Proponents of decentralized services (which are sometimes abbreviated as “decents”) hope to overcome some of these limitations by scattering the software and data that run online services closer to their ultimate points of use. Tarr’s Secure Scuttlebutt isn’t a social network like Twitter or Facebook, nor is it an email client like Gmail. Instead, it’s a platform for encrypted, automated, and local replication of information. Atop this information, new, decentralized versions of services like Twitter—or anything else—can be built.