The recent events convinced me that the freedom on the internet is no more. Amazon turning off AWS servers for a platform that they don’t like is an order of magnitude more disturbing than twitter or facebook deleting an account.

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection[1]. Ideally, we need a platform where the only person who can control any content is the content creator/owner. Jaron Lanier wrote about it a long time ago in the book called Who Owns the Future?. Back when I first read it, I was very skeptical, but now I see that he was totally right, and very visionary. If you know of such a platform, please let me know. If you want to help create it, let’s talk about it. If you know someone who needs help working on such a platform, I am game.

For now, I am going to be taking control of my original content by keeping the original on my website, located at http://www.masterov.us/, and using all the social platforms merely as convenience for you, my dear friends. My instagram account for SV Expeditious will remain separate from this experiment, and I will be using my old instagram account instagr.am/master0v instead.

The idea is simple, really. I’ll create all my posts on masterov.us/blog and an automatic script will create a link to the content on all my social media accounts.

A reasonable question might be: what about the comments? One idea was to sync all the comments in both directions, but that will increase engagement metric for the social platforms, and I explicitly don’t want to do that, so instead I invite you to join http://t.me/mas1er0v Telegram channel, and we’ll do all the discussions there. Durov seems to be the most respectful of people’s privacy and freedom. If that changes, we can move that channel elsewhere easily.

Once this system works, I may try to document and open-source it, to encourage people to do the same. If you are interested in contributing, please let me know.