However, leftists have been slow to adopt technologies that not only align more with our political values but provide additional security. Why?
Well, the first thing that is a challenge is it's hard getting people to move to alternatives to major services. First, everyone is pretty well entrenched in these legacy services: they have a username, they have followers and follow others. That entrenchment makes moving hard, but not impossible. Second is more of a technical or learning curve based scenario: alternatives require people to learn something new, which depending on the service we're talking about, can very.
The thing is, if we're to truly live our values online, a big step towards doing that is indeed moving to decentralized services. Decentralized services by nature are more inline with leftist (especially anarchist) values than centralized and closed services.
While the technical hurdles might be higher, they're not impossible. They do require some conscious thinking and decision making:
These are all important decisions not to be taken lightly. I chose the fine individual running tchncs.de for a lot of my services because he's a kind person who provides a lot of his services for free. In exchange, I can donate as I have resources to some additional funding toward the projects. I have the technical expertise to roll my own and eventually may do so, however I don't have the funds or time at the moment so I would need to crowdfund the money to cover at least the costs of operating plus partner with someone who has more time.
It's not impossible to find other trustworthy instance providers out there. But, what do you need? Let's take a look at the basics.
It takes a little work, but eventually we can all move away from mainstream services to federated services, and we can more importantly start building our own clusters of decentralized services. If you want to get into a decentralized service but don't know where to start, start talking to others. Chances are you know a techie who might be willing to run a server(s) for a custom instance and allow you to provide monetary resources toward maintaining it and building it.
Or, find an instance you trust and use a unique username and password schema for each, that way if it ends up being a problem, you can ditch it and move on.
It takes a little work, but anything worth doing requires some work. In the end, we're all better off with decentralized services.
Solidarity,
Endarchy
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