Glad that you're enjoying the Kindle! I do think the smaller size is pretty convenient. And you got warm light too and waterproofing, nice!
I enjoy the warm light, especially at night! I'm currently reading
The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living, and the first thing it talks about is how Danes set a cozy environment with warm light sources like candles, fireplaces, and glowing lamps. Besides that, I've had f.lux on my computer for years now...the science isn't clear on whether it helps you fall asleep more naturally, but at this point I just like it.
It does require requesting and waiting for your books, but it's quite nice! There are also... other means of acquiring books if that's how you prefer.
Haha, I actually don't mind paying for a book, especially if it's one that I'll like. There's been times I've read a book at the library or on Scribd (now Everand) and then bought the book just to always have it handy for reference. A part of me, which is far away from my minimalist self, would love to create a small personal library, where I could loan books out to my friends if they wanted to. That was apparently a major thing to have for upper-class people centuries ago...not so much so now, sadly.
I might not even describe a decentralized web as more "individualistic"... it inherently requires a lot more cooperation and working together instead of a singular centralized source.
I guess in my mind the preferred future of the internet is individualistic, and a decentralized internet could help enable that. Potential problems aside, one of the things I liked about the mini-Twitter decentralized feed is that the actual post was hosted on each person's site instead of a central database that a company controls. Even if people are cooperating, it's because they've made the intentional individual choice to instead of just defaulting to that as sites are today.
Related, I just read yesterday that Reddit has
struck a $60 million/year deal with a 'large AI company' to use Reddit posts for training data...money that I'm sure won't be shared with the people who actually made those posts. They've apparently also been threatening to block Google and Microsoft web crawlers if they don't also agree to pay up.
I think when we (or at least I) say that we want decentralized internet/web, that does not mean that everything should be self-hosted. For content creators and business owners, self-hosting makes sense, but that's not most people. In fact, that seems counterproductive for both efficiency and usability concerns. (Most attempts to solve this happen in the blockchain space, and generally create more problems around the centralization of power than they solve.) Rather, the way that share and access things should be through open systems that allow for freedom of choice and prevent any one entity from having full control or decision-making power. With email, you can write your own email software and run your own email server, but that's not necessary because you can just use Gmail, and if you don't like Gmail, you can still use something else and communicate with people on Gmail. With podcasts, you can host in one place and then list to any number of podcast directories/apps for people to find it. That's very different from modern social networks, which fully control every aspect of the process, and fully gate their networks to prevent cross-communication.
Just having these open protocols would create much greater freedom of choice and prevent unilateral decisions by profit-seeking corporations. Even if our search engines remained centralized, that does not change that the content would no longer be behind walled gardens. (In any case, I have not seen a convincing model for a working decentralized search engine that is not a crypto scam.) I think it is also not really confusing from a usability perspective; I have tech-illiterate friends on Mastodon (though I'll admit that Mastodon could have some significant usability improvements, but that comes with investment that it has not had), and whether or not they're there mainly just depends on where their social network is.
I think we're not entirely on the same page...I don't have an issue with email or podcast protocols themselves, and I don't think everything has to be self-hosted to be individualistic. I think the problem is that besides someone directly giving you a link to their stuff you look up email addresses and podcasts using some kind of centralized service...a search engine, a directory, or website. And that's fine on the current web...but if the decentralized web wants to replace that, how will you find it? According to the presentation, the only way you could find even a web address is to receive it directly or look it up on their web 2.0 website. You open up the browser and it's literally a blank page. So if your aim is to replace the current web with something that's better (in their opinion), how do you fix that problem without relying on what you're trying to replace?
I think centralized search engines could be potentially problematic...maybe less-so if there's a number of them that are competing with each other. But as it is Google just as a search engine has so much power over the internet that
people are designing websites for what Google wants rather than what their own audiences want through SEO.
And I'm speaking more of ideals here...I understand that this is something that's in development and that people don't have all the answers. I don't even know if this will ever be something that has mass-appeal. I think a problem with a lot of tech development in general is that techies design things for themselves and not the mass audience they claim to want to use it, and that's why some things never catch on even though there's people that passionately advocate for it.
I do agree with your last point. I guess all I'm saying is that this is not a problem inherent with the technology, but rather a problem resulting from our socioeconomic system, which inherently rewards centralization of power.
I don't think it's just the socioeconomic system...just speaking from my experience on a small level, I think creators and founders want the security of knowing they can't be forced out of the thing that they poured their heart and soul into. I don't deny that the profit motive is probably a bigger reason, but when I read that Mark Zuckerberg made sure he personally has most of the voting shares in Facebook/Meta, I can sympathize with that side of it too, even if I think Facebook itself is a social abomination.