Excellent article and almost 6 years old. There are many projects to mention here but so far none of them took of as far as I know. Or did they?

After publishing my own rant about the same topic [0], Dave Winer commented via Twitter and argued that RSS is a very successful tool that decentralizes the web. I didn't understand his point at the time but today I think he is absolutely right.

His point was that when trying to fix the problem we should look at what already exists and works. Why did RSS succeed? Probably because it solved a problem for many people. It did not try to reinvent old things in a decentralized way but offered real benefits. Another good example for this git vs svn (centralized vs decentralized revision system).

[0] http://www.soa-world.de/echelon/2011/09/the-decentralized-we...

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing. I've been beating the same drum for years within my circle of friends, and I always tend to get the "huh?" reaction. It's always refreshing to discover somebody else who seems to be running on the same wavelength. :)

I miss USENET. Nowadays, my digital identity has been spread to the four corners, across Facebook, Twitter, various unrelated phpBB-based sites, and places such as /. and HN. Even if I wanted to, there is no possible way that I could re-locate every digital utterance I have ever made publicly. Not only that, but I don't truly "own" anything I write anymore. It's stored in some unmarked server somewhere, stuffed into a schema that has no published documentation. I still have e-mail archives going back 10+ years, but if Facebook ceases to exist 10 years into the future, it will be like the (admittedly few) worthwhile written conversations and interactions I had with people on there never happened. There will be no record of it.

There's got to be a better way.