A decentralized library
It was tempting to start my decentralized library project by building a whole library, but that would have been a mistake.
To actually be “decentralized” that means it has to work even if you’re the last user who cares. You can’t depend on the cloud. You can’t depend on access to the internet. On the continued existence of a company like Amazon, a publisher, or even authors. All of those are vectors for centralization.
Users have to be able to run it themselves from scratch. They shouldn’t HAVE to but they should be ABLE to.
Instead of starting with a library I started with a single book. The book I chose was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
This is built with a publishing platform I’m calling Large. There’s plenty of mediums.
This book and collection is forkable. This means that any users can copy it and republish it with their own edits, art, or any other changes they want to make. It’s like a coloring book. You can make an exact copy of the material and make sure it’s always available for any fans. And each copy contains a full copy of the Large Admin which means it’s now a portal for any user to publish anything they want. Also the only server is a super simple static host (GitLab Pages) and the full app can work offline (soon) and be easily wrapped and deployed to app stores, etc.
I took Alice and broke it into 500 tiles and styled with and generated AI art for many of them. You can do the same.
