So the question is how do we democratize that?
If a convincing case could be made that the benefits to National Security outweigh the costs to the copyright cartels, I'd be willing to bet that young secondary-schoolers would have a blast with a decently designed curriculum that includes a working student-to-student mesh-network as one of its goals.
I mean, right now one can pretty freely go write up a blog using self-hosted wordpress, octopress, pelican, hugo or whatever. But choosing that over Medium can sometimes mean a lot more work to put in. But if we can democratize the ease-of-use and the good bits of Medium/Facebook/Twitter... Maciej's end statement about "using open standards, write text in text, images in images" would have been achieved.
The problem is that corporations now create a significantly more compelling version (in most criteria - UX, UI, etc) of the Free and Open versions out there.
I've written about this before, and even right now I'm not sure where I stand exactly, except that tweaking the algorithms to compensate for bias is definitely not the right answer: if you look at the mirror and don't like what you see, you don't draw on top of the mirror to accentuate the result! You go on a diet!
I liked the idea of data gardening, but the thought of going-to-communities is daunting. I get tired even thinking about it.
Regarding living beyond walled gardens:
> Publish your texts as text. Let the images be images. Put them behind URLs and then commit to keeping them there. A URL should be a promise.
But people already do that! The question now is to turn to why people do otherwise. I personally do not understand the reason people say, post long blogposts on Facebook, but I do understand for services like Medium.
For example, I'm extremely tempted to write on Medium because it provides the network effects of readers clicking on tags to read next. So the question is how do we democratize that?