Okay I’m reading this, sort of, and thinking of stuff so if I’ve missed something just tell me and I’ll go back. Anyway was just thinking of the structure of a decentralized site vs a centralized site. In a centralized site, say a blog for instance, you post content at a central point (your website) and people come to view it, subscribe to it and leave comments on it. In a decentralized model you would COLLECT content and comment and like it and then make it available for others to also collect. Remember information can be easily copied. I know it’s obvious right? But we don’t actually need to own data in order to, you know, own it. Imagine a blog where everything can ultimately be changed by the reader. Say you found a site, loved it’s content but HATED the style of the website. So just switch the theme you’re viewing it with. The point here is to illustrate that instead of storing a website a central point we can treat it more like a U-Pick. User A’s comments and likes are stored on User A’s safespace. If user B doesn’t like user A’s comments (or even a specific comment) then all he needs to do is unsubscribe to it or them. Comments and likes aren’t something you add to a central point, they’re a database YOU KEEP and that others can subscribe to. This would also allow for a ton of different mods that most websites and social networks don’t bother with. Dislikes? Silly emotes? Do I care that much about your dislikes? maybe Do I care to subscribe to all your emoticons on posts? Probably not. But someone else might and you’re free to add them. This would also save the database problem and solve the issue with censorship. People wouldn’t need to control their stuff because if you have a problem with someone you just elect not to listen to them or delete their particular comment from your database So take a business for example. Say customer A has a problem with customer B. The business need not get involved at all because customer A can simply delete customer B’s comments from his database, or unsubscribe from customer B entirely. And all the business has control of is their own comments and the content they produce. They don’t control what other people say or do. This could work for any kind of content. I just used comments as an example. You could put out any kind of content and people could comment on it but the comments would be their collection. People would own their data. If you got a spammer on your site just unsubscribe from them them. You could even combine all this with a reputation system so that good content gets bumped up and bad spammy content gets rated down.
So coming into a website would be something like this.
Collect website theme/layout.
Collect banner
Subscribe to content
Subscribe to author’s comments.
Remember you download a website’s content every time you visit it so really it is that simple, you are subscribing to it. Its just a really slow refresh rate compared to what we tradiionally think of as “subscriptions.”