The original idea of the World Wide Web was decentralization of information. Anyone with an Internet connection can set up a website. Others can link to it so that people will discover it. Somehow, though, it’s lost its way. Big “social media” sites dominate it. They let you find a lot of people you know or are interested in in one place. But this advantage comes at a price. On most of these sites, the software controls which posts you see and who is recommended to you. They’re more vulnerable to government censorship than smaller, more agile sites. People complain about them but keep using them.

It’s getting worse. Some countries are banning social media access by young people. There’s talk of legally requiring people who post to these sites to disclose their identity. This will discourage the expression of dissent and intimidate people who want to discuss problems they aren’t even comfortable telling their own families about.

The solution has always been there. It’s decentralization. Blogs and forums hosted on the creators’ own machines or for a monthly fee on a server. The RSS and Atom protocols let you subscribe to most of them without handing them any information. The main problem is finding the ones you’re interested in. Some work is now being done on a set of lexicons built on the AT protocol called standard.site, which will help with discovery and identity.

A lexicon is a schema for metadata; standard.site lets you publish information about your website in a way that lets it be aggregated. If you create a record for your website, it includes at least the name and URL, and it can include things like an icon, a description, and labels. What you do with a standard.site record once you’ve made it isn’t clear to me; I assume you need to submit it to an aggregator that lets people search for sites that interest them. There could be lots of aggregators, catering to different interests. If the idea catches on, search engines might use them to improve the relevance of their results.

There are some client applications for standard.site, but I’m still looking for one that I’m comfortable with. Ironically for a discovery aid, the name makes finding information difficult; a search on “standard.site” turns up mostly irrelevant results.

If you know more or have other ideas for decentralization, let me know.