Further, the combination of RSS and blogs means that I *daily* get information i'm not going to get elsewhere (anything having to do with neurodivergence that isn't massaged through clinical gatekeeping, and is by neurodivergent beings themselves, for starters), as well as being a perfectly fine way to aggregate digital comics, for another.

And get this -- it's not paywalled, it's not fee-based, there's no hurdles. Ironically, "it just works". :P

I don't see open networks as being any different. There's this presumption that there needs to be large-scale, siloed server farms to make this work -- the problem with this assumption is even simpler:

- that's not true at all, lol

Peer-to-peer protocols exist. The problem is that people keep assuming that it's impossible for them to be used, when that's not true.

And even if that was true, there's nothing keeping anybody with the right skillsets (many of whom are part of the underlying sets of assumptions of inevitability here) to create them.

So why keep believing it? It's like people have bought into several different lies, and are acting as if that's just the way it is. When it's not.

It's almost as if we keep slipping into some sort of "escape from freedom" sort of totalitarian dynamic, when in fact, open publishing of literally *everything* could happen, right now, and everybody could ditch Amazon, right now. The rest would be up to the readers, which is true anyway.

This isn't a "things could be better, so why aren't they" situation. This is a "things are better period, so why keep acting as if they're not?" one.