When I shop for beauty products, I open these exact sites: sephora.com, amazon.com, the brand website, the tiktok app, and ulta.com.

Some 90% of online traffic is from 2% of websites. As these platforms dominate people’s time —and dominate ownership of data— they are incentivized to contain you in their atmosphere. They execute this by refusing to share their content to be used on other platforms. This is well and dandy, if you disregard the value of ownership as a creator. You are essentially creating art and generating value—through videos, followers, comments— that you have no ownership of. The platform owns all of that. They can remove your content one day, deem you unfit for their site, and dictate your means of living.

This was most recently depicted when TikTok was forced to remove their U.S. presence in January 2025. Creators could not move their content, followers, or any of this amazing digital property that they had created. Panic set in. Videos of creators crying with anticipated loss and fear flooded the feeds. Some tried to move their followers through nudges and pleads to other sites.

A classic example of ownership serving internet users better is the set up of email. You OWN your email. You can access your email through any STTP/HTP server. I can access my email (whether it be my business domain email or gmail or academic emails) on Outlook, mail.com, iphone’s mail app, or any other mail app. I own the content of those emails. I can bulk export the content. I can access them cross-platforms. I can bulk export my contacts. As it should be! The access to my email is decentralized — Meaning I can access my property without being beholden to any one platform.

Imagine a future where creators can own their digital assets— their videos, their followers, their comments— what if they were transferrable and accessible in the web? What if you could access tweets, Instagram posts, pinterest bulletins, and youtube shorts in one platform? What if you didn’t have to fear that your content would be lost if any one platform died out?

We are living through a time of rapid change, and as a result, I believe we may see some changes in digital ownership. My use of Google search has dramatically decreased in the last six months. Whereas before, I may have automatically turned to google.com to answer any question, I now find myself going to the chatgpt app. What changes will that lead to? All these websites that have been optimizing for google search.. Now will we optimize for chatgpt? I know this seems like disparate topic, but I think this upheaval of internet use will tie in someday. In fact, Sam Altman said in a recent 2025 interview that in his ideal vision, there would be open, user-controlled systems with decentralized proof-of-personhood protocol (i.e. Worldcoin). He stated that "The goal is to gradually move governance of the protocol to the community.", meaning that no central company will fully control World ID or the token in the long term. I’m also hopeful that creators will realize that these platforms carry too much power over their livelihood. They will want to derisk and own.

There is a saying in retail that you should never let too much of your sales comes from one supplier; If they cut you off, you’re dead. The problem is that the big platforms have grown their network effects to a formidable scale. Only a series of huge disruptions, like the changes at Twitter ownership, a never-before-seen censorship, or the existential crises of a major platform, will lead to users switching over to decentralized platforms. But once users grow on decentralized platforms, I think there will be small chance of turning back

What are the reasons against it?