No, I want a decentralized go-to place that I can check many points of view over a subject, just like the Fediverse works today.

I disagree with the premise that multiple POVs on every topic will yield better understandings or discussion. It is the same flaw that Ground News or other services have, which purport to curate POVs from different news media outlets, with the implicit assumption that all the outlets have something useful to offer. This assumption is absolutely balderdash.

The Fediverse is no more – or less – immune from disinformation and other ails, but has better user- and instance-level protections: bans and defederation are effective, because if they weren’t, people here wouldn’t log back on. For Mastodon and Lemmy and other forms of social media, the decentralization has clear and obvious benefits.

A decentralized knowledge-store does not.

There is nothing to fear.

There is everything to fear when knowledge is spread out into small libraries across the land. The historical analog is book-burning incidents that dotted human history, whether to suppress paganism, Mayan culture, or the spread of communism. The modern-day analogy is when Vine went defunct and the content was almost wholly lost to the world. The Fediverse example is when an instance unexpectedly disappears, stranding all its users.

But focusing on a knowledge-store, technology has given us the ability to copy data at rates that outpace all of history’s ecclesiastical scribes put together. We can – and do – preserve the largest datasets (see [email protected]) because it is a matter of resilience. Yet that endeavor has become more difficult precisely because of technology. The Internet Archive faces this issue, because they cannot save what they don’t even know exist or cannot see it.

The Fediverse inhabits a very special Goldilocks zone right now, not unlike Wikipedia, where the availability of interest, capabilities, and materiel allow for the existence of this internet experiment. But fragile it is, and instances are no further from risk than by a DMCA notice, a UK age restriction law, a frivolous but expensive SLAPP suit, or just plain ol running out of money.

If I had spare time and energy and were presented with the options to either: 1) set up a decentralized knowledge store of nebulous benefit, or 2) support the online compendium which I’ve personally used for over two decades now and has helped untold numbers of students and researchers with starting the research into a new-to-them topic, and could do so by using my servers to seed the all-Wikipedia torrents… well, I think the choice is clear.