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Last year, after listening to three interviews with Mattias Desmet, I introduced his idea to my Arabic audience as ”The most important thing you can read on my website”. By now I have read his amazing book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”, listened to many more interviews with Him, and I still think that his ideas are the most important ideas I have came across since 2009.

Back in the very old days of email, running an email server was a serious challenge for many reasons, like the cost of hardware, the cost of software, the cost of bandwidth, the cost of support services, and the cost of securing email and fighting spam. At that time big tech recognized the opportunity to provide easy to use email services for small companies and small communities, and thus Google started Google apps, and Microsoft started selling Exchange in the form of software as a service.

Ryan Dawson of the Anti Neocon Report has got it right. As far as I know, he is the only activist that realized the value of decentralization and decided to embrace decentralized solutions. In his interview on Free Man beyond the wall webcast, Ryan explained his logic and why he decided to go decentralized, and the best thing about that interview is that Ryan focused on his own issues, and tried to handle them as a responsible and determined person in his own context, regardless of what the other world would say. Great Job.

After my previous story about Jeremy and his friends, I got an angry call from Paulo, another fictitious person that I talk to from time to time. Paulo was angry with me because, as he put it, I took a neutral stand towards those who promote recentralization which could be understood that I approve it. According to Paul, very smart people promoted recentralization as if it was decentralization, which begs an inquiry about their reasons.

Remember Jeremy, our fictitious content creator from the previous article. He came to visit me with Jim and Marc to discuss our reservations on the alternative blockchain-based social networks. They provided compelling arguments about blockchain benefits over traditional centralized databases, and talked religiously about our individual role in decentralizing the internet and building the future web.

In my previous article in the series, I highlighted the importance of context when evaluating solutions. Now I would like to start with a specific context, identify the problem, and look for specific solutions.

I have worked for many years as a person who understands problems, evaluates them, and recommends solutions to address them. My domain of experience is the internet, and my customers were undertaking some type of endeavor on the web. During these years I have come to learn a simple thing about solutions: they have advantages and disadvantages for each context. A solution might be good enough for a specific problem in a certain context, and not good at all for an identical problem in a different context.

There are many alternative microblogging networks, here is a short list with some comments from my experience: