alt Hacker NewsThe elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.
The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
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When it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay.
And this is not cynic talking ...
The real elephant in the room is unless you are an actual king, your castle is always on someone's land
I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
We already have digital citizenship and already are digital citizens.
We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.
It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.
This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.
A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
It is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.
Or, maybe reside on large platforms partially or temporary.
There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit.
The open web.
We can build any web we want, at any time.
And build we should.
All large communities were small once.
Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow.
Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still.
And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.
Make all Algos for content recommendations open for scrutiny and watch the walls come down.
Do we go on massive platforms to find the small communities (like subreddits) that we like?
Disagree. That is still "playing nice"
I live somewhere that has a lot of castles - there are 3 (possibly 4) within 2km of where I am sitting writing this.
I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).
I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.