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I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. That the current web is centralized has little to do with its te

I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. That the current web is centralized has little to do with its technical design, and everything to do with economic and structural incentives that have made it that way. It's tempting to say "start afresh", but we'll just be trading our current problems for a new set of problems IPFS introduces. It's a law of nature that problems are always conserved. I would rather we do the hard work of fixing the web we've got, in particular the hard issue of how to re-decentralize it.

kirubakaran 10y ago
What do you suggest?
- idlewords 10y ago
  There's the million-dollar question. I've been bashing my head against it for a few years now. I think an important thing is to give everyone a say in how these large computer networks affect their lives. How to do that in the context of a broken political system isn't clear to me at all.
  - hkt 10y ago
    The solution does not have to be technical. If you want to restore control to as wide a group as possible, start by running a centralised service with a membership structure. Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff, but almost everyone can use a website or an app. Allowing them a role in governance rather than operations is the key factor. I wish more people thought so.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      > "Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff" It's possible to make home servers easy enough to use they're effectively plug and play. I've got my own ideas of how this can be done, others have different ideas, but the goal of easy home server infrastructure is the same. Once you have that, it becomes painless to take part in IPFS or similar.
      - loulouxiv 10y ago
        I used to think that home servers could be the best solution, but I see more and more obstacles in the way of adoption. First, even if you can create a plug and play home server box, it will still need some configuration to make it available from the internet, which while very obvious to anyone a bit techie can be difficult to even explain in layman's terms. Secondly, it is not clear if there is an acceptable solution to security issues. In such a system that by design will be accessible from the internet, this a major problem. Auto updates could be part of the answer, but it seems that human intervention would still be needed from time to time and that imply an effort of the user to keep informed and aware of such operations. Or an entity could offer a remote administration service but that would displace entirely control of the system and create a single point of failure. At that point you might as well have that entity administer a single server used for a moderate number of people. If this entity is a non-profit where governance is shared between all members it could very well be an ideal solution. In France the "association loi 1901" legal structure is a good fit and is known and understood by the vast majority of the population.
        ZenoArrow 10y ago
        > "First, even if you can create a plug and play home server box, it will still need some configuration to make it available from the internet" Will it? The device I had in mind would plug directly into a router, occupying two LAN ports for connectivity, and one USB port for power (USB ports are increasingly common on routers these days, even the free ones ISPs give out). In addition, IPv6 removes the need for NAT and port forwarding. The device could even come with a default DNS name setup, so it could be literally plug and play. > "Secondly, it is not clear if there is an acceptable solution to security issues." You build the security into the device, e.g. firewalls and process isolation. You could also design the device so that flashing new firmware required a physical button on the device to be pressed to enable this feature for a short period of time, limiting the window of opportunity for the device to be infected with malware. > "Auto updates could be part of the answer, but it seems that human intervention would still be needed from time to time and that imply an effort of the user to keep informed and aware of such operations." Information about security updates could be done via email or SMS, which are both easy enough for mass market users. You would enter these details at the point of purchasing the device, so you'd have nothing extra to setup once you had it. If you had to update your contact details, this would be easy enough to set via the home server GUI.
  - th-ai 10y ago
    Any bashing on Named Data Networking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking Rather than the system getting less reliable exponentially as it scales up, it gets more reliable exponentially as it scales up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=1667 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=1667 Integrity and trust are properties of the data; not of the way that you obtain it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 There's no routing. You get rid of all of the routing chatter. You get rid of all of the routing brittleness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLGzGK4c-ws&t=5071 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLGzGK4c-ws&t=5071 We wanted to turn around the incentive structure where right now senders have a lot of power and receivers have basically nothing, they have to eat what they're fed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=23890 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=23890
    - tangent128 10y ago
      IPFS is, more or less, an implementation of Named Data Networking.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    You are clearly fond of democracy as a solution to conflicting social goals. Democracy has some nice properties, but also downsides: notably it can only try a single solution at a time. The idea behind decentralized architecture is: instead of trying to find a better way to agree on one thing, how about we assume from the start that different people will want different things? What do we actually need to agree on? In the old days we had to agree on everything, because it was technologically infeasible to coordinate plans more than a few times per year. If you need to move bodies to communicate, democracy is what happens. But we live in a new time where messaging is close to free, so we don't have to agree on everything ahead of time. In a totally decentralized world, we wouldn't have to agree on anything ahead of time. I would meet you in the forest and our respective AIs would go to work helping us quickly and safely negotiate an entire legal framework and set of treaties governing our interactions. I don't think we will ever get there, I think it will always be a mixture of decentralized and centralized norms. But right now the decentralized architecture is brand new, so it has a huge headroom for growth, so it just makes more sense putting effort into it.
    - idlewords 10y ago
      This image of AIs in the forest is really arresting. It reminds me of something Joi Ito said recently about us nerdles all trying to pass the thorny problems of living with one another as human beings up to a higher intelligence, which is a way of reducing them to (the world's hardest) programming problem. I imagine that our AI companions in the forest would just play hyperdimensional space chess with one another, or talk shop about how best to make paper clips, and leave us in the same position we are now. They'll have their own cares and woes. I don't know if in 2016 I'm a big believer in democracy, but I do believe in community, particularly now that everyone regardless of technical ability is using the web. That said, I think you make a very good point about variety and trying multiple avenues at once.
      - erikpukinskis 10y ago
        I'm not talking about autonomous AIs, I'm talking about controllable AIs. And I absolutely don't consider it a programming problem. You'll notice I said they will help us negotiate, not negotiate on our behalf. It is a design challenge, which makes it partly a social problem and partly and engineering problem.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    You and me both, brat. I'm slowly realising a fundamental truth of economics: whatever it is you're making cheaper, you're going to have one hell of a lot more of. And as you increase the quantity, you'll start bumping into limiting factors elsewhere. E.g., cheaper transport => far more congestion. Cheaper communications => more advertising. Cheaper storage => vastly more surveillance and monitoring. Cheaper telecoms => vastly more phone solicitations and scams. There's the question of what people really need to access -- and here I think it's key to go back to Maslow's Hierarchy. And to acknowledge our human limitations of information capacity per day. Several sources I've seen (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest about 150 - 300 email messages/day, and something less than even a cursory glance at 800 comments (The New York Times's comments moderation team). How do you provide a manageable and significant set of information to people? I've also started noting that our-so-called discussion systems themselves (Slashdot, Facebook, Reddit, even HN) are pretty poor at self-supporting useful user feedback. Almost as if that's not their true function.
viraptor 10y ago
I think there are multiple issues in many contexts wrt decentralised net. You probably won't require Facebook or Twitter for many reasons. There's both a social and tech issue. But there are some things that mirroring and content addressing would be perfect for. Replacement for the current script and files CDN for example. Package/software repos, firmware downloads, news sites, etc. Anything accessed by lots of people and not updated every second. And there's also the location context. If you live on the west coast US, maybe it doesn't matter. But if half of the web traffic could move to ipfs, Australia for example should get an amazing speed increase by unblocking the big pipes.
- kveykva 10y ago
  I've recently had issues accessing most CDNs from inside of China without a VPN, accessing directly doesn't have this issue. So maybe IPFS could help there as well.
jcoffland 10y ago
> in particular the hard issue of how to re-decentralize it. Isn't that exactly the problem ipfs is attempting to address. What kind of solution do you want and why does this one not work for you? It's easier to discard someone else's idea than it is to evaluate it's merits. I'm not sure this is the solution but it looks interesting and it appears to interoperate with the existing Web via gateways even though the author does not make this clear early on in the documentation.
- idlewords 10y ago
  I'm not trying to pee all over IPFS. But it's also the case that it's easier to throw out mature, crufty old systems and start afresh. Every programmer knows this temptation. We've had the web for twenty years now, and are just beginning to understand what it is and how it changes the world. If you're suggesting using IPFS (or any other system) as a way to expand and grow the web, I'm with you. But replacing the web means throwing out a lot of hard-won experience and intuition, in favor of a system that's bound to have its own issues down the line.
  - raarts 10y ago
    This line of reasoning can be applied to ANY change. Also HTTP isn't going away.
    - rer 10y ago
      Why isn't HTTP going away?
      - inimino 10y ago
        Because there's a lot of it.
        rer 10y ago
        Would it go away if there was less of it? Can you imagine ways there could be less of it?
riffraff 10y ago
> It's a law of nature that problems are always conserved. I'd agree that some social issues cannot be solved by technology, but many have been. E.g., without looking at the information age: in London before the Clean Air Act thousands people literally died of the smog, but the CAA was made possible only by increased availability of electricity and gas heating.
- idlewords 10y ago
  Your example is one where political and technical changes together helped solve a problem. You're literally citing a law as an example of a 'social issue solved by technology'. My point is that replacing a complex technical system with a different technical system only reshuffles the set of problems that will need solving. The social and political problems that made the web what it is today won't disappear due to a redesign.
  - hkt 10y ago
    He is actually saying that the law could only change due to technological advance. That law (if memory serves) banned burning coal, which was how people heated their homes. There had to be something that could heat their homes instead of coal, before they could be compelled to use it.
zer0gravity 10y ago
Technology may help by making it easy for people to host/share their data. But technology is driven by politics. So we kind of need both. The solution that I see, is transitioning from social media, where people use some centralized service to "socialize", to social infrastructure, where people run their own servers and connect to the servers of their friends making a real social network. IPFS may be a step in this direction.
amelius 10y ago
> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. [...] I would rather we do the hard work of fixing the web we've got There are multiple flaws in your reasoning: for one, the web was also a technical solution to a social problem; also, IPFS is someone's hard work aimed at fixing the web we've got.
- idlewords 10y ago
  The web was a technical solution to an information management problem at a physics lab.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    That was the initially scoped solution. It turned out that a lot of other actors had information management & sharing problems of a similar scope. Well before commercialisation of the Web.
FieryTransition 10y ago
Id say we need a political movement to push through a technical solution to problems like this, so I agree with you on that. But I think there is definitely space for things like IPFS. Technical solutions can give more guarantees than people can, so without it, what would we really have? Promises easily broken in the future? The problem with things like IPFS, is that they require political backing or economical incentive to really spread, otherwise they are most likely just going to remain a nice demo for a few technical people. So IMHO technology needs to go hand in hand with economical or political incentive, but how is an open question.
digi_owl 10y ago
> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. And here i was just listening to Adam Curtis talk about his latest creation, Hypernormalisation, where he touched on the issue of thinking one can solve social issues with engineering.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Can you expand on that? Or link the talk?
fizzbatter 10y ago
> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. I'm so lost at this assertion. How is this a social / political problem? IPFS is not permanent hosting. It is not an attempt to take power away from others and distribute it to the masses. It is purely a technical problem, which i think is objectively true. I have a feeling that you believe IPFS is partially designed to subvert governments/etc. And to an extent, that may be possible, but it is being built with DMCA's in mind. IPFS wants to allow governments / copyright holders to take content down from the network. It is not trying to become a pirate haven. Why? Well, mainly because piracy inhibits adoption. There may not be a way to DMCA currently (i haven't checked in months), but there are Github issue(s) on it. The creators don't want to see IPFS blocked in countries because it can permanently host illegal content. Which makes a ton of sense. The problem IPFS is trying to solve, as i see it, is purely technical. As advertised in pretty much every pitch i've seen for this technology, we are simply scaling too fast in storage and not fast enough in bandwidth. It appears impossible to handle the infrastructure load of files we are creating. IPFS solves this by automatically pulling content as locally as possible, reducing network overhead. Furthermore, it means that a DDOS/viral/etc of a central resource will not kill it. It's safely and mostly permanently (barring DMCA/etc requests) available. So with that said, what political and social problem do you see IPFS trying to solve? I don't see any.
- NeutronBoy 10y ago
  > I'm so lost at this assertion. How is this a social / political problem? How is it a technical problem? Current web technologies allow decentralised web (except for maybe root name servers). Everyone can host their own content, control their own servers, basically everything below your hostname. The implementation has led down a centralised path.
  - fizzbatter 10y ago
    > The implementation has led down a centralised path. Sure, but choosing another implementation is.. a technical choice, is it not? Are you saying that if i choose to implement a distributed method it's not technical? What is my choice then, political? Because i have no political motives.. purely technical. I want less data choking the pipes. Which is all IPFS is ultimately doing. Seems pretty technical (instead of social/political, atleast) to me. Am i missing what you were conveying?
api 10y ago
The key is economic. The cloud and SaaS have taken over largely because the cloud is DRM and because centralization creates opportunities for ad and ad-driven surveillance business models. There is merit in doing the technical work to make a decentralized paradigm easier, but the lack of an economic model is the tougher of the two problems.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There are a few other issues. One is discoverability. It's tough to find a bunch of scattered systems all over the place. That's a problem Facebook, Reddit, and HN address. Another is identity. Tracking who's doing what (and what their permissions/authorities are) over a bunch of sites is ... a pain. I'm still mulling over a comment a few days back on HN that a user had 770 different password-based identities in their accounts-management storage (personal). Search (related to the first) is a third -- spiders suck a lot of bandwidth. Unless there's some way to distribute search or allow nodes to self-report search elements (which will probably require some form of auditing). And there's administration. It's really easy create systems any idiot can use, but then, any idiot will, and DDoS Brian Krebs and Dyn. Bulletproof administration is a real pain point.
snarfy 10y ago
There are plenty of technical reasons why the web is centralized. I cannot even host a server on my residential service without violating the ToS agreement. Even if I did, there is the problem of not enough IP addresses so my IP is dynamic. This is solved with dynamic dns, etc but is another technical hurdle to overcome. And then there is NAT creating yet another layer to hosting your own server. And I won't even go into security. These are all solvable, but to say there is little to do with the technical design ignores all of the problems that led us to where we are today.

kirubakaran 10y ago

What do you suggest?

idlewords 10y ago
There's the million-dollar question. I've been bashing my head against it for a few years now. I think an important thing is to give everyone a say in how these large computer networks affect their lives. How to do that in the context of a broken political system isn't clear to me at all.
- hkt 10y ago
  The solution does not have to be technical. If you want to restore control to as wide a group as possible, start by running a centralised service with a membership structure. Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff, but almost everyone can use a website or an app. Allowing them a role in governance rather than operations is the key factor. I wish more people thought so.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff" It's possible to make home servers easy enough to use they're effectively plug and play. I've got my own ideas of how this can be done, others have different ideas, but the goal of easy home server infrastructure is the same. Once you have that, it becomes painless to take part in IPFS or similar.
    - loulouxiv 10y ago
      I used to think that home servers could be the best solution, but I see more and more obstacles in the way of adoption. First, even if you can create a plug and play home server box, it will still need some configuration to make it available from the internet, which while very obvious to anyone a bit techie can be difficult to even explain in layman's terms. Secondly, it is not clear if there is an acceptable solution to security issues. In such a system that by design will be accessible from the internet, this a major problem. Auto updates could be part of the answer, but it seems that human intervention would still be needed from time to time and that imply an effort of the user to keep informed and aware of such operations. Or an entity could offer a remote administration service but that would displace entirely control of the system and create a single point of failure. At that point you might as well have that entity administer a single server used for a moderate number of people. If this entity is a non-profit where governance is shared between all members it could very well be an ideal solution. In France the "association loi 1901" legal structure is a good fit and is known and understood by the vast majority of the population.
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        > "First, even if you can create a plug and play home server box, it will still need some configuration to make it available from the internet" Will it? The device I had in mind would plug directly into a router, occupying two LAN ports for connectivity, and one USB port for power (USB ports are increasingly common on routers these days, even the free ones ISPs give out). In addition, IPv6 removes the need for NAT and port forwarding. The device could even come with a default DNS name setup, so it could be literally plug and play. > "Secondly, it is not clear if there is an acceptable solution to security issues." You build the security into the device, e.g. firewalls and process isolation. You could also design the device so that flashing new firmware required a physical button on the device to be pressed to enable this feature for a short period of time, limiting the window of opportunity for the device to be infected with malware. > "Auto updates could be part of the answer, but it seems that human intervention would still be needed from time to time and that imply an effort of the user to keep informed and aware of such operations." Information about security updates could be done via email or SMS, which are both easy enough for mass market users. You would enter these details at the point of purchasing the device, so you'd have nothing extra to setup once you had it. If you had to update your contact details, this would be easy enough to set via the home server GUI.
- th-ai 10y ago
  Any bashing on Named Data Networking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking Rather than the system getting less reliable exponentially as it scales up, it gets more reliable exponentially as it scales up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=1667 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=1667 Integrity and trust are properties of the data; not of the way that you obtain it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 There's no routing. You get rid of all of the routing chatter. You get rid of all of the routing brittleness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLGzGK4c-ws&t=5071 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLGzGK4c-ws&t=5071 We wanted to turn around the incentive structure where right now senders have a lot of power and receivers have basically nothing, they have to eat what they're fed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=23890 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=23890
  - tangent128 10y ago
    IPFS is, more or less, an implementation of Named Data Networking.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  You are clearly fond of democracy as a solution to conflicting social goals. Democracy has some nice properties, but also downsides: notably it can only try a single solution at a time. The idea behind decentralized architecture is: instead of trying to find a better way to agree on one thing, how about we assume from the start that different people will want different things? What do we actually need to agree on? In the old days we had to agree on everything, because it was technologically infeasible to coordinate plans more than a few times per year. If you need to move bodies to communicate, democracy is what happens. But we live in a new time where messaging is close to free, so we don't have to agree on everything ahead of time. In a totally decentralized world, we wouldn't have to agree on anything ahead of time. I would meet you in the forest and our respective AIs would go to work helping us quickly and safely negotiate an entire legal framework and set of treaties governing our interactions. I don't think we will ever get there, I think it will always be a mixture of decentralized and centralized norms. But right now the decentralized architecture is brand new, so it has a huge headroom for growth, so it just makes more sense putting effort into it.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    This image of AIs in the forest is really arresting. It reminds me of something Joi Ito said recently about us nerdles all trying to pass the thorny problems of living with one another as human beings up to a higher intelligence, which is a way of reducing them to (the world's hardest) programming problem. I imagine that our AI companions in the forest would just play hyperdimensional space chess with one another, or talk shop about how best to make paper clips, and leave us in the same position we are now. They'll have their own cares and woes. I don't know if in 2016 I'm a big believer in democracy, but I do believe in community, particularly now that everyone regardless of technical ability is using the web. That said, I think you make a very good point about variety and trying multiple avenues at once.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      I'm not talking about autonomous AIs, I'm talking about controllable AIs. And I absolutely don't consider it a programming problem. You'll notice I said they will help us negotiate, not negotiate on our behalf. It is a design challenge, which makes it partly a social problem and partly and engineering problem.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  You and me both, brat. I'm slowly realising a fundamental truth of economics: whatever it is you're making cheaper, you're going to have one hell of a lot more of. And as you increase the quantity, you'll start bumping into limiting factors elsewhere. E.g., cheaper transport => far more congestion. Cheaper communications => more advertising. Cheaper storage => vastly more surveillance and monitoring. Cheaper telecoms => vastly more phone solicitations and scams. There's the question of what people really need to access -- and here I think it's key to go back to Maslow's Hierarchy. And to acknowledge our human limitations of information capacity per day. Several sources I've seen (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest about 150 - 300 email messages/day, and something less than even a cursory glance at 800 comments (The New York Times's comments moderation team). How do you provide a manageable and significant set of information to people? I've also started noting that our-so-called discussion systems themselves (Slashdot, Facebook, Reddit, even HN) are pretty poor at self-supporting useful user feedback. Almost as if that's not their true function.

viraptor 10y ago

I think there are multiple issues in many contexts wrt decentralised net. You probably won't require Facebook or Twitter for many reasons. There's both a social and tech issue. But there are some things that mirroring and content addressing would be perfect for. Replacement for the current script and files CDN for example. Package/software repos, firmware downloads, news sites, etc. Anything accessed by lots of people and not updated every second. And there's also the location context. If you live on the west coast US, maybe it doesn't matter. But if half of the web traffic could move to ipfs, Australia for example should get an amazing speed increase by unblocking the big pipes.

kveykva 10y ago
I've recently had issues accessing most CDNs from inside of China without a VPN, accessing directly doesn't have this issue. So maybe IPFS could help there as well.

jcoffland 10y ago

> in particular the hard issue of how to re-decentralize it. Isn't that exactly the problem ipfs is attempting to address. What kind of solution do you want and why does this one not work for you? It's easier to discard someone else's idea than it is to evaluate it's merits. I'm not sure this is the solution but it looks interesting and it appears to interoperate with the existing Web via gateways even though the author does not make this clear early on in the documentation.

idlewords 10y ago
I'm not trying to pee all over IPFS. But it's also the case that it's easier to throw out mature, crufty old systems and start afresh. Every programmer knows this temptation. We've had the web for twenty years now, and are just beginning to understand what it is and how it changes the world. If you're suggesting using IPFS (or any other system) as a way to expand and grow the web, I'm with you. But replacing the web means throwing out a lot of hard-won experience and intuition, in favor of a system that's bound to have its own issues down the line.
- raarts 10y ago
  This line of reasoning can be applied to ANY change. Also HTTP isn't going away.
  - rer 10y ago
    Why isn't HTTP going away?
    - inimino 10y ago
      Because there's a lot of it.
      - rer 10y ago
        Would it go away if there was less of it? Can you imagine ways there could be less of it?

riffraff 10y ago

> It's a law of nature that problems are always conserved. I'd agree that some social issues cannot be solved by technology, but many have been. E.g., without looking at the information age: in London before the Clean Air Act thousands people literally died of the smog, but the CAA was made possible only by increased availability of electricity and gas heating.

idlewords 10y ago
Your example is one where political and technical changes together helped solve a problem. You're literally citing a law as an example of a 'social issue solved by technology'. My point is that replacing a complex technical system with a different technical system only reshuffles the set of problems that will need solving. The social and political problems that made the web what it is today won't disappear due to a redesign.
- hkt 10y ago
  He is actually saying that the law could only change due to technological advance. That law (if memory serves) banned burning coal, which was how people heated their homes. There had to be something that could heat their homes instead of coal, before they could be compelled to use it.

zer0gravity 10y ago

Technology may help by making it easy for people to host/share their data. But technology is driven by politics. So we kind of need both. The solution that I see, is transitioning from social media, where people use some centralized service to "socialize", to social infrastructure, where people run their own servers and connect to the servers of their friends making a real social network. IPFS may be a step in this direction.

amelius 10y ago

> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. [...] I would rather we do the hard work of fixing the web we've got There are multiple flaws in your reasoning: for one, the web was also a technical solution to a social problem; also, IPFS is someone's hard work aimed at fixing the web we've got.

idlewords 10y ago
The web was a technical solution to an information management problem at a physics lab.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  That was the initially scoped solution. It turned out that a lot of other actors had information management & sharing problems of a similar scope. Well before commercialisation of the Web.

FieryTransition 10y ago

Id say we need a political movement to push through a technical solution to problems like this, so I agree with you on that. But I think there is definitely space for things like IPFS. Technical solutions can give more guarantees than people can, so without it, what would we really have? Promises easily broken in the future? The problem with things like IPFS, is that they require political backing or economical incentive to really spread, otherwise they are most likely just going to remain a nice demo for a few technical people. So IMHO technology needs to go hand in hand with economical or political incentive, but how is an open question.

digi_owl 10y ago

> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. And here i was just listening to Adam Curtis talk about his latest creation, Hypernormalisation, where he touched on the issue of thinking one can solve social issues with engineering.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Can you expand on that? Or link the talk?

fizzbatter 10y ago

> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. I'm so lost at this assertion. How is this a social / political problem? IPFS is not permanent hosting. It is not an attempt to take power away from others and distribute it to the masses. It is purely a technical problem, which i think is objectively true. I have a feeling that you believe IPFS is partially designed to subvert governments/etc. And to an extent, that may be possible, but it is being built with DMCA's in mind. IPFS wants to allow governments / copyright holders to take content down from the network. It is not trying to become a pirate haven. Why? Well, mainly because piracy inhibits adoption. There may not be a way to DMCA currently (i haven't checked in months), but there are Github issue(s) on it. The creators don't want to see IPFS blocked in countries because it can permanently host illegal content. Which makes a ton of sense. The problem IPFS is trying to solve, as i see it, is purely technical. As advertised in pretty much every pitch i've seen for this technology, we are simply scaling too fast in storage and not fast enough in bandwidth. It appears impossible to handle the infrastructure load of files we are creating. IPFS solves this by automatically pulling content as locally as possible, reducing network overhead. Furthermore, it means that a DDOS/viral/etc of a central resource will not kill it. It's safely and mostly permanently (barring DMCA/etc requests) available. So with that said, what political and social problem do you see IPFS trying to solve? I don't see any.

NeutronBoy 10y ago
> I'm so lost at this assertion. How is this a social / political problem? How is it a technical problem? Current web technologies allow decentralised web (except for maybe root name servers). Everyone can host their own content, control their own servers, basically everything below your hostname. The implementation has led down a centralised path.
- fizzbatter 10y ago
  > The implementation has led down a centralised path. Sure, but choosing another implementation is.. a technical choice, is it not? Are you saying that if i choose to implement a distributed method it's not technical? What is my choice then, political? Because i have no political motives.. purely technical. I want less data choking the pipes. Which is all IPFS is ultimately doing. Seems pretty technical (instead of social/political, atleast) to me. Am i missing what you were conveying?

api 10y ago

The key is economic. The cloud and SaaS have taken over largely because the cloud is DRM and because centralization creates opportunities for ad and ad-driven surveillance business models. There is merit in doing the technical work to make a decentralized paradigm easier, but the lack of an economic model is the tougher of the two problems.

dredmorbius 10y ago
There are a few other issues. One is discoverability. It's tough to find a bunch of scattered systems all over the place. That's a problem Facebook, Reddit, and HN address. Another is identity. Tracking who's doing what (and what their permissions/authorities are) over a bunch of sites is ... a pain. I'm still mulling over a comment a few days back on HN that a user had 770 different password-based identities in their accounts-management storage (personal). Search (related to the first) is a third -- spiders suck a lot of bandwidth. Unless there's some way to distribute search or allow nodes to self-report search elements (which will probably require some form of auditing). And there's administration. It's really easy create systems any idiot can use, but then, any idiot will, and DDoS Brian Krebs and Dyn. Bulletproof administration is a real pain point.

snarfy 10y ago

There are plenty of technical reasons why the web is centralized. I cannot even host a server on my residential service without violating the ToS agreement. Even if I did, there is the problem of not enough IP addresses so my IP is dynamic. This is solved with dynamic dns, etc but is another technical hurdle to overcome. And then there is NAT creating yet another layer to hosting your own server. And I won't even go into security. These are all solvable, but to say there is little to do with the technical design ignores all of the problems that led us to where we are today.