The Håkon
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Why a decentralized blog

An ordinary blog lives inside a company. The company decides whether your text stays up, decides who sees what, and can delete your account — and with it, everything you wrote — without notice and without needing to satisfy you. You don't own the address where you write; you're a tenant.

This blog has no such owner. It's built on an open protocol, not a platform. The difference isn't just philosophical, it's mechanical:

Your identity belongs to no one but you. There's no "account" or "username and password" — there's a key pair. Beyond that, you choose whether to link your personal data or not — otherwise your profile is just a random number on the internet, and you don't need to expose yourself the way anonymous writers used to. Losing access to an account is the nightmare of any centralized network; here, whoever holds the key holds the identity.

The content doesn't live in one place. Every published post goes to several relays at once — independent servers, run by different operators, with no relationship to each other. If one goes down, the others keep answering. There's no single order that can wipe everything out, since every post sits in countries scattered around the world.

No one decides what you can say. A relay can refuse to publish an event of yours — but you publish it on another. There's no appeal because there's no single authority; there's redundancy.

That holds even for a court order. On a network with an owner, a takedown decision — from a judge, a government, whoever — has someone to be addressed to: the company receives the notice, complies, and the content (or the whole platform) goes dark at once, for everyone, in any country. This isn't hypothetical: in August 2024, Brazil's Supreme Federal Court ordered the complete suspension of X (formerly Twitter) across the entire Brazilian territory, after the platform resisted account-removal orders — the most visible case of how an entire social network can end up hostage to a single decision against a single operator. In the United States the case reached the Supreme Court in 2024, Murthy v. Missouri: a lower court had ruled that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social networks to remove posts about the pandemic and the 2020 election — the Supreme Court didn't rule on the merits and dismissed for lack of standing, but the episode shows the same pattern: a central authority pressuring a handful of companies that control distribution. In the European Union the mechanism is different but the effect is similar: since 2014 a court can order a search engine to erase results about a person, the so-called "right to be forgotten" — useful for whoever requests it, but a tool that depends entirely on a central company existing to comply with the order.

On a network with no owner, the same order has no single target: there's no company to notify, no server whose blocking brings down the whole network. A relay can be compelled to remove something under its own jurisdiction — but the event is already signed and replicated on others, in other countries, under other laws. This doesn't mean the content is immune to every consequence — it means there's no single point whose removal erases the information everywhere at once.

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