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Yeah. From a hacker's perspective, a business model is just some way to keep a thing up and running. If it doesn't create a bunch of jobs at some office somewhe

by mbrock 11y ago

Yeah. From a hacker's perspective, a business model is just some way to keep a thing up and running. If it doesn't create a bunch of jobs at some office somewhere or lead to an IPO, well, that's just worldly affairs, right? The distributed/federated stuff is still alive, maybe more than ever. Git is a fantastic example. I push and pull repositories between computers all the time. Often over ad-hoc WiFi, even. Usenet and all that stuff is beautiful to reminisce about, but we should keep in mind also that it was largely sponsored by universities, corporations, militaries, and internet service providers... IRC is a great inspiration too. Nowadays people look at it and think "ew, no Unicode" or "duh, it's not even JSON," but considering its resilience, its simplicity, its adoption, it's an enormous, staggering success. These beautiful projects that started as tiny little seeds by clever obscure Scandinavian hackers... It's just all about starting a little thing, getting your friends in on it, and keepin' it hella real.

quesera 11y ago
True, although keep in mind that while USENET's bandwidth was definitely sponsored, the technology (above the TCP layer) was built by hackers as a side project. At some point Larry Wall (e.g.) got a job just being himself, but for a long time he had unrelated professional responsibilities. Since the bandwidth funding model has now bubbled down to the consumer marketplace, it seems like the conditions are right for a huge variety of services. Actually that was starting to happen before the web swallowed all other services. Don't get me wrong, the web was/is a great thing, but it severely dumbs down the range of protocol expression. The state of websockets in 2016 is a weak imitation of IRC or MUD capabilities more than 20 years ago (never mind adoption problems). I guess that's a curse of being "good enough". The better has an uphill battle.

by mbrock 11y ago

quesera 11y ago

True, although keep in mind that while USENET's bandwidth was definitely sponsored, the technology (above the TCP layer) was built by hackers as a side project. At some point Larry Wall (e.g.) got a job just being himself, but for a long time he had unrelated professional responsibilities. Since the bandwidth funding model has now bubbled down to the consumer marketplace, it seems like the conditions are right for a huge variety of services. Actually that was starting to happen before the web swallowed all other services. Don't get me wrong, the web was/is a great thing, but it severely dumbs down the range of protocol expression. The state of websockets in 2016 is a weak imitation of IRC or MUD capabilities more than 20 years ago (never mind adoption problems). I guess that's a curse of being "good enough". The better has an uphill battle.