Also, I noticed some of the UUCP servers got MUDs too. Wow, I wish more folks would play them (myself included). It’s just sad folks prefer flashier centralized experiences whether it’s social media, websites, or games. :C
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That may be art, but that does not make sense. Technically, the Internet is still decentralized. You can rent a small server and run a web site and a mail server, for example. It is not difficult.
The problem is that you audience is likely to be dependent on centralized services, which won’t accept your email and won’t reference your web site. That is were the real problem lies.
To take an analogy, the Internet is like roads. Roads are not centralized. You can drive anywhere you like. Nevertheless, people gather at malls and city centers, because it is where other people are.
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You may want to enquire about
There are hundreds of free servers around.
People complain about a centralized Internet, but there are hundreds of decentralized alternatives around, run by enthusiasts on open source software.
Edit: since the action about minetest (and other good stuff) happens on irc, I’ll leave this link here:
https://matrix.org/blog/home/
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You guys posted a picture with SGIs in it.
You just made my day.
(Ok, back to panicking over deadlines.)
No. Nearly all encryption is a matter of Alice and Bob exchanging messages using a secret key that is known only to those two people. All the other stuff – PKI, Diffie-Hellman, RSA – is about the problem of how Alice and Bob set up the key in the first place, without physically meeting, and without eavesdroppers and impostors being able to interfere with that process.
But (a) if people do meet physically to exchange keys, you don’t need any of that, and (b) if Alice and Bob each have a secure channel to Carol, they can use it to create a secure channel to each other, which will still work even if Carol explodes. You can do quite a lot with just these two tactics, if you have to, although public-key infrastructure (PKI) does make things considerably easier at scale.
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I very much remember using UUCP… I’m pretty sure I used it as an underlying transfer for both SMTP and NNTP.
But I also remember when setting up an SMTP email server would generally allow mail to be forwarded along the path.
NNTP essentially died under its own volume of data, and SMTP relays died with the onslaught of spam. Which also helped ISPs justify blocking any traffic on the defined SMTP TCP port…
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