6 ms·

The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live. Int

by gue5t 11y ago

The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live. Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols. You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other. At that point using HTTP makes no sense either, and users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it. Web technologies are not really useful for users-talking-to-users without server-based mediation.

Coincoin 11y ago
And once again we stumble on the Internet's weak point we could never fix -- the DNS. Google wanted to fix the problem and, despite their best intention, became evil in the process. Now instead of racing for a .com name, people are fighting for search terms, bending to the opaque, machine enforced rules of a single entity driven by advertising revenues.
parasubvert 11y ago
"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live." That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine. The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly would need applications that automated these details away for a broader purpose. In fact many stil do run servers in their home in limited contests: their PVR, their backup appliance, their network printer, their Nest thermostat, heck even their Xbox with Twitch. It's all about the software application that warrants having your own server and makes it easy to maintain/run. "Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. " Its more than the interactions require software that needs to be written and evolved and maintained. A decentralized social network arguably has many benefits, that would lead to everyone buying something (software to run in their devices, or an appliance for their utility closet) to hook into it. "You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. " The web IS all about agreements (protocols), as is the Internet. Decentralized execution of said agreements lead to emergent effects. Sure, if someone writes one piece of software, everyone by definition has agreement. But the world of the network is about N versions of software written by different people and still achieving their ends. Today we have cases of agreements enforced by single copies of software (Facebook) on a decentralized network with many many underlying differences in software (web servers, TCP stacks, firewalls, routers, databases). The only reason Facebook exists are the prior agreements made on those lower commodified layers, and economic value moves up the stack. So why haven't we written the software and agreements to commodify Facebook? Because these things take time for the economic incentives to work. I believe it will happen, just a matter of time. The Web's architecture encourages decentralized sharing and manipulation of information, it's just incomplete. " The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols." What's the infeasible part? Where you see infeasibility, I just see "work in progress", or "incompletion". "You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other." Okay, there is a good idea for part of an implementation... "At that point using HTTP makes no sense either," ... And a bad one. As an example - BitTorrent actually relies on HTTP and the web to bootstrap discovery to a tracker before moving to a an (optional) DHT. The web is an essential component of the puzzle. "users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it." Why on earth would they need to? I can buy an appliance at Best Buy today that runs Wordpress for me. Why can't that evolve into something more sophisticated and compelling , that removes the need for centralized services? I think you're way too hung up on this concept of a server being a socio-political construct rather than a transient architectural role in an interchange. Clients can be servers and vice versa. End users already run servers today, they just don't know it. The real socio-political construct of the Internet, the nexus of control, is the protocol. That's how you blow up centralized services.
- gue5t 11y ago
  You're right that it's certainly within the financial means of anyone to run a web server; "class mobility" is not terribly difficult here. The problem is, as you state, that virtually nobody wants to have to administrate a server! In-home devices which accept connections are not relevant as they are inaccessible without giving your home network a well-known name. Any device which is not accessible from the Internet at large is not meaningfully a part of the Internet--it's simply on a network. Of course, you can set up port forwarding and buy a domain so you can access these devices from the Internet, but that fundamentally changes the situation. This is really the important distinction here: "servers" have known names and addresses on the Internet and "clients" do not. When you want to communicate with your friends, you do it by name or address; in the current model of the Internet as something 99% of people access via 3g on phones (with all kinds of network-side firewalling) or via their home router's dynamic IP and NAT, most users do not have any well-known address. The only way they can find their friends is by coordinating to both use some third party site. This is what it means for the current architecture of the web to encourage centralization: the most efficient way to let everyone find all their friends is for everyone to congregate at the same third-party location, i.e. Facebook. We haven't moved away from that because the decentralized alternatives have tended to suck, requiring running your own server all the time at a fixed address; actual progress would involve eliminating servers entirely and replacing DNS with a distributed name-lookup service that's actually designed for this use-case, and then having your mutual friends play the role of mailservers when you and your peer are playing phone-tag and not simultaneously online.
  - parasubvert 11y ago
    I agree with your point about search/indexing, but a lot of that has to do with an economic model to fund such a service ... the advertising-driven free models leads towards centralized control and loss of privacy. One interesting way to look at this is the move Apple is making towards more search and cloud services that are funded by device sales, not by advertising and analytics. Decentralized services have tended to suck because you always need at least a federation of centralized servers for search/discovery. But it's possible to do so in a relatively end-to-end secure way, if it can be funded without requiring spying/analytics. Anyway I'm just saying that there's a lot of possibility out there, and the barrier really is one of coming up with a big enough application incentive to force change across multiple areas of the current deployed web.
pdkl95 11y ago
It's not the "web" which causes this class separation - that happened because of NAT. NAT is what requires a 3rd party to mediate communication. We have some hope that IPv6 will roll back this imprimatur[1] a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people still confuse NAT with a stateful firewall that push for NAT in IPv6 where it isn't needed. The core benefit of the internet is that it is media access. Anybody can publish because the network treats all hosts as peers. There are entire categories of software that has never been written because they don't work behind NAT, and centralized solutions became popular as a workaround. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

by gue5t 11y ago

Coincoin 11y ago

And once again we stumble on the Internet's weak point we could never fix -- the DNS. Google wanted to fix the problem and, despite their best intention, became evil in the process. Now instead of racing for a .com name, people are fighting for search terms, bending to the opaque, machine enforced rules of a single entity driven by advertising revenues.

parasubvert 11y ago

"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live." That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine. The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly would need applications that automated these details away for a broader purpose. In fact many stil do run servers in their home in limited contests: their PVR, their backup appliance, their network printer, their Nest thermostat, heck even their Xbox with Twitch. It's all about the software application that warrants having your own server and makes it easy to maintain/run. "Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. " Its more than the interactions require software that needs to be written and evolved and maintained. A decentralized social network arguably has many benefits, that would lead to everyone buying something (software to run in their devices, or an appliance for their utility closet) to hook into it. "You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. " The web IS all about agreements (protocols), as is the Internet. Decentralized execution of said agreements lead to emergent effects. Sure, if someone writes one piece of software, everyone by definition has agreement. But the world of the network is about N versions of software written by different people and still achieving their ends. Today we have cases of agreements enforced by single copies of software (Facebook) on a decentralized network with many many underlying differences in software (web servers, TCP stacks, firewalls, routers, databases). The only reason Facebook exists are the prior agreements made on those lower commodified layers, and economic value moves up the stack. So why haven't we written the software and agreements to commodify Facebook? Because these things take time for the economic incentives to work. I believe it will happen, just a matter of time. The Web's architecture encourages decentralized sharing and manipulation of information, it's just incomplete. " The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols." What's the infeasible part? Where you see infeasibility, I just see "work in progress", or "incompletion". "You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other." Okay, there is a good idea for part of an implementation... "At that point using HTTP makes no sense either," ... And a bad one. As an example - BitTorrent actually relies on HTTP and the web to bootstrap discovery to a tracker before moving to a an (optional) DHT. The web is an essential component of the puzzle. "users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it." Why on earth would they need to? I can buy an appliance at Best Buy today that runs Wordpress for me. Why can't that evolve into something more sophisticated and compelling , that removes the need for centralized services? I think you're way too hung up on this concept of a server being a socio-political construct rather than a transient architectural role in an interchange. Clients can be servers and vice versa. End users already run servers today, they just don't know it. The real socio-political construct of the Internet, the nexus of control, is the protocol. That's how you blow up centralized services.

gue5t 11y ago
You're right that it's certainly within the financial means of anyone to run a web server; "class mobility" is not terribly difficult here. The problem is, as you state, that virtually nobody wants to have to administrate a server! In-home devices which accept connections are not relevant as they are inaccessible without giving your home network a well-known name. Any device which is not accessible from the Internet at large is not meaningfully a part of the Internet--it's simply on a network. Of course, you can set up port forwarding and buy a domain so you can access these devices from the Internet, but that fundamentally changes the situation. This is really the important distinction here: "servers" have known names and addresses on the Internet and "clients" do not. When you want to communicate with your friends, you do it by name or address; in the current model of the Internet as something 99% of people access via 3g on phones (with all kinds of network-side firewalling) or via their home router's dynamic IP and NAT, most users do not have any well-known address. The only way they can find their friends is by coordinating to both use some third party site. This is what it means for the current architecture of the web to encourage centralization: the most efficient way to let everyone find all their friends is for everyone to congregate at the same third-party location, i.e. Facebook. We haven't moved away from that because the decentralized alternatives have tended to suck, requiring running your own server all the time at a fixed address; actual progress would involve eliminating servers entirely and replacing DNS with a distributed name-lookup service that's actually designed for this use-case, and then having your mutual friends play the role of mailservers when you and your peer are playing phone-tag and not simultaneously online.
- parasubvert 11y ago
  I agree with your point about search/indexing, but a lot of that has to do with an economic model to fund such a service ... the advertising-driven free models leads towards centralized control and loss of privacy. One interesting way to look at this is the move Apple is making towards more search and cloud services that are funded by device sales, not by advertising and analytics. Decentralized services have tended to suck because you always need at least a federation of centralized servers for search/discovery. But it's possible to do so in a relatively end-to-end secure way, if it can be funded without requiring spying/analytics. Anyway I'm just saying that there's a lot of possibility out there, and the barrier really is one of coming up with a big enough application incentive to force change across multiple areas of the current deployed web.

pdkl95 11y ago

It's not the "web" which causes this class separation - that happened because of NAT. NAT is what requires a 3rd party to mediate communication. We have some hope that IPv6 will roll back this imprimatur[1] a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people still confuse NAT with a stateful firewall that push for NAT in IPv6 where it isn't needed. The core benefit of the internet is that it is media access. Anybody can publish because the network treats all hosts as peers. There are entire categories of software that has never been written because they don't work behind NAT, and centralized solutions became popular as a workaround. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/