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(Premise: I love decentralized systems.) > A decentralized web would be vastly more efficient in terms of resources. A lot of the data could be deduplicated a

by gioele 10y ago

(Premise: I love decentralized systems.) > A decentralized web would be vastly more efficient in terms of resources. A lot of the data could be deduplicated and a lot of backbone traffic could be avoided. Decentralization usually brings more duplication of data. Think of email: copies of the same email are redundantly stored in many servers. And this is what we want. I have received the email, I decide if and when to delete it. Or Bitcoin. It is "decentralized", but if you want to run a normal client an be part of the federation you will need to spare quite a bit of disk space to store the exact same 90GB that comprise the blockchain. > Right now, if a dozen people around a block watch the same viral video, all of them will fetch it through the backbone, which is obviously wasteful. If they want to store the video for later, they will have a dozen copies wasting space on their drives, which could again be reduced by more efficient algorithms (eg. erasure codes). At the same time we do not want people to know that we are watching this video. We can get that video from our neighbors only if the ID of the video leaks somehow (if you reply "TOR", I will answer "exit nodes know"). But that is just a side problem. The main problem is dynamic content. Almost all my open browser windows contain pages that are generated "just for me" (github, gitlab, travis, HN, a work-related 2TB ownclound installation, amazon, google search, ...). These are the pages I care about, and, sadly, these are the pages that are most difficult to decentralize in acceptable ways. Actually some of them are meant to be centralized (amazon or google search, for example). I'd love to see more decentralized or semi-decentralized services (planets and their OPML files are great, for instance), but one has to admit that some problems just ask for centralization. PS: weird, I had to write "google search" instead of "google". Using just the word "google" felt somehow wrong. Brand dilution, I suppose.

icebraining 10y ago
Tor actually only uses exit nodes if you want to connect to the regular web, if you fetch a video from a .onion address the encryption is end-to-end. And there's also Freenet. Github/Lab and HN actually seem pretty easy to decentralize - git already is, and the rest are essentially feeds, much like email/newsgroups/RSS/FMS. It's mostly a matter of running the aggregation code in the client, rather than on the server. Google can also be decentralized and federated - see YaCy. Amazon, there wouldn't be much point, since the service would still be contracted with a single party. It's not a trivial job (in the "I could do that in a weekend"), but it doesn't seem architecturally hard considering the existing distributed platforms.
the8472 10y ago
> Decentralization usually brings more duplication of data. While this is true this could be vastly reduced if the internet supported source-specific IP multicast (SSM). That way even a small box in someone's basement hosting a single copy of some niche content could serve thousands worldwide. Alas, multicast is hard and incentives are not in favor of making it available to the end-user even in limited scopes.

by gioele 10y ago

icebraining 10y ago

Tor actually only uses exit nodes if you want to connect to the regular web, if you fetch a video from a .onion address the encryption is end-to-end. And there's also Freenet. Github/Lab and HN actually seem pretty easy to decentralize - git already is, and the rest are essentially feeds, much like email/newsgroups/RSS/FMS. It's mostly a matter of running the aggregation code in the client, rather than on the server. Google can also be decentralized and federated - see YaCy. Amazon, there wouldn't be much point, since the service would still be contracted with a single party. It's not a trivial job (in the "I could do that in a weekend"), but it doesn't seem architecturally hard considering the existing distributed platforms.

the8472 10y ago

> Decentralization usually brings more duplication of data. While this is true this could be vastly reduced if the internet supported source-specific IP multicast (SSM). That way even a small box in someone's basement hosting a single copy of some niche content could serve thousands worldwide. Alas, multicast is hard and incentives are not in favor of making it available to the end-user even in limited scopes.