Nobody wants to organize horizontally.
Yet you’re posting this on a rapidly growing horizontally-organized social media system, running on top of a wildly successful, half-century old, horizontally-organized global computer network governed by “rough consensus and running code”. Curious.
Obligatory “I am very smart”
horizontally-organized social media system
Even the fediverse feels like a bunch of hierarchies. Some have a council with code of conduct on top, some have a benevolent dictator. As a user, you have very little say in the relationships between the large instances. It’s easier to become a sovereign instance at the moment, compared to the dark times of twitter and reddit, but as soon as the large instances decide not to federate with the world by default, you’re back to square one. It’s very similar to citizen vs country, and country vs country interaction.
half-century old, horizontally-organized global computer network
I’d say that only Tier 1 networks are horizontally managed. The name itself implies a hierarchy. There is an organization on top granting AS’s to legal entities, and assigning IP addresses to them. An average ISP customer has absolutely no say about what happens higher up in the hierarchy.
Sure, you can try to bootstrap a flat network, but that has it’s own disadvantages. And I’m saying that as a member of a project trying to build a meshnet using network protocols with more or less flat topology. (Disaster radio, Meshtastic, Reticulum).
