I care about decentralization… I see it as a return to the original ideas of the internet, of the web… packet switching was designed to be decentralized, TCP/IP, HTTP… they were designed to be decentralized. You have a lot of different servers serving documents that use hyperlinks to connect one another, you don't care about where the document is coming from.

Powered by DNS, TCP/IP, web servers and what not, the URI is used to find the document and it serves it to you. There is no one controlling any of this, you can just put up a document, set up your DNS, point it to a server and there you go. Anyone with a URI will be able to find your content. This is something that has been lost, don’t get me wrong, this still exists, but it has been lost in the sense that running your own server, buying your own domain, and managing all of it is not super hard but it's not easy either. It's just much much easier to create an account on X or Meta or whatnot…

It's so easy to join and put content on these platforms… they're optimized for that. They're optimized to make it much easier for you to start posting and keep coming back. Because there's a financial motive behind it. There's nothing wrong with making money, you need to make money in order to keep things progressing, Someone has to pay for it, right? But, we've lost control… we've moved to a centralized world. All this content lives behind the walled gardens. You don't really own your account, you don't really own your username, you don't own any of it…

Ownership means the freedom to exit, the right to go somewhere else, and the ability to take your stuff with you. When you rent an apartment and fill it with your belongings, those belongings don’t stop being yours. Even if you’re renting, you don’t have to leave everything behind when you move out. But the web doesn’t work that way. You put all your stuff in one place, but when you want to move to a different platform, you can’t take it with you. Even if the platform allows you to export some of your data, it’s not always easy to import it into a new service. It’s possible to do it, but it’s not always straightforward, and it’s not always supported.

When you move to another network, you mostly start over from zero… no followers, no nothing… You have to rebuild your content and your graph. It's ridiculous… The fact that you can barely make any money on these platforms is ridiculous… That's one of the reasons why I care about decentralization and I care about blockchains and crypto and peer-to-peer and web3.

Honestly, I think tokens have a place but tokens have been one of the things that have caused the space to be completely misunderstood, Because tokens and the ease in which they can be traded made the space too focused on speculation… “wen token! wen token!”... Honestly, it's just not appealing… It’s cool that they’re a form of utility that we have, they’re a form of exchange native to the medium, which can be used to incentivize certain behaviors, so that's great… But they’re just one piece of the puzzle… a piece that a lot of people are put off by.

We need to move beyond that, if we want to grow the decentralized web. I want to take it back… We're getting there… We're going to get there. I've seen recently more and more people saying that we need to move away from a lot of speculation, we need to focus more on real value to the users. We need to start thinking more on higher levels of abstraction. Finally, we have the notion of embedded wallets! Even though we don't like what web2 did to the web. There's still a lot of value there. There's a reason why it's worked so well, right? Optimizing the user experience makes it so easy, so trivial… you don't worry about anything technical… you just use your product… We can do the same. The technology still has to mature but we can start doing it already.

We can start taking the steps. I'm glad that people are now doing these embedded wallets which live within the app itself to a certain extent and you don't have to necessarily worry about an external wallet, which honestly has been one of the worst user experiences… Folks have been trying to make wallets nicer and better, props to them, but they shouldn't exist… At least not the way they are today. We really need to make the decentralized web useful. Show its value… that's another reason why I'm starting all this…

After I got hooked on web 3, crypto, NFTs, DAOs, etc. I really tried to push building in web3 within Google… I really did… I was excited because it really seemed that it was being taken seriously, to a certain extent. It was great… The plan looked awesome. I was excited, but it stopped. Understandably… What OpenAI has shown with ChatGPT and so on, it shifted the industry. It really bumped me that we didn't continue and we didn't execute on these plans. That would have been pretty cool…

I haven't pivoted.

Sure. I might be somewhat working on AI now but I haven't pivoted. I'm still in crypto, I'm still in decentralization. That's what's still in my mind 24/7.

I started d11d.tools – d11d stands for decentralized – I started all this to start getting back into space a little bit more, building a bit more, working towards something that I've been thinking about for more than a year now.

It’s gradually getting more and more into focus in my mind. I want to share… talk about it. But I don't think it's still at the point where I can fully share it since it’s still developing… but I’ll do so in the upcoming posts.

d11d.tools are these little experiments I'm starting to run, just pieces to a puzzle. I’m starting to navigate the space, send some signals and see what comes back. To iterate and find different use cases, different opportunities, different strategies to inform a layer that will help bring the decentralized web back. Because that's what I want. It's what we all want… Building infrastructure is easy (comparably). Also building little applications on top of like next.js and things like that is easy. It’s fun and they have value, for sure but they’re tiny tools. They’re not something that will bring value, engagement and hook people, something that makes you think, “this is how things should be”. Something familiar yet. refreshing and exciting… revolutionary… Something that it's not more of the same. I find that interesting, and that's exciting.

That's why I'm going to continue thinking about this space and build in it. I'm starting to take the steps towards that. I hope you all can follow along in this journey.

I can't do this alone. I can't.

I'm going to continue sharing through programmista and Farcaster.

I want your questions, I want your thoughts. I want your ideas… because I cannot do this alone. This is for everyone. This is by everyone.

I always start involving people more as I progress. I definitely will.