The Web We Lost, on the web of ad-hoc, bottom-up social networks before the pendulum swung fully towards centralized networks like MySpace, then Friendster, and now Facebook, Twitter, and friends. I’m glad Anil Dash is pointing out that great things were happening before social networks were massively financed operations and the delightful things that were different when people ran the system from the bottom up.

Owning and operating your data is obviously better than letting someone trade on it. But, there are missing pieces for users:

I don’t think any of these are insurmountable. But, decentralization is hard! Can we pull it off? I’d love to see it happen.