Decentralized Syndication — The Missing Internet Protocol

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2025-01-07 17:00:05

The Internet is decentralized by design. It came into being not at once, but in parts. New protocols were added on top of previous ones, with each new protocol extending and improving functionality of the global network. TCP and IP protocols were built in the 1970s, then came SMTP and DNS in the 1980s. 1990s gave us probably the best known HTTP protocol that delivers the visual experience of the web. All these core protocols were built with decentralized Internet in mind.

TCP-IP protocol was well suited for data transfers between applications and for building application-level interactions. SMTP enabled a new way of human communication — emails. HTTP made the web accessible. Everyone now could create a website and share public information on the net. However one essential problem remained — discovering content on the web. In the early days people shared links to their websites on forums and mailing lists and that worked quite well while the Internet was small. But there was no generic web information publishing and discovery protocol. It seemed that this essential internet protocol was still missing.

As the Internet grew enterprises stepped in to fill content discovery gap. Search engines tried to scrape the whole of the web, index every website and every piece of information. Later on private companies created web publishing platforms that allowed users to publish without owning a personal website or domain. Everyone could create a new blog and publish content on a blogging platform. Then the Internet evolved and adopted an even simpler publishing model — social network apps and link aggregators. Now people could publish content even easier but their content was owned and walled by the content platforms.