so fine, we can make a user system that is totally horizontal and democratic. but that just moves the problem: whoever has SSH access to the server ultimately has final say over what happens. fine, so we federate or shard the server so that it actually runs in multiple places simultaneously, each of which has a complete mirror of the state. but if we want a shared domain, whoever owns the DNS record ultimately decides where to point browsers...

it's a pile of systems that assume some people are in charge and some people are not. administrators and users, coordinators and participants. again, there are cases where this is a fine arrangement but my main point is that experimenting with alternatives is difficult/impossible because these structures are imposed on us by the tools we use.

this is of course not surprising given that so much of this tech comes from the militaries and academic institutions of the global north. the same way that assumptions around the written culture of the individuals that built the systems still define every layer of the computing stack, so too do their hierarchical worldviews. the artist always signs their work whether or not they intend to.

@nasser domain names identify very specific things, but in p2p networks you don't need domains at all, just IPs on the TCP layer
with some ingenuity, a decentralized system could be provided with entrypoints on regular domains
it is not impossible with current technology, just hard to design around