After spending years building a decentralized social media and publication platform, I took some time to reflect on the lessons I learnt. Such a chance to detach and step back from the immediate work was necessary to integrate a turbulent journey and force myself to be honest with the problems and dilemmas I face.

When actively working on a project, one often accepts assumptions and limitations unintentionally. In my case, when wrangling with pressures from political powers and struggling to branch into different genres, languages, and use cases, it is hard to acknowledge that these challenges sprout from the fact that what we built has turned into a platform. It is ironic, since we started out to build a decentralized social network that could survive the control of information by the powerful. But it is also inevitable, as we have prioritized the network effect, crucial to draw in users.

Yet the issues I and many others set out to solve are now widespread. Governments around the world are exerting control over the internet. Some justified, others fueling the accelerating trend of authoritarianism and nationalism.

The power to determine what people see and think is too big a responsibility and risk for a few governments and corporations, and should not exist in the first place. They sprout from our reliance on platforms to think and understand collectively. But the platform is not the only way.

1.

The internet was invented for people to send webpages to each other. A webpage can contain media in any shape or form, and is fully controlled by the author. It is still the most expressive, permissive, and decentralized communication system we have. Domain names, browser standards, frontend developer tools - these are some of the best examples of open ecosystems made of software, protocol, and human organization.

And many do use the internet directly. IndieWeb owners handcraft their websites, and use open protocols to connect to each other. Digital gardeners turn their thought processes into public websites, exploring how we can think better individually and collectively. The internet that consists not of corporations and their servers but individuals and their personal hosts, is well and alive, and slowly turning into the tool for thought that people have always dreamed of.

Yet when platforms have become dead-simple to onboard, it still requires quite a lot of digital literacy to create your own website. During my long break, I had the chance to reunite with family members, and several of them, in their 60s, regularly write but do not know how to have a personal website. It wasn't until then did I realized that creating and publishing a website is a process far from simplified. As a developer, I have built numerous websites with the powerful and ever-expanding ecosystem of static site generators, and all work like a breeze. But for people who know nothing about the command line or GitHub, the few technical requirements between them and independent websites are an impenetrable barrier.

Simplified to the extreme, one can right-click on a file or folder, build and preview the website, and publish it. Most content creators already have their work in local files, so this flow fits in well. It is also a good practice of how software and users interact: your content is stored locally, so you can always access it; your creative work is stored in files instead of hidden databases, so it can last longer than the application or service you use.

2.

I suspect that no one has built something like this because, on the surface, an extra simplification to the current website builders only corresponds to a very small market, which happens to include my older folks in their 60s. And principles like local-first or file-over-app, although important for the long-term, have little impact on the short-term choices of individual users. But I believe by itself, simplifying an action to the extreme is already a powerful feature to migrate users to a new system, and in the long run, those principles do make a difference that users can feel.

I also think moss will be much more than a simplified website builder and deployer. For most content creators, audience reach is much more important than autonomy, and is certainly dominated by social media platforms. This is gradually starting to change with the maturity of open social protocols and the cultural awareness of the price of centralized platforms. Integrating open social protocols is carried out by many platforms and tools, but when designing afresh, we can make it a cornerstone of an autonomous yet connected network instead of an afterthought.

Platforms do much more than store social graphs. They are powerful because, with algorithms, they control what content audiences see and what attention creators get. This solved the problem of finding your initial audiences, but the engagement-seeking algorithms also create many problems we are facing.

If we do not want algorithms to control what we see and think, then we still need real humans. Magazine editors, book publishers, underground zine creators - these are the gatekeepers that social media claimed to have removed, only to replace them with the algorithm overlords. If we are to rely on each other to travel through the unpredictable future, the important job of filtering out noise and identifying what matters should, at least partially, be left to our fellow humans. So when AI and other algorithms are increasingly helping us to think and decide, it is even more crucial to make it easier to make curation simple and rewarding.

If we can have a network of independent curators, it can become the indispensable information filter instead of platform algorithms. That will, in turn, make an independent website much more usable for content creators, solving its biggest weak point when compared to platforms. These are well beyond what I can start with now, and I have little idea of how such a network of curators can be formed. But what I do know is that such a future still needs an easy way to create independent sites that are socially connected. And moss is the first step to contribute to that future.