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A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

• susurrus 10y ago
  Do they even have proofreaders at TechCrunch? They keep repeating paragraphs!
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Well, they were similar, but showed variation. Now all we need to do is introduce selection, and the articles can write and evolve themselves!
    • Arathorn 10y ago
      I have no idea where the mangled paragraphs came from - they weren't in the version I sent TechCrunch :(
      • dredmorbius 10y ago
        No worries. I never repeat repeat myself.
      • clydethefrog 10y ago
        Maybe inform them? Several comments on (centralized ;) ) social media are criticising the article because of the way it's written instead of discussing the message of the article, sure TC doesn't want that.
        • Arathorn 10y ago
          yup, I mailed/pinged them within 45 mins of it going up; no response yet :(
          • Arathorn 10y ago
            ...and now fixed.
            • Arathorn 10y ago
              ...apart from the bits they didn't fix. I give up.
              • Arathorn 10y ago
                ...and finally fixed entirely(!)
• mixedCase 10y ago
  "A decentralized web would be very slightly inconvenient to the people so forget about your freedom and privacy who cares about that." More realistic title. It would make for a shorter article though.
  • dcposch 10y ago
    Switching from Facebook to, say, Diaspora or something is more than just "slightly inconvenient". One of them has all of my friends on it and the other has none. -- Two ideas for how we can help decentralization win. 1. Don't just clone an existing app. The two decentralized protocols with the most adoption by far are Bitcoin and BitTorrent. Both of them have capabilities that no centralized system can match. Same with Ethereum, Namecoin, etc. So the goal of a decentralized system should be to exceed the functionality of what came before, not just to clone an existing centralized service. 2. Run your open source project like a startup. That means gathering metrics, tracking week-on-week growth, getting press hits, creating a brand, caring about product and UX. I've seen cool decentralized projects get no adoption because the people running them focus on the technical aspects and ignore things like usability. BitMessage, for example, is impressive technology, but the client is called "PyBitMessage" and it looks lolbad: http://i.imgur.com/ydY6PIX.png http://i.imgur.com/ydY6PIX.png
    • keyle 10y ago
      I'm totally with you on number 2 - but don't those things require money? UX, design, consistent look, all require money. And honestly, the press is a lot more likely to talk about you if you have money invested and shiny offices. To get such things, you have to have a profoundly interesting argument to investors, which usually does not rhyme with "we want to free the people, privacy, etc". There are, of course, exceptions.
      • johannes1234321 10y ago
        Coding costs money to. You have to motivate designers etc. in a similar way as you motivate coders to work on the project.
• mtgx 10y ago
  Because Techcrunch didn't link to any of the projects they're talking about, here they are: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ http://dat-data.com/ http://dat-data.com/ https://blockstack.org/ https://blockstack.org/ https://www.ethereum.org/ https://www.ethereum.org/
  • subliminalpanda 10y ago
    I've been playing a bit with ZeroNet [https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/] lately; it's quite usable despite being a fairly new project.
  • marknadal 10y ago
    Also after zeronet, don't forget about: http://matrix.org http://matrix.org http://gun.js.org http://gun.js.org http://webtorrent.io http://webtorrent.io
  • sandcat 10y ago
    As well as https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ and https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
• Alex3917 10y ago
  The real issue is that we need to make it illegal to give out free content, unless it's distributed under an open license. Otherwise advertising-supported businesses will always be able to outcompete everyone else via dumping, and these businesses always benefit from being increasingly centralized. That's why we don't have liberal newspapers anymore in the U.S., because ad supported papers put them all out of business. At the very least people need to be trained that it's unethical to surf the web without using an adblocker.
  • imglorp 10y ago
    The centralization is a good point, but I wanted to ask about why > we don't have liberal newspapers anymore in the U.S. Most conservatives would say the papers and media outlets are _all_ liberal. Would you expand on that spectrum? > it's unethical to surf the web without using an adblocker It's also unethical to insert malware into ads, or to hire syndication services that allow it. I'll continue to block until that's fixed.
    • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      >> we don't have liberal newspapers anymore in the U.S. >Most conservatives would say the papers and media outlets are _all_ liberal. I think this effect can be best demonstrated by a conversation I had with a Google fan last week. In particular, I've had an ongoing banter with him about his choice to refer to The Verge as "iVerge". I find this very odd, that people believe The Verge has a strong Apple bias. You see, The Verge regularly gets exclusive interviews and opportunities from Google. When the Pixel was announced, The Verge staff had already been sent a demo unit, and they had a ton of quotes from senior Google employees available to use in their article, written in advance. Why would an Apple-biased blog be given so much direct access to Google? And this isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. What I've come to recognize is that The Verge will shill for anyone who gives them the goods. Exclusives are as valuable as Google or Apple outright cutting them a check, because it guarantees a ton of page views. Apple and Google both are pretty manipulative when it comes to their press, and unsurprisingly, The Verge rarely posts hard-hitting critical material of either, because hurting a company's reputation in an article is a great way to get blacklisted by their PR team. Anyways, the point of the story: The Google fan stated that even though The Verge seemed equally positive about both companies, that it was Google, in his opinion, which was innovative and did amazing things. So by giving Apple similar coverage, The Verge was being biased towards Apple. Because in his opinion, Apple didn't deserve the praise, but Google did. If you are a biased viewer, a moderate voice can be quickly confused with bias for the other side. This is also, for instance, why liberals think I'm a conservative, and conservatives think I'm a liberal.
• brador 10y ago
  A decentralised web is not viable until we can create an NP soft or better mesh network. Until then the network load to manage itself crushes it before it can walk.
  • the8472 10y ago
    decentralized routing is a problem separate from decentralized hosting on a core-shell topology network, i.e. the current internet.
  • vamur 10y ago
    It is not viable until there is an order of magnitude cheaper storage (e.g $1/1TB) and cheaper/faster bandwidth. For the latter it is becoming more expensive and slower lately.
  • mark_l_watson 10y ago
    +1 for bringing up mesh networks. I have been reading about mesh network projects in Germany and other places. What I think is needed to increase adoption is something like the raspberry Pi, a cheap and open mesh router that would allow setting up community networks, with hooks for volunteers to provide low bandwidth gateways to the web, tools for sharing locally hosted copies of Wikipedia, projects for local social media, market places for local commerce, etc. When there is a low cost system available, then I can visualize myself starting a class at the local library, etc. In an increasingly centralized world (central banks, the awful one worked government philosophies, winner take all hubs on the web, etc.) it is too easy to lose track of the fact that local issues, economy, and life are more important than global issues.
    • zzzcpan 10y ago
      There are many millions of people who don't have the problems, that can be solved by mesh networks. They live in countries, where ISPs are not overregulated and are very competitive, bringing cheap high quality high speed internet to every household. In fact, those ISPs and the whole broadband market there emerged from similar communities of local networks you describe, except they weren't mesh networks, but wired networks. And yet there is no decentralized web there either. Because it's not technology, that's stopping it from happening.
• BjoernKW 10y ago
  Ironically, GitHub is a prime example of why centralisation is harmful. If GitHub suddenly disappeared tomorrow (or even just went offline for a few hours), many software build processes in the world would grind to a halt. Sure, because Git is a decentralised protocol eventually it'd all be brought back up again but it'd cause a major disruption and at the very least create enormous costs.
  • ekianjo 10y ago
    You could easily move tomorrow to another git based service. The only stuff missing would be issue management.
    • johannes1234321 10y ago
      And your wiki, and all links leading to your project and all tooling you've built around.
      • mioelnir 10y ago
        No idea about the other things, but the wiki is just an additional git repo that you can check out like any other one.
        • johannes1234321 10y ago
          And then you still need the infrastructure to run it on a site where contributors already have an account or don't mind the extra burden of registration.
          • ekianjo 10y ago
            People moved away from sf fast enough im pretty sure the same thing would occur if things turn sour for github.
    • fredsir 10y ago
      Many rely on Github for more than source control hosting and issues. It's really not a non-issue.
• dgudkov 10y ago
  I believe the internet is naturally drifting to "governed countries" (e.g. Google or Facebook) and one of the biggest drivers is not just convenience, but decreasing security of the web in general. Just like the wild West eventually became a number of states with borders, police and government. It became especially relevant in the recent years, when harvesting exploits en masse has become a huge industry. Yes, centralized "web governments" have exponentially increasing attractiveness for attackers although they can benefit from scale, applying good security practices more consistently than multiple decentralized self-governed "nodes". The criminals tend to self-organize and centralize. Why? because it's more effective. As long as there are centralized "bad guys" "good citizens" don't have any other choice than unite and develop a centralized policed "country". And "the bad guys" won't go anytime soon. The decentralized web is like youth -- it's a wonderful idealistic time but it's gone and will never return back.
  • pessimizer 10y ago
    Very cynical, but I tend to agree. I think the idea of the libertarian individualistic decentralized web is a non-starter for the general public. If you see the decentralized web as a matter of degree of centralization of individual services, however, a continuum where you can have a web for your family, a web for your job, your own personal web, a web run by your neighborhood, a web for your government etc. and conventions/interfaces to allow strictly regulated communication between those levels, I think you see it as an inherent quality of the web. The problem isn't that Facebook mediates the relationship between you and the people you went to high school with, or that twitter mediates the relationship between you and Washington Post reporters; it's that once those relationships have been well-established and don't need any more protection (or need protection from Facebook itself), there's nowhere to take them to on the web. It shouldn't be easier to send baby pictures to my mother and aunts through Facebook. If one of us wants to make the effort to get some off the shelf appliance (or appliance that needs Debian installed and apt-get run periodically) and hook it to the web, and establish a hub for the family that provides most of what facebook provides, it would be better if it were both possible and easy to create and access.
• dannyrosen 10y ago
  The nature of the net us to centralize and then decentralize, it's a cycle. See 90s AOL vs the open net as an example. At this point it's more about usability than it is about access. The open tools that are being built still have a ways to go towards fluid user on-boarding and compelling retention experiences.
  • sukilot 10y ago
    When has it ever decentralized? The nature is that new decentralised systems get invented, then they get centralized. The outbursts of decentralization keep getting smaller and less frequent, as programming software gets more complex with more dependencies and requirements (security, internationalization, etc)
  • adrusi 10y ago
    There's very little evidence to support this claim. Some things were decentralized in the past, now most things are centralized. That does not establish a cycle.
    • zerognowl 10y ago
      The Internet has many centers and choke points, most of which gather in the U.S. The Internet needs country level network diversity and more stuff happening on the edge of networks instead of the center. Maciej Ceglowski explains it better than I: The Internet With a Human Face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWFo1VaQNmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWFo1VaQNmU
• mark_l_watson 10y ago
  I went to the Decentralised Web conference in June. Fantastic venue, good talks, and lots of interesting people to talk with during the breaks. I blogged about the experience http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/06/action-items-after-attending.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/06/action-items-after-attend... Until recently, I was trying to go 'all in' by favoring GNU Social over centralized social media, almost always running Linux on the laptop, etc. I have backed off somewhat, realizing that my workflow for writing books and consulting is more efficient using OSX, and sometimes Facebook and G+ are much better at connecting with friends and better for publicizing book updates, etc. than GNU Social. I am trying to live in a practical 'middle ground' where I can get my work done and still participate in keeping the web open and decentralized. Two new developments that are promising: a Ruby version of GNU Social that uses the same protocols that looks much more hackable, and TBL's W3C Solid project.
  • nojvek 10y ago
    Facebook and goog is build by armies of full time folks with average salaries of 150k. Competing with volunteers doesn't get you far. Even the rise of git was because of github. A for profit centralized company. May be the best case is to have open, decentralized protocols, with for profit companies providing hosting and simple signup. ICQ or XMPP, never quite took off like slack. Is it because of the interface?
    • adrianN 10y ago
      A couple of years ago everybody had ICQ, at least here in Germany. I wouldn't say that it "didn't take off".
      • flukus 10y ago
        Same in Australia before MSN messenger (and now facebook messenger) supplanted it. I set my phone notification to the default ICQ sound and if I get a message in a meeting I see the instant wave of nostalgia across everyone's face.
    • rak00n 10y ago
• melvster 10y ago
  The most advanced decentralized system Ive seen in web 3.0 is also the one Tim Berners-Lee talks about, solid. While still very new, I think it has more than sufficient power to take back your data from the large monopolies. One nice feature, as you'd expect from the inventor of the web, is that it's 100% backwards compatible with existing Web technology. https://github.com/solid/solid https://github.com/solid/solid Link to github repo above
  • Arathorn 10y ago
    Matrix.org is also focused in the same domain (and could be considered more mature in some respects :) (disclaimer: i work on it.)
  • EGreg 10y ago
    Have you seen our platform? We spent 5 years building it and it's also 100% backwards compatible with the Web. See my comment elsewhere in this thread about the Qbix Platform. If anyone here knows Tim Berners-Lee and can introduce us, please hit me up, that would be extremely helpful.
    • melvster 10y ago
      I hadnt, but thank you for the pointer. Please feel free to pop into the solid gitter channel. Tim is a participant when he has time. https://gitter.im/solid/chat https://gitter.im/solid/chat
      • Arathorn 10y ago
        why on earth are you using a centralised chat product for Solid?! Please at least give https://riot.im https://riot.im a go - you can bridge it straight into Gitter for people who like the gitter UI :)
        • ryukafalz 10y ago
          >why on earth are you using a decentralised chat product for Solid?! Assuming you meant centralised here? ;)
• chestnut-tree 10y ago
  A real barrier to a decentralised web is the difficulty of installing software on a server. I know that sounds really mundane and inconsequential in the broader debate about a decentralised web, but consider the following... Imagine if installing a server-side chat app, message board, project management app, or CMS were as easy as installing a desktop app. In a desktop app, it's usually one click to start the install and then, if necessary, you're guided through a few screens to complete the install. Want to uninstall? The OS (operating system) will provide a feature to manage that. Now consider how complicated installing on a server is in contrast. Upload you files to a folder or directory, enable permissions, set configurations not just for your server but also the language the program is written in - the list goes on. No wonder SaaS (Software as a Service) is thriving like never before. Who, other than technical folks, could possibly have the time, interest or inclination to set up a self-hosted solution when the barrier is so high? Perhaps some in the tech field would like to keep it that way? Would Saas be less attractive if installing a self-hosted solution was simple, easy, quick and secure? Surely an essential part of a decentralised web is that companies, organisations and individuals choose to run their own software using open protocols and data formats. But until the ease, security and simplicity of installation improves for web software, it simply won't happen on a large scale.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    Living billboard arrives to announce, drumroll please : sandstorm.io The auto updating server that you can self-host or use as a hosted service, allowing you to install and uninstall lots of applications, both free and proprietary, just by clicking the button. (No, not paid to tell this unless you count the stickers I got. And no, not perfect but still a refreshing change.)
    • CalRobert 10y ago
      Sandstorm is awesome. Of course, it would help if ISP's weren't so keen to make sure nobody actually uses the internet to make computers talk to each other, instead of just having Amazon, FB, and Google's computers talk at you.
• foobarbecue 10y ago
  It seems to me that one significant barrier is that most people don't have a static IP. If we can move to IPv6, will ISPs start issuing static IPs for everyone by default?
  • api 10y ago
    Not having a static ipv4 ip is not a show stopper. Nat traversal works fine across most carrier grade nats. I agree that ipv6 helps.
  • pitay 10y ago
    Doesn't dynamic DNS solve this problem? I have used that for a service on a home server set up for friends. I haven't had any connectivity problems using the dynamic DNS address, although, to be fair my dynamic IP address has stayed remarkably static.
    • foobarbecue 10y ago
      It does, but it's a hacky workaround and fails sooner or later unless you're using a paid service.
  • newscracker 10y ago
    A static IP brings along privacy and tracking concerns when public facing servers/services are mixed with personal browsing and use. Even if ISPs are handing out IPv6 addresses, it would be better for people to get addresses that do change often or on demand.
    • p1mrx 10y ago
      You can't reasonably expect ISPs to provide anonymity; that would be like asking the Post Office to change your mailing address on demand. It makes more sense for ISPs to focus on efficient delivery, while anonymity is handled by things like overlay networks.
• dredmorbius 10y ago
  Successfully attacking this problem means progress on numerous fronts: technology, connectivity, bog-simple configuration and operation, recoverability from user or system/hardware errors. Whittling these down over time may work. Most significantly, hardware costs are not presently constraining, limitations lie elsewhere. Google and Facebook's advertising support strongly tend to centralisation. Kicking the legs of advertising out from under the stool of publishing might be a means of attacking that particular tendency, which would make a more distributed technical model much more viable. There's the question of just how distributed you'd want a system to be. There are problems at both low and high levels of centralisation. A fully decentralised model might have a tendency to go rogue, or be subject to petty dictators. It's been interesting to note that even a well-capitalised entity such as the NSA is reported to prioritise specific and generally small values -- single-digit, often single-hand -- of systems for specific attack and interest. There's an argument to be made that strategically weak targets, such as the perennially troubled Yahoo, headed by the morally compromised Ms. Meyer, can be made to crumble where a more commercially robust firm, say, Google, Apple, or Facebook, would be willing to resist. I'm mindful of this. There's some reason to believe that perhaps a suite of Free Software alternatives would offer more robust installations, and compromises would impose high workfactors, for any given would-be surveillor. The question of creating systems by which data exfiltrations might be more readily detected is another area for exploration. Going back to the publishing world, there's a long-standing practice of including intentionally fictitious entries within compilations, maps, etc., whose observation in the wild would indicate copying. This might be worth pursuing on a formal basis, particularly through such indicators as financial accounts, email or communications addresses, URLs, etc., extant as canaries which would reveal a data breach. A huge problem for any widely distributed infrastructure is maintenance and administration. I'm reluctantly concluding that a world in which individuals and households host and administer their own personal data servers isn't viable. I'm not abandoning all hope, but it seems a difficult problem, and one which the Internet of Shit seems determined to prove intractable. Much of this has to do with the financial underpinnings of the infotech world. As several recent authors have noted (Paul Romer, Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Mason), information-dense goods function poorly in a market-based economic system. They have numerous characteristics which make for poor price discovery and dynamics, with informational asymmetries, heavy up-front (and hence average & fixed) costs, low-to-zero marginal costs, susceptibility to low-cost copying by others (notably China, though this is a practice with ancient traditions -- see Ha-Joon Chang and Frederick List), diminishing marginal returns, long-tail support obligations, and unintended and non-evident consequences (to vendors, users, and bystanders). A few possible models for a largely-distributed personal informations ervice suggest themselves. One is the residential-server-as-utility model. Comcast has had such an offering for nearly a decade, that I'm aware of. Essentially, it's a set-top box which can take on additional responsibilities, including home automation and security functions. There are several other utility-type providers who might offer similar capabilities. There might well be ad-hoc collections of friends or neighbours. A tech-oriented person could easily provide services to hundreds or thousands of others on commodity equipment. The main limitations here are trust and discoverability. There are arguments for making email into a government-provided service, via the post office. This introduces the risks of government surveillance (already an issue with postal systems), though the protections of legislative restrictions, and public-sector union whistleblower protections, against gross abuse. The fact that physical mail delivery already ensures a brick-and-mortar point of presence in virtually any habitation means that one of the perennial problems of information technology -- establishing, asserting, and recovering identity -- can be achieved through a local visit. The early Internet spread through a set of social institutions, largely universities. These provided points of access, administration, and accountability to populations of users ranging from a few hundreds to a few tens of thousands per site at major public universities. Whilst this was not an all-encompassing level of provisioning, it is a model of access and social organisation which might be useful to draw on for a more modern implementation. Public libraries, as an alternative to universities, might offer another option. They already serve as an internet access option for a significant population. Banks, schools, major retail establishments, and religious centres might be other options. I'm not sure what exactly will work, but the dynamics I'm pointing at here involve: Technical capabilities and equipment. A very low bar, and getting lower all the time. Connectivity. Slightly more difficult, given distribution, land-use, and reliability concerns, but still generally tractable. Trust. A major factor, especially in a world of eroding social institutions and values. This plays into the dynamics of various systems providers / maintainers quite heavily. Workforce technical capabilities. Information management skills are remunerative, and could prove difficult to retain. This might change, possibly rapidly. The present market is, however, exceptionally geographically centralised. A distributed node-and-service model might allow for greater flexibility in specific node administrators and technical staff to operate in a much broader choice of areas, including those with lower housing costs than New York City or San Francisco, closer to family or hometowns, etc. I expect some de-skilling of routine obligations, but technology tends to require at least a modicum of fire-fighting capabilities, and perhaps some engineering and planning capacity as well. Identity and pseudonymity. Both matter. Balancing the risks of data disclosure with those of data loss gets complex. Principle control over data, plus remote backups, ensures against physical loss. Encryption with some model of key escrow, in which a set of parties, several with strong and vested interests in personal privacy can balance privacy against the problem of loss of specific tokens (physical or otherwise). Ease of use / access. This stuff has to be bog-fucking-simple to provision, deploy, and maintain. Copyright and copyright compliance. Ultimately, my view is that we're going to have to recognise that attempts to re-bottle the genie, and provide centralised or authorial control over reproductions is doomed. Information-as-public-good strikes me as increasingly inevitable. (Which isn't the same as "inevitable", though it's getting warmer.) Misbehaviour. People can be asshats. Another reason for forms of key escrow and the like is to allow specific access to specific individuals' information in specific instances, subject to very strong controls. Search. Traditionally this has relied heavily on data-center based operations. There are distributed alternatives, but none I've seen are particularly adept. So: yes, challenges, but the fundamental capability (hardware) is well in hand. Spitballing at approaches should eventually see something stick.
• EGreg 10y ago
  The example of GitHub they use is actually telling. Git is decentralized, so why use GitHub? The answer may be surprising: It's because social has not been decentralized. Yes, status.net existed for a while but it was just about publishing short updates. Also, a few years ago several guys from my college raised money to make Diaspora. That didn't fulfill the promise of a decentralized social web either. Bitcoin is decentralized money. Email is decentralized communication. The Web is decentralized publishing. But what about decentralized social? Ideally, it should start with the Web and enhance it. It should: + Work on every device out of the box, and take advantage of the special characteristics of each device (eg mobile phones are private to the user, and work as endpoints for text message invitations with auto-confirming links https://qbix.com/platform/features/invitations https://qbix.com/platform/features/invitations ) + Be as easy to install as WordPress by organizations, who can choose the hosting provider to grow their community, and be able to move it anytime + Seamlessly support user identity AND contact lists across domains. Be able to sync with personal address books, social network friend lists, etc.(https://qbix.com/platform/features https://qbix.com/platform/features) + Seamlessly support a standardized access control model, ideally where roles correspond to contact groups or friend lists. (https://qbix.com/platform/features/contacts https://qbix.com/platform/features/contacts) + Be modular, so developers working for organizations can easily use components, developed and maintained by different developers, in the organization's social apps. + Allow people to subscribe to certain streams of information. Take care of real time updates via WebSockets for online users while delivering offline notifications for people who subscribed, via text, email or native notifications. (https://qbix.com/platform/features/streams https://qbix.com/platform/features/streams) + If done correctly, such a system would decentralize search engines and social networking sites, allowing local communities to get massive value from being networked without having to send all their signals to California and back, or connect to Facebook's "web for India" or "web for Africa" just to organnize meetings or talk to someone next door. (https://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed https://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed) That is what we built. And we are slowly rolling it out. And it's free and open source. You can downoad it right now and play with it: http://qbix.com/platform http://qbix.com/platform (It took us about 5 years to make it, so some screenshots are a bit dated.) If anyone here knows Tim Berners-Lee and can introduce us, that would be extremely helpful.
  • 10y ago
• ommunist 10y ago
  May be yes, may be no. It really depends from who owns agenda of decentralizing the web.
• Gys 10y ago
  To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want. So they do not feel a need for getting the 'power back'. It all comes down to perceived (!) value. Once people use one thing, they will only switch if something else offers a clear higher value. At that point offering the same value is not enough anymore. This higher value has to be something that makes every day life in a very obvious way a little better. I am afraid something abstract like 'more power' will not do the trick.
  • EGreg 10y ago
    That also explains to libertarians why people like "The State". They don't necessarily feel they need to decentralize everything. But the real reason is, it just hasn't become convenient yet. One day, each community will run its own open-source software that will manage local taxes and services without having to wait for Big Government to do it.
    • lrem 10y ago
      The trend in private (as in commercial, non profit etc) internet is exactly opposite. Why do you expect the public (as in state) to be different?
      • EGreg 10y ago
        Because as I said, trends are largely a function of available technology. There is a reason we put up with long DMV lines and mailed everything with USPS, until the web eventually moves all that stuff online.
  • gtirloni 10y ago
    The public zeitgeist is finally catching up with the realisation that being entirely dependent on massive siloed community platforms is not entirely in the users’ best interests I see zero evidence this happening.
    • api 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• infodroid 10y ago
  Decentralized services have not been able to compete with their walled garden counterparts due to lack of resources and access to capital, as well as the coordination costs of federation. It's a structural and not a technical problem. I can't see how this will ever change. Most decentralized services are open source projects maintained by volunteer developers. They are competing with centralized commercial projects with deep pockets and the ability to hire not only smart developers but also artists, testers, sysadmins, designers, marketers, researchers, and project managers - some of the things you need to deliver a best-in-class service to users. The odds are stacked against the decentralized service from the beginning. Even when these projects attract commercial interest, such as Dat or Ethereum named in the article, it is not clear how their funding will be sustainable given that decentralized platforms are more difficult to monetize than centralized ones. And it's really hard to see Github as a "posterchild" for the decentralized web, since it is really a centralized service.
  • sukilot 10y ago
    It has to use the existing gardens as scaffolding: embrace , extend, extinguish. Your new service has to interoperate/sync with Facebook (using screenscraping or API) in order to access your friends and feed, and then it's up to the users to choose to migrate, edge by edge, to the alternate network.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • walterbell 10y ago
      Yes on incremental migration, e.g. the IndieWeb community targets content creators, allowing them to syndicate from decentralized to centralized, so that the content system of record and ownership is under the creator's control.
  • JohnStrange 10y ago
    I don't think so. Decentralized services never took off very much because of tremendous technical difficulties with reliable NAT traversal/hole punching. Companies like Skype spent unbelievable efforts to get around these problems and kept them a closely guarded secret. There are a few more libraries now, but it's still surprisingly difficult to achieve reliable p2p connectivity without some external, centralized server to get the process started. This in combination with a few other problems with ISPs, slow upload speeds and the "intellectual property" watchdogs prevented 1-click installation. Without extremely easy and fast setup that even the dumbest person can manage, no software will achieve wide popularity. Shareware authors have already realized this in the 90s and this hasn't changed since then. So my verdict is: technical reasons, mostly, although I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there were some "dark forces" behind them in some countries. Genuine P2P has always scared the shit out of traditional companies and politicians.
• hhnn 10y ago
  It's nice, how alive and kicking IRC still is. If you are into startups, there is a channel called #startups on freenode that has a lot of likeminded people.
• userbinator 10y ago
  Does anyone remember the "decentralized web" of the early 2000s? Varous P2P protocols existed that allowed everyone to share content freely, and they did. Content that was not even originally in digital form was digitised and nothing but a search away. It was amazing. The copyright/media industry didn't like that. Security paranoia (possibly assisted by the industry) also heightened its demise. I really do hope we see another "rise of P2P", but there seems to be strong commercial interests against it. (Bitcoin itself is rather commercial in nature, as it deals specifically with currency.)
  • Swizec 10y ago
    There were downsides too. Getting memes from eMule was great, but imgur is so much easier.
  • oldmanjay 10y ago
    Are you of the opinion that p2p piracy has somehow gone away? I do have to question the notion that free entertainment is what empowers people, but I suppose it isn't the stupidest attempt at justifying piracy I've ever read.
    • userbinator 10y ago
      Are you of the opinion that p2p piracy has somehow gone away? It hasn't, but it's far diminished than what it used to be. I do have to question the notion that free entertainment is what empowers people, but I suppose it isn't the stupidest attempt at justifying piracy I've ever read. Not only entertainment, but information in general. Various books and journals, some of which you probably wouldn't even be able to buy a physical copy of, obscure software, etc. "Knowledge is power." Piracy isn't just movies and music...
      • oldmanjay 10y ago
        > Piracy isn't just movies and music You're right, of course, but this is one of those situations where 99% of cases ruined it for the rest. And I would argue heavily that p2p is diminished in any way. I don't have anything to do with the piracy subculture and it took me under 5 minutes to find torrents of current movies, tv shows, and albums.
• jamesbercegay 10y ago
  Decentralized web would not work for nation state type attacks. They have too many resources. They could dilute and attack it seems.
• jamesbercegay 10y ago
  Decentralized web would not work for nation state type attacks. They have too many resources. They could dilute and attack it seems.
• erikb 10y ago
  The internet is decentralized. The thing is that you need to get the data from person A to person B. And neither A nor B can alone afford the infrastructure to enable that.
• bogomipz 10y ago
  In my opinion one of the disturbing trends increasingly presenting a "usability" issue is the insistence of sites putting content behind a login wall, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Glasdoor etc. Some of these make a subset of content viewable but then prohibit me from scrolling further until I sign up. Usually the sign up requires selecting one of FB, Google, et al as an Oauth provider. So by extension you kind of have centralized control of third party content as well.
• zer0gravity 10y ago
  So nobody can "give the power back" to anybody, but people can stop giving their power away to others. We all have power, and we manifest it through our actions and choices. Some say knowledge is power, but in order to gain knowledge you have to make that choice. One can try to educate people about the benefits of hosting their own data, but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing. I tend to agree with others that posted here, that in general, people are just not interested. It may be too hard for them to grasp the real implications of giving all those informations about them to third parties.. They may also consider that it's too hard to handle all those problems by themselves so they're willing to pay the prices... I don't think that the change can happen unless the people who do understand, do something about it, but usually these people are more interested to cash in on the ignorance of those who don't...
  • benevol 10y ago
    > but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing And when do we usually listen? When we feel the pain. Which is why we'll probably have to feel the pain of authoritarian governments in the near future, to gain enough understanding, before we can make that transition to a better humanity. I just hope this painful transition won't take too long.
  • dsacco 10y ago
    >>I tend to agree with others that posted here, that in general, people are just not interested. It may be too hard for them to grasp the real implications of giving all those informations about them to third parties.. They may also consider that it's too hard to handle all those problems by themselves so they're willing to pay the prices... It's true that many users who give away their data are not cognizant of the consequences, and there are others who understand but do it reluctantly because of peer pressure or usability. But there's a huge swath of people who fully understand the privacy implications of giving away all their data in exchange for the products they use daily, and they're perfectly happy with the deal. They're not as vocal as the zeitgeist here on HN, and they're not irrational, naive or helpless; they just have a different set of values. I agree with you that people who care deeply about this issue have the power to change it through focused, collective effort (even if that means supporting open alternatives, like DuckDuckGo). However, I disagree with your characterization of people who willingly support this as being predominantly exploitive.
• milansuk 10y ago
  I think that article is missing one important thing. "Web 3.0" needs a killer app! Something which is not simple to duplicate in current centralized web and still It's very attractive to web users.
  • 1propionyl 10y ago
    It still pains me to see that Mozilla Persona failed.
    • newscracker 10y ago
      It was terrible to see that happen, but it looks like getting out of silos built by the likes of Google, Facebook, etc., is becoming more difficult with time. If something has to be built, it has to be done by common people. There's no point looking at large corporates for these.
    • chriswarbo 10y ago
      I see a lot of HNers lamenting the loss of persona. The code's available, so what's the major issue preventing its continued use? Is it the use of de facto addresses, like the fallback login.persona.org? Couldn't that be mitigated by either establishing a new de facto standard (either commercial or community run), or by adding a fallback field to the protocol?
• ommunist 10y ago
  Ehm... how can you decentralise backbone services, that can do anything to your ISP if it does not comply. Say, tomorrow as a counter-terrorist measure, your ISP will be enforced to close all encrypted p2p traffic, you won't be able to do anything to circumvent top level traffic control policies.
• ommunist 10y ago
  The only real way to 'give power to people' and 'decentralize' is to run your own ISP and launch your own satellite, and to negotiate gating your uplink to those forever centralized, otherwise your free netizens will only be able to ping each other within your enclave. And, if I may ask, what shall you do as 'free ISP' without IP addresses, huh? Like Agent Smith told Neo:"What good is in phone call if you are unable to speak?"
• 1propionyl 10y ago
  It would really be interesting to see something like a "personal SOLID server" that runs on your phone, and is reachable in IPv6 only (or through tunneling via "DNS for people", replacing phonebooks conceptually and handled as a separate distributed service). The biggest obstacle to running a personal server is that it must always be on, and always be connected. Using cell phones (which certainly have the capacity for most individuals) would make that easy, and also refocuses "my data" into a physical concept. When you used to unplug your phone, the entry in the phonebook would fail. Now, when you turn off your phone, you "go dark" in the truest sense. It would be very easy to have a secondary battery that powers a low power coprocessor optimized for this task so that even when your phone dies, the server lasts a while longer (say 48 hours?). I think ultimately if we're going to live in a world of personal data ownership in the truest sense, our data must be something tangible we can carry with us (and that isn't an extra thing to carry). Of course, you'd want to back up that server config and your data, so there would be monetized services for that. Celebrities and business owners would have substantially more traffic or need to be online all the time, and as a result would need to actually pay for hosting and maintenance as a function of their utility. This introduces yet another market. And throughout this whole system, you are now explicitly trusting your data as an object to a company for their services. You are not participating on their platform while they farm your interactions. Any thoughts or criticisms?
  • unexistance 10y ago
    exactly what I had in mind, as most of user's 'smart' phone capability are under-utilized, so it's not a problem of hardware / software / usability, it's more to make it appealing for user to adopt, which is the hard problem since forever :p
• stevewilhelm 10y ago
  In my experience, one of the largest hurdles decentralization faces is agent identity. Or simply put, how do you determine who is who on the network. The original Internet failed to address this problem. The successful solutions I have seen to this issue have employed centralization. SSL certificates from Verisign and login with Google Sign In so consumers can trust your website. Don't confuse this with distributed authentication. They exist , but I would say difficult to use. I am talking about identity.
  • LukeB42 10y ago
    Does this contact come back with the same public RSA key each time? Could they sign a small piece of data with the key? It probably [is/isn't] them, then. In Synchrony[1] this forms your address (like an email address but for editing web pages / chat / RTC teleconferencing / multi-user JS/WebAssembly applications), which contacts can then put a name to in the UI by mousing over. The address has the form network_name/node_id/user_id, where network_name is an opt-in namespace (so Synchrony can select routing tables based on their overall trustworthiness), node_id is 160 bits based on the SHA1 of "ip:port:pubkey" which peer nodes can then verify, preventing one another from assuming node IDs that correspond to popular URLs, so no one can computationally inexpensively monitor popular URLs for financial gain[2]. Note that the RSA keypair is per-instance of the software and not per user-identity - that when we ask a node if it can sign for some data it's the installation rather than the individual user identity being checked. [1] https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony [2] http://www.tm.uka.de/doc/SKademlia_2007.pdf http://www.tm.uka.de/doc/SKademlia_2007.pdf
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      Keypairs are not useful identities though. They don't encode any meaningful attributes (e.g. name) and it's too hard to manage them.
• LukeB42 10y ago
  Here's a decentralised caching proxy I made earlier this year: https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony Future plans include a C port (already in the works) and dialing down on the contacts API to bootstrap a three.js CAD tool.
• applecore 10y ago
  If Twitter led the charge to decentralize the web, starting with their chief product, I believe the company would be worth 10-100x more than it is now (i.e., a market capitalization between $100B and $1T).
  • newscracker 10y ago
    Can you explain what they could do or how they would do it?
• avadhoot 10y ago
  Isn't that what blockchain is trying to achieve?
• Animats 10y ago
  So far, nobody has a federated social network that 1) doesn't suck, and 2) has a worthwhile user base. Someone in college should take one of the federated systems, polish it up, and market it to fraternities and sororities at name schools as FratNet. This would give all the cool kids a private social network that they controlled.
  • stevewilhelm 10y ago
    Networks don't tend to stay siloed. Very quickly members move on to graduate schools and then jobs. The social network boundaries expand beyond their original fraternities and sororities. You end up with one large social network.
    • Animats 10y ago
      That's the point. As Zuckerberg taught us, you have to onboard the cool kids first. Then you grow. The federated network people don't get this.
• wineisfine 10y ago
  We should not be worried about chat apps, but rather the cancer that is called Facebook
• Paul-ish 10y ago
  One area that may be ripe for the picking is video chat, as this article starts out describing. I think everyone is sick of having half a different applications to talk to their friend. Why can't this be a protocol like email? I think the technologies exist and have existed for a long time; RTC, SIP, ICE, etc... The hurdles are social and political.
• skybrian 10y ago
  The problem with this plan is that it doesn't really tackle the first rule of the Internet: spam and abuse make everything suck. The last really popular decentralized service was email, and users migrated to large providers because they had better spam filters. Also, setting up your own mail server has become increasingly difficult, due in part to anti-spam measures. As a side effect, email has become pretty lossy. Centralized services are far from perfect on this, but they have a somewhat easier time of it. They can fund dedicated teams to deal with abuse. So, the result is feudalism, where you join a larger organization that provides some measure of protection. (Not enough protection, according to many people.) I'm hopeful that Sandstorm (or something like it) will make it easier for people to run their own server-side software, but it seems more for private use; you can publish a blog but it's not designed for large-scale sharing like a social network. That still seems like an unsolved problem.
  • educar 10y ago
    There are many other players in this space - yunohost.org, cloudron.io etc. https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted has a better list
  • inimino 10y ago
    I don't think that's the problem with these plans. Imagine that email didn't exist, and you were designing it from scratch. There are many easy solutions to the spam problem if you start with a clean slate. The problem is that nobody would ever adopt email today if it was new. More recent decentralized solutions haven't failed because of spam, but through lack of adoption.
• j2kun 10y ago
  In addition to spam/abuse and the difficulty of setting up a server, another area of centralization that hasn't yet been solved is payments. If we want a truly decentralized web, we need a way for computers to posses and spend money without human intervention. This compounds the difficult of spam/abuse and server setup, but is still a huge factor in why the web is the way it is today.
• greenyouse 10y ago
  The is awesome! I hope they're able to bring their vision of a decentralized web to fruition! The biggest outstanding problem that nobody seems to be talking about though is how to monetize a decentralized business. With the current web there are lots of options that have varying degrees of nastiness for their users but ultimately pay developer salaries: 3rd party ads, IP/API licensing, pay for product, data collection, in-app purchases, e-commerce, etc. Since not all of these carry over well to a decentralized web, how can it be profitable for companies? The problem of building a generic, distributed platform (or at least some technology for decentralized services) probably comes first but putting money behind its development couldn't hurt. I think if engineers won't be able to make money with it, then it will be much harder to sustain development in the long run. Any ideas for this part?
  • alecco 10y ago
    There's no need to monetize user generated content. That's what these companies do. They make people generate content for them for free and use it to sell ads while creating an orwellian dystopia.
    • greenyouse 10y ago
      I wasn't really suggesting that businesses keep using the same web 2.0 models. Just fishing for ideas for the distributed web. If teams are actually going to commit thousands or millions of work hours into making products, then there should be a way for them to be rewarded for their job. Making money isn't inherently evil, but making it at the users' expense is. idk, there could be client-side Bitcoin mining if somehow you can find a breakthrough mining algorithm (maybe using Algebraic Cryptography or Satisfiability Theory) that runs an order of magnitude faster than current and users are OK with running it. e-commerce could have some kind of payment system with escrow where you could charge a small operating tax. Hard to ensure everything works though since all code is running client-side, which can't be trusted. pay per download probably still works. others? I agree that ads, tracking, IAP, and other stuff should be left out. It's weird to think about services which as the creator you really have no control over once it's released (I'm thinking of Freenet or GNU social style services). There aren't any services that I know of which are both 100% distributed and making money on the regular. Not really well thought out ideas, just putting stuff out there.
• Animats 10y ago
  We need handset-to-handset encrypted communication without a server. How good is IPv6 inbound connectivity?
• amelius 10y ago
  I think the European union should fund the research and development of a decentralized web. Because right now all their information is flowing to the US.
  • njharman 10y ago
    Decentralization won't stop information flowing to the US. We'll just have to buy additional peerage points. Our budget and desire to spy on the world is greater than the world's resolve to not be spied on.
• drivingmenuts 10y ago
  All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Decentralizing will be great until people realize that they need access to information outside their enclaves, then there will be another push for centralization. Additionally, who are these People the author writes about? All of the tools cited, while freely available to anyone, are geared toward power users in installation and operation. That doesn't sound like "The People" to me; it sounds more like an elite group (although a pretty large and diverse elite group, within itself). If all you're going to do is stand by the highway and wave signs and shout slogans, I wish you well with that plan but I don't think it's going to work. The people you're opposing (who are actually people, too) have got better and more convincing arguments, as well as positive results that matter to their customers.
• z3t4 10y ago
  Many people think Facebook is the web, just like people think the web is the Internet. I'm sure both web and Internet will outlive Facebook though. Facebook have introduced a lot of new people to the web/Internet. It's just a matter of time though, until those people discover that there's more, like Youtube for example.
• hkt 10y ago
  This remains a bit of a silly argument. It is like saying we can wipe out poverty if only more people were able to get rich: the way that people progress is through collective provision. That means the state, or associations of people who value privacy (who may not all be technically savvy!) who can pool their resources and offer something normal people can use. This, unlike the decentralised web, could engender the same kind of network effect that whatsapp and facebook benefit from. I've written about this and heard more people make the same argument lately: it isn't technology that will bring about privacy on the internet, but a democratic organisation, founded by concerned citizens, governed by anyone who has an interest in promoting privacy and run on behalf of anyone who wants to benefit from it. There are a lot of benefits to this approach: you lose the engineering challenges of VC backed companies (no data mining operation) and of cyberpunks setting out to let everyone be their own little island (protocols and amateur operators). Jurisdictions can offer different advantages, like company forms with regulated purposes written into their founding documents, or more favourable privacy laws. Off the shelf software can scale all the way that is required for this sort of thing (think apache kafka as the basis for a messaging system like WhatsApp) and the organisation would only have to be financially sustainable like Mozilla, rather than profitable like Facebook. It also puts privacy into the hands of normal people, who can take part in governance and protect their data that way, rather than having to learn techie things they don't care about. Talking about the decentralised web is great, but we often forget what motivates people to want to decentralise in the first place: the fact that their desires are not something the market can cater for, and that what they believe should be their right is simply not available any other way. If we want privacy, we should think about all the means by which we can provide it in the general case, including by collectively owning the means of communication.
  • jamez1 10y ago
    Where does the world wide web fit into your model of the world? (it didn't need "collective provision") All the article proposes is that we don't have our data locked up, that it's not centralized, so that we have control. This is a pretty simply concept I think you're the only one here who is confused. Your comparison to poverty doesn't make sense, privacy isn't constrained by resources.
• shmerl 10y ago
  Also, interoperaibilty. The major problem of all these major services is not just centralization, but the fact that they can't even communicate with each other. Their stupid walled garden nature and the fact that they on purpose avoid open standards prevents it. That's what disgusts me the most about Whatsapp, Hangouts, Skype and etc. They are stuck in the non interoperable stone age of computing, while e-mail, much older technology managed to break through years ago as federated and interoperable standard.
• oconnor663 10y ago
  https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ > We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that's how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s. > That has taken us pretty far, but it's undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don't fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving. > Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today.
• partycoder 10y ago
  Well, initially the web was a fantastic place to be. People used the web for entertainment and people used to trust people online. Every website was unique and handcrafted. Then, as evil started going online in the form of harassment, fraud, scams, spreading malware... people started to be reluctant of following any link, and people started to seek for "trusted websites". In addition, people gave away the ability of customizing webpages in return for searching people by name, real time cross platform publishing, and photo sharing with access control lists.
• otempomores 10y ago
  Actually if you gave people acomfortable centralized tool to admit and withhold data and rights to entitys by groups across all devices.. Decentralization would be there
• tofupup 10y ago
  neat
• tango12 10y ago
  What kinds of business models will decentralized applications have? Any good examples? A decentralized web seems like a logical next-step. Although, it's hard for it to happen just by developer power alone. Once viable business models and success stories emerge around decentralized applications (like ads on P2P file sharing client?), IMO, this will really pick up steam.
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