8 ms·

The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

162 points by elie_CH 10y ago

anilgulecha 10y ago
Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc). Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on : a) user input b) stateful server With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem. With new technologies like bitcoin showing trust can be based in mathematics, and ethereum showing that interactions can be based around mathematical rules, we definitely have the technological raw power to built a scalable, trustable, non-censorable alternative to www. I do hope these new technologies are not too-hampered by how ubiquitous and entrenched www is.
- tim333 10y ago
  They managed a) user input b) stateful server with Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The trouble with decentralisation is users aren't bothered with it unless they need it to circumvent laws with things like bittorrent for copyright laws and bitcoin for money laundering, drug dealing, cryptolocker extortion and the like.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    Users don't bother with Diaspora because while it makes some gestures towards being simple and friction-free, it's essentially still a geek project for geeks, and not a mass user project for mass users who have zero interest in technology and just want to be social. The distributed network idea has been around for a long time, and ideally it's how the web will go. But it's much more of a technical and social challenge than today's server-based web. To win users it has to be significantly better than what's available today - not just another way to do the same things, but with a few extra complications and unreliabilities.
- marknadal 10y ago
  You are right, static resources is much simpler to solve than dynamic data. Everything from regular old Bittorrent, to IPFS (and many many others) can handle resources. But we need something like a Decentralized Firebase. And that is exactly what we're working on at https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun . I met Tim Berners-Lee last year at the Extensible Summit and chatted for a bit, and it is pretty incredible to know that he is rock solid in his principles and values. That takes a pretty level head.
- mbrock 10y ago
  Git is pretty good at handling change, and it does it by building on a static object store plus a very thin layer of mutable names. I think IPFS is already sufficient for that, and indeed someone has already built a chat application. https://github.com/haadcode/orbit https://github.com/haadcode/orbit The underlying IPFS event database implementation: https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db I think that there's something related to subscribing to changes without any central point of failure that's not currently possible with the IPFS implementations, but I also think that this is planned.
petewailes 10y ago
"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides." I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the same thing for free. The challenge with the web is as is noted at the end, not one of technology, but one of society. Making a better web means making how people work with each other through the web, what we expect of it, and how we want it to work better. Unfortunately, time and time again we've seen people prefer free, lousy web content to even a ludicrously small payment for something really good. How you fix that (getting people to value what they get from the web and to be willing to pay for it), I don't know. Spotify, Netflix, The FT et al have shown that it's possible to get people to pay, but I can't imagine even the majority of the web going that way for now. Hopefully that changes in the future.
- OscarCunningham 10y ago
  I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    As a flattr user from both sides (site owner and site visitor), I can't say I was entirely happy with it. Although it's well implemented. I find it difficult that they constrained the concept to payoff = $monthly_amount/$number_of_clicks. From both sides I would prefer to be able to set and see prices, not arbitrary equal results for all the sites I click. That had kept me from clicking in most cases, because I wouldn't want to give the equal amount to go to some 1-paragraph blogpost as to a 1 hour podcast. Even though I would want to contribute for both.
    - splatcollision 10y ago
      Potential to integrate the amount of micropayment as a star rating - think a combined "donate & rate" action after reading / watching. Let people contribute from 0.01 to 5.00 units of currency, in easy increments, that also indicate how much they liked it. Automatically bill and aggregate monthly.
goldenkey 10y ago
The end of the article said it best. It isn't an infrastructure problem. It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don't give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren't usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Exactly, no technology will change human nature. Take all of history as an example. Technologies that don't fit our goals are not used and the goals of governments (and their sponsors) always prevale.
- erez 10y ago
  People don't want to use these services. People have to use them, as there is no other method. Had the web's been decentralized from the get-go, and someone would come with a centralized service, you'd find the goldenkeys of the world arguing "people want to use decentralized services".
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    The federation idea seems to be the best way to create decentralization . The problem is that most people working on a type of website usually combine forces and host together. ThePirateBay and Libgen have come the closest to being federation-like. Tons of mirrors and different host names with the same source code and content that is meshnetted across the federation. The only thing that tpb isnt a good demonstration of is divided private data. That is the motivator for most decentralization proponents
    - Fice 10y ago
      Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.
elcapitan 10y ago
I think the way the web has been conceived once and then evolved around a relatively small set of core concepts is amazing. I find it hard to imagine though that after 20 years of evolution we could go back to a point where we apply another round of centralized planning how it actually should look like. The existence of centralized services is the result of demand and evolution, not of false planning in the beginning. 20 years is still a very short timespan, and we should probably admit that for huge societal changes like this we simply need more experimentation and more time. The rapid changes in technology sometimes lead people to the misconception that everything else would move similarly fast, but our human world is still slow. I'd rather see more people just try out different options on the web as it is and then have the most successful win rather than putting a bunch of clever people in a room and plan for everybody else.
- cheez 10y ago
  One way to think about this is that these guys are going to try, they'll come up with stuff that no one uses and it will be some nerd somewhere that comes up with the next iteration of the web. I.e., it won't be Berners-Lee that does it, it will be the next Berners-Lee somewhere. Satoshi (whether one person, or a group) did it with Bitcoin. The concept is now ingrained into every architect's toolbox. While Bitcoin itself won't revolutionize the web, it is a huge step forward in how to think of decentralization in an environment where it is too costly (technically, financially) to effectively decentralize. Perhaps the next step will be combining said decentralization with anonymity. Then in 50 years, maybe we'll all have our own anonymity-preserving "cloud boxes" that follow us wherever we live, just like routers do now (save the anonymity and storage).
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    Yes, that's what I would favor. Not only decentralized web, but also dezentralized thinking and tinkering. Maybe it's because the emphasis of the article is put on Berners-Lee and thereby creating a notion of authority, or because the group meeting and church-like environment somehow looks and sounds very much like design by committee, but the article didn't really convey that path to me.
danmaz74 10y ago
More than "reinventing the web", I would worry about finding strategies to keep the web open against the strong pull towards (semi) walled gardens that is coming from Facebook and others.
- amelius 10y ago
  I'm afraid this can only be done by introducing new laws. The network effect is just too strong, and most people don't care enough about privacy and openness to switch to different networks.
  - snsr 10y ago
    Or by providing a more attractive option.
    - amelius 10y ago
      How? In this new economy, big corporations have structured themselves such that they can compete with and protect against "disruptive" startups. Also, coming up with something more attractive takes time (trial and error), and big corporations can easily incorporate (copy) those new features in their products in the meantime.
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    You can't code away their wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g
  - uola 10y ago
    People do care about privacy and openness, not just in the way technologists expect them to. Using Google for mail over some random company or running your own mail server is reasonable for the threats against privacy most people face. Communicating with your friends on Facebook is "open" compared to asking them to buy a specific phone, run their own servers or install software. If anything it's developers don't care about privacy and openness. They are the ones running all these companies that take advantage of open technology not (or even prevent it to) keeping up with the demands of users.
jacquesm 10y ago
It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on. It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be peers, not producers and consumers.
- infodroid 10y ago
  Also in my experience ISP's to this day favour downloads over uploads by at least a 20:1 margin. Not to mention their restrictions on open ports and running internet-facing servers. Though I'm not sure if this was just a market response to customer preferences or if it was a contributing factor to digital consumerism.
  - gaius 10y ago
    That's the A in ADSL for you...
  - mcphage 10y ago
    > Also in my experience ISP's to this day favour downloads over uploads by at least a 20:1 margin. [...] Though I'm not sure if this was just a market response to customer preferences or if it was a contributing factor to digital consumerism. Verizon ran a campaign recently where they made their FiOS service 1:1 claiming that it was due to customer demand. But it happened right around when the FCC was debating net neutrality, so I always assumed that Verizon hoped they could fool a few people into thinking that it was what net neutrality was all about.
- curun1r 10y ago
  > Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections Mail servers, perhaps. SMTP servers, not a chance in hell. SMTP simply wasn't designed for a world with SPAMers, phishing and others who abuse email. If we're going to enable decentralized, we need to build in security and accountability from the start rather than relying on the naive protocols from the dawn of the internet. Note that you can have security and accountability while still maintaining anonymity. As an example, proof-of-work systems can mitigate the risk of bulk mail. But if you're trying to replace SMTP, you're traveling a well-trodden path that no one has successful traversed as of yet. I wish whomever goes down that path the best of luck, since we need a good, modern, decentralized replacement for SMTP. But I wouldn't bet on anyone, even someone like TBL, being able to succeed at it.
wangii 10y ago
What's the killer app?
Fice 10y ago
Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it. No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wallet provider. This will not change until new ethics of decentralization forms in the society. And that will happen eventually, but it could take a lot of time.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  So I agree with you in general and also wish to un-pack a little of what you mention based on my personal growing up alongside internet access. As in, I can do the 2400 baud modem handshake from memory, ran a server on a cable modem, and now consider myself more a user/consumer of technology than a creator/in the field. Traditionally access to the WWW had a pretty high threshold of combined factors: Cost for hardware and communications, time and effort to understand how things worked, and a still pretty basic group of sites and such. Lee is wrong in that the Web used to be 'more open' from a general social sense - it was AOL chat rooms before Snapchat, it was GeoCities before Facebook, and on and on and on. Large organizations like Dropbox have made it competitive and a more intelligent decision than trying to set up a personal server and jump through all sorts of intellectual and digital hoops to make it work. Or, in other words, the easier something is to use, the more idiots are going to get their hands on it and use it. The Web is simply a reflection of the human species. Both stunningly beautiful and tragically ugly, it's certainly evidence to me that Utopia is, fundamentally, irrational and likely impossible without exlcusion and selection bias.
- zanny 10y ago
  Bitcoin already is. Blockstream LLC employs a majority of core developers with commit access, and thus can effectively hold the protocol ransom for profit, and they have been doing so for over a year now. Good luck ever getting a fee-less transaction accepted, and even at "standard" fee rates your transaction may not be accepted into a block for hours due to the backlog because they have intentionally kept the maximum block size at 1MB, intending to sell for-profit centralized corporate services that "guarantee" rapid block acceptance on their own lightning platform.
alistproducer2 10y ago
I don't like how the article completely left out IPFS.
kordless 10y ago
Software is the result of business models. Business models are the result of risk management around desired outcomes. Making more money, for example. Making more money is the reason we've had bubbles and new business layers appear. MSPs were the precursor to SaaS, for example. Software sucks because business models must frequently be addressed before customer's needs are addressed. Of course this is a simplification of the process, but no company continues writing software if their business models for that software fail and they run out of money or is threatened with shutdown if they don't comply with the government. To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. New models of work storage and exchange must be created to allow developers to write code for the people who need it. When a user relies on a feature, there should always be a clear path for them to a) continue using that feature for as long as they see fit and b) enter into a contractual agreements with a developers to develop new features they need. This should be able to be done without a corporation or business model getting in the way. It also implies all the software down the stack is reinvented in the same way to support this new methodology. Deployments/installs, for example, will need to be done differently moving forward. This is obviously bad news for the "startup" scene, but good news for humanity. Things are getting complicated and clearly don't scale well doing it the old way. It's time for a change.
- bobajeff 10y ago
  Sounds like you already have a solution in mind.
- andrewfromx 10y ago
  Yes! Working on code for the sake of building something vs. money. Re-think the question, is money a resource: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11828947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11828947
- adevine 10y ago
  Wat? > To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. This goes into my "and everyone gets a pony" set of solutions.
seagreen 10y ago
“The web is already decentralized,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.” One that can, perhaps, be solved by more technology. This is a very confused article. It's a social problem! But we're going to solve it with technology! I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee has a great understanding of the situation, but since it didn't come across in the article let's try to build our own description of the problem here in the comments. To do this we'll go through the most interesting projects in the "fix the web" space and steal their key insights. # Camlistore - All Your Data Should Be in One Place I probably have important data in two dozen different places. Google, FB, Dropbox, Reddit, GitHub, Mint, Stack Exchange, Amazon, etc. This is crazy! All my personal data should go into a personal data store. I'm not sure how we'll ever approach a sane system without this step. Camlistore is all about making that data store. More info here: https://camlistore.org/doc/overview https://camlistore.org/doc/overview " Camlistore is your personal storage system for life. " # Urbit - Everyone Should Have a Name Right now only techies own their names. We do it in two ways -- the total ownership way where we make a private key and identify ourselves with it, and the "technically renting but basically ownership" way where we buy a domain. You can reach me at <myname>@<mydomain> today, tomorrow, and probably for the rest of my life. Most non-techies get by with Gmail and a FB page. This isn't the worst, but it's not ideal. And for every different service we use we get a different name. I don't want 20 names! I want to use my name! (Or sometimes one of my pseudonyms, which Urbit has first-class support for). In Urbit everyone has a name[1]. Even better, this name maps to their computer, so if I know my friends name I can connect to their computer -- the foundation of getting an actual peer-to-peer network back from the current mess. [1] Connected to a private key and human readable! But often silly, eg: ~gumdob-tumlub # Sandstorm - Everyone Needs a Server Servers are necessary to be real internet citizens. I think this is basically self-explanatory. If your entire internet presence disappears when you close your laptop lid you're basically beyond helping, and will always need some kind of walled-garden to watch out for you. The problem is that Linux servers are a pain to host. With Sandstorm you can set up a server with one click. You can install apps with one click. This is . . . basically such an obviously good idea it's hard to find more to say about it. If there are more interesting projects in this space please mention them, I'm going back to coding:) EDIT: I wasn't really sure what to write for a conclusion, but now I've thought of one: The web evolved, what we get next will be _built_. This is very exciting.
combatentropy 10y ago
With a computer in every pocket, we're ready for a peer-to-peer Internet. I'd rather host my own wall and email than rely on Facebook and Google. Of course I would still rely heavily on some good open-source software. And for most people this open-source software would have to be packaged nice and simple, like "apps." Also I've read that distributed networks (or "meshes"?) are much harder to get working well than centralized ones. I don't know much about them, though. We might need to wait for another battery breakthrough, too, if my phone will be doubling as a server. I guess we would also need more blockchains, sharding and encryption like with Tor, and a greater comfort with eventual consistency.

162 points by elie_CH 10y ago

Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc). Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on : a) user input b) stateful server With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem. With new technologies like bitcoin showing trust can be based in mathematics, and ethereum showing that interactions can be based around mathematical rules, we definitely have the technological raw power to built a scalable, trustable, non-censorable alternative to www. I do hope these new technologies are not too-hampered by how ubiquitous and entrenched www is.

tim333 10y ago
They managed a) user input b) stateful server with Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The trouble with decentralisation is users aren't bothered with it unless they need it to circumvent laws with things like bittorrent for copyright laws and bitcoin for money laundering, drug dealing, cryptolocker extortion and the like.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Users don't bother with Diaspora because while it makes some gestures towards being simple and friction-free, it's essentially still a geek project for geeks, and not a mass user project for mass users who have zero interest in technology and just want to be social. The distributed network idea has been around for a long time, and ideally it's how the web will go. But it's much more of a technical and social challenge than today's server-based web. To win users it has to be significantly better than what's available today - not just another way to do the same things, but with a few extra complications and unreliabilities.
marknadal 10y ago
You are right, static resources is much simpler to solve than dynamic data. Everything from regular old Bittorrent, to IPFS (and many many others) can handle resources. But we need something like a Decentralized Firebase. And that is exactly what we're working on at https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun . I met Tim Berners-Lee last year at the Extensible Summit and chatted for a bit, and it is pretty incredible to know that he is rock solid in his principles and values. That takes a pretty level head.
mbrock 10y ago
Git is pretty good at handling change, and it does it by building on a static object store plus a very thin layer of mutable names. I think IPFS is already sufficient for that, and indeed someone has already built a chat application. https://github.com/haadcode/orbit https://github.com/haadcode/orbit The underlying IPFS event database implementation: https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db I think that there's something related to subscribing to changes without any central point of failure that's not currently possible with the IPFS implementations, but I also think that this is planned.

petewailes 10y ago

"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides." I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the same thing for free. The challenge with the web is as is noted at the end, not one of technology, but one of society. Making a better web means making how people work with each other through the web, what we expect of it, and how we want it to work better. Unfortunately, time and time again we've seen people prefer free, lousy web content to even a ludicrously small payment for something really good. How you fix that (getting people to value what they get from the web and to be willing to pay for it), I don't know. Spotify, Netflix, The FT et al have shown that it's possible to get people to pay, but I can't imagine even the majority of the web going that way for now. Hopefully that changes in the future.

OscarCunningham 10y ago
I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.
- elcapitan 10y ago
  As a flattr user from both sides (site owner and site visitor), I can't say I was entirely happy with it. Although it's well implemented. I find it difficult that they constrained the concept to payoff = $monthly_amount/$number_of_clicks. From both sides I would prefer to be able to set and see prices, not arbitrary equal results for all the sites I click. That had kept me from clicking in most cases, because I wouldn't want to give the equal amount to go to some 1-paragraph blogpost as to a 1 hour podcast. Even though I would want to contribute for both.
  - splatcollision 10y ago
    Potential to integrate the amount of micropayment as a star rating - think a combined "donate & rate" action after reading / watching. Let people contribute from 0.01 to 5.00 units of currency, in easy increments, that also indicate how much they liked it. Automatically bill and aggregate monthly.

goldenkey 10y ago

The end of the article said it best. It isn't an infrastructure problem. It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don't give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren't usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.

pmontra 10y ago
Exactly, no technology will change human nature. Take all of history as an example. Technologies that don't fit our goals are not used and the goals of governments (and their sponsors) always prevale.
erez 10y ago
People don't want to use these services. People have to use them, as there is no other method. Had the web's been decentralized from the get-go, and someone would come with a centralized service, you'd find the goldenkeys of the world arguing "people want to use decentralized services".
- goldenkey 10y ago
  The federation idea seems to be the best way to create decentralization . The problem is that most people working on a type of website usually combine forces and host together. ThePirateBay and Libgen have come the closest to being federation-like. Tons of mirrors and different host names with the same source code and content that is meshnetted across the federation. The only thing that tpb isnt a good demonstration of is divided private data. That is the motivator for most decentralization proponents
  - Fice 10y ago
    Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.

elcapitan 10y ago

I think the way the web has been conceived once and then evolved around a relatively small set of core concepts is amazing. I find it hard to imagine though that after 20 years of evolution we could go back to a point where we apply another round of centralized planning how it actually should look like. The existence of centralized services is the result of demand and evolution, not of false planning in the beginning. 20 years is still a very short timespan, and we should probably admit that for huge societal changes like this we simply need more experimentation and more time. The rapid changes in technology sometimes lead people to the misconception that everything else would move similarly fast, but our human world is still slow. I'd rather see more people just try out different options on the web as it is and then have the most successful win rather than putting a bunch of clever people in a room and plan for everybody else.

cheez 10y ago
One way to think about this is that these guys are going to try, they'll come up with stuff that no one uses and it will be some nerd somewhere that comes up with the next iteration of the web. I.e., it won't be Berners-Lee that does it, it will be the next Berners-Lee somewhere. Satoshi (whether one person, or a group) did it with Bitcoin. The concept is now ingrained into every architect's toolbox. While Bitcoin itself won't revolutionize the web, it is a huge step forward in how to think of decentralization in an environment where it is too costly (technically, financially) to effectively decentralize. Perhaps the next step will be combining said decentralization with anonymity. Then in 50 years, maybe we'll all have our own anonymity-preserving "cloud boxes" that follow us wherever we live, just like routers do now (save the anonymity and storage).
- elcapitan 10y ago
  Yes, that's what I would favor. Not only decentralized web, but also dezentralized thinking and tinkering. Maybe it's because the emphasis of the article is put on Berners-Lee and thereby creating a notion of authority, or because the group meeting and church-like environment somehow looks and sounds very much like design by committee, but the article didn't really convey that path to me.

danmaz74 10y ago

More than "reinventing the web", I would worry about finding strategies to keep the web open against the strong pull towards (semi) walled gardens that is coming from Facebook and others.

amelius 10y ago
I'm afraid this can only be done by introducing new laws. The network effect is just too strong, and most people don't care enough about privacy and openness to switch to different networks.
- snsr 10y ago
  Or by providing a more attractive option.
  - amelius 10y ago
    How? In this new economy, big corporations have structured themselves such that they can compete with and protect against "disruptive" startups. Also, coming up with something more attractive takes time (trial and error), and big corporations can easily incorporate (copy) those new features in their products in the meantime.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  You can't code away their wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g
- uola 10y ago
  People do care about privacy and openness, not just in the way technologists expect them to. Using Google for mail over some random company or running your own mail server is reasonable for the threats against privacy most people face. Communicating with your friends on Facebook is "open" compared to asking them to buy a specific phone, run their own servers or install software. If anything it's developers don't care about privacy and openness. They are the ones running all these companies that take advantage of open technology not (or even prevent it to) keeping up with the demands of users.

jacquesm 10y ago

It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on. It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be peers, not producers and consumers.

infodroid 10y ago
Also in my experience ISP's to this day favour downloads over uploads by at least a 20:1 margin. Not to mention their restrictions on open ports and running internet-facing servers. Though I'm not sure if this was just a market response to customer preferences or if it was a contributing factor to digital consumerism.
- gaius 10y ago
  That's the A in ADSL for you...
- mcphage 10y ago
  > Also in my experience ISP's to this day favour downloads over uploads by at least a 20:1 margin. [...] Though I'm not sure if this was just a market response to customer preferences or if it was a contributing factor to digital consumerism. Verizon ran a campaign recently where they made their FiOS service 1:1 claiming that it was due to customer demand. But it happened right around when the FCC was debating net neutrality, so I always assumed that Verizon hoped they could fool a few people into thinking that it was what net neutrality was all about.
curun1r 10y ago
> Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections Mail servers, perhaps. SMTP servers, not a chance in hell. SMTP simply wasn't designed for a world with SPAMers, phishing and others who abuse email. If we're going to enable decentralized, we need to build in security and accountability from the start rather than relying on the naive protocols from the dawn of the internet. Note that you can have security and accountability while still maintaining anonymity. As an example, proof-of-work systems can mitigate the risk of bulk mail. But if you're trying to replace SMTP, you're traveling a well-trodden path that no one has successful traversed as of yet. I wish whomever goes down that path the best of luck, since we need a good, modern, decentralized replacement for SMTP. But I wouldn't bet on anyone, even someone like TBL, being able to succeed at it.

wangii 10y ago

What's the killer app?

Fice 10y ago

Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it. No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wallet provider. This will not change until new ethics of decentralization forms in the society. And that will happen eventually, but it could take a lot of time.

6stringmerc 10y ago
So I agree with you in general and also wish to un-pack a little of what you mention based on my personal growing up alongside internet access. As in, I can do the 2400 baud modem handshake from memory, ran a server on a cable modem, and now consider myself more a user/consumer of technology than a creator/in the field. Traditionally access to the WWW had a pretty high threshold of combined factors: Cost for hardware and communications, time and effort to understand how things worked, and a still pretty basic group of sites and such. Lee is wrong in that the Web used to be 'more open' from a general social sense - it was AOL chat rooms before Snapchat, it was GeoCities before Facebook, and on and on and on. Large organizations like Dropbox have made it competitive and a more intelligent decision than trying to set up a personal server and jump through all sorts of intellectual and digital hoops to make it work. Or, in other words, the easier something is to use, the more idiots are going to get their hands on it and use it. The Web is simply a reflection of the human species. Both stunningly beautiful and tragically ugly, it's certainly evidence to me that Utopia is, fundamentally, irrational and likely impossible without exlcusion and selection bias.
zanny 10y ago
Bitcoin already is. Blockstream LLC employs a majority of core developers with commit access, and thus can effectively hold the protocol ransom for profit, and they have been doing so for over a year now. Good luck ever getting a fee-less transaction accepted, and even at "standard" fee rates your transaction may not be accepted into a block for hours due to the backlog because they have intentionally kept the maximum block size at 1MB, intending to sell for-profit centralized corporate services that "guarantee" rapid block acceptance on their own lightning platform.

alistproducer2 10y ago

I don't like how the article completely left out IPFS.

kordless 10y ago

Software is the result of business models. Business models are the result of risk management around desired outcomes. Making more money, for example. Making more money is the reason we've had bubbles and new business layers appear. MSPs were the precursor to SaaS, for example. Software sucks because business models must frequently be addressed before customer's needs are addressed. Of course this is a simplification of the process, but no company continues writing software if their business models for that software fail and they run out of money or is threatened with shutdown if they don't comply with the government. To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. New models of work storage and exchange must be created to allow developers to write code for the people who need it. When a user relies on a feature, there should always be a clear path for them to a) continue using that feature for as long as they see fit and b) enter into a contractual agreements with a developers to develop new features they need. This should be able to be done without a corporation or business model getting in the way. It also implies all the software down the stack is reinvented in the same way to support this new methodology. Deployments/installs, for example, will need to be done differently moving forward. This is obviously bad news for the "startup" scene, but good news for humanity. Things are getting complicated and clearly don't scale well doing it the old way. It's time for a change.

bobajeff 10y ago
Sounds like you already have a solution in mind.
andrewfromx 10y ago
Yes! Working on code for the sake of building something vs. money. Re-think the question, is money a resource: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11828947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11828947
adevine 10y ago
Wat? > To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. This goes into my "and everyone gets a pony" set of solutions.

seagreen 10y ago

“The web is already decentralized,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.” One that can, perhaps, be solved by more technology. This is a very confused article. It's a social problem! But we're going to solve it with technology! I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee has a great understanding of the situation, but since it didn't come across in the article let's try to build our own description of the problem here in the comments. To do this we'll go through the most interesting projects in the "fix the web" space and steal their key insights. # Camlistore - All Your Data Should Be in One Place I probably have important data in two dozen different places. Google, FB, Dropbox, Reddit, GitHub, Mint, Stack Exchange, Amazon, etc. This is crazy! All my personal data should go into a personal data store. I'm not sure how we'll ever approach a sane system without this step. Camlistore is all about making that data store. More info here: https://camlistore.org/doc/overview https://camlistore.org/doc/overview " Camlistore is your personal storage system for life. " # Urbit - Everyone Should Have a Name Right now only techies own their names. We do it in two ways -- the total ownership way where we make a private key and identify ourselves with it, and the "technically renting but basically ownership" way where we buy a domain. You can reach me at <myname>@<mydomain> today, tomorrow, and probably for the rest of my life. Most non-techies get by with Gmail and a FB page. This isn't the worst, but it's not ideal. And for every different service we use we get a different name. I don't want 20 names! I want to use my name! (Or sometimes one of my pseudonyms, which Urbit has first-class support for). In Urbit everyone has a name[1]. Even better, this name maps to their computer, so if I know my friends name I can connect to their computer -- the foundation of getting an actual peer-to-peer network back from the current mess. [1] Connected to a private key and human readable! But often silly, eg: ~gumdob-tumlub # Sandstorm - Everyone Needs a Server Servers are necessary to be real internet citizens. I think this is basically self-explanatory. If your entire internet presence disappears when you close your laptop lid you're basically beyond helping, and will always need some kind of walled-garden to watch out for you. The problem is that Linux servers are a pain to host. With Sandstorm you can set up a server with one click. You can install apps with one click. This is . . . basically such an obviously good idea it's hard to find more to say about it. If there are more interesting projects in this space please mention them, I'm going back to coding:) EDIT: I wasn't really sure what to write for a conclusion, but now I've thought of one: The web evolved, what we get next will be _built_. This is very exciting.

combatentropy 10y ago

With a computer in every pocket, we're ready for a peer-to-peer Internet. I'd rather host my own wall and email than rely on Facebook and Google. Of course I would still rely heavily on some good open-source software. And for most people this open-source software would have to be packaged nice and simple, like "apps." Also I've read that distributed networks (or "meshes"?) are much harder to get working well than centralized ones. I don't know much about them, though. We might need to wait for another battery breakthrough, too, if my phone will be doubling as a server. I guess we would also need more blockchains, sharding and encryption like with Tor, and a greater comfort with eventual consistency.