7 ms·

There are a lot of efforts to "re-decentralize the web" and none of them seem successful. In my opinion, that's because their authors are trying to implement so

There are a lot of efforts to "re-decentralize the web" and none of them seem successful. In my opinion, that's because their authors are trying to implement some elves fantasies. 1. Has anyone of the "redecentralizers" ever thought about how developers would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale, Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that? 2. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah, that's non-trivial, but wouldn't it be cool if with minimal effort we could move existing software to a more decentralized model? 3. Don't tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to build JS SPAs. 4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?

mynewtb 9y ago
The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.
- tuxt 9y ago
  Someone has to pay the bill.
  - astrobe_ 9y ago
    We already do. The hard disks, the bandwidth, the electricity. Give me a ready-made virtual machine image [1] pre-configured to share files. I don't care about the protocols, I don't care about super-duper-unbreakable encryption because I won't share or host copyrighted content nor wombat porn. [1] Not a freaking docker image or whatnot (hi, Mediagoblin!) - if you want it to succeed it has to be dead simple so that mere mortals can do it.
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    If you want to write things on a self-hosted static blog in your free time, the hosting costs add up to a few dollars per month for a domain name and (e.g.) a VPS, for something that can scale to thousands of simultaneous readers. This is completely negligible, so I don't think "the bill" is a very important factor.
- qznc 9y ago
  Has this old web really disappeared or us it just dwarfed by the new web today?
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    The old web is still there but it is definitely dwarfed by the new web. Search results are gamed, comment sections are spammed, product placement and paid reviews are rampant, fake neutral information websites erode trust. Because there is money involved and access to the Internet is not controlled, some people chasing the dollars ruin the experience for everyone. They keep generating noise in their chase of money so that eventually the old web is impossible to find because most links lead to the new web.
    - qznc 9y ago
      It sounds like an interesting technical problem at first. A search engine for hobbyists. Use AI or whatever to filter out commercial interests. The problem is that nobody will pay you by definition and you are in an arms race against commercial interests. Does not sound sustainable.
      - jsilence 9y ago
        Remove the cause and not the symptoms!
        qznc 9y ago
        Remove capitalism?
        laughingman2 9y ago
        Yes!
        beaconstudios 9y ago
        haha, stop capitalism - it took GeoCities away from us! Very compelling.
- nsgi 9y ago
  That web still exists: look at Wikipedia, one of the largest websites, run entirely not-for-profit with the aim of sharing the sum of human knowledge. Nothing stops people from starting not-for-profit websites today and only linking to other not-for-profit websites. Running a website has never been cheaper and search engines are light years ahead of anything that existed then. They may never be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but that's because the web has grown in audience to people looking for something similar to watching TV, reading newspapers and going to the pub. Those activities will always be more popular than people hacking in a garage, but they can coexist.
  - RRRA 9y ago
    They CAN, sure, but they MUST coexist... and that is less guaranteed considering market forces and network effects.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    The changing audience isn't the biggest reason they're more popular. When people talk about 'stickiness' they're talking about using Dark Patterns of UI and/or using hyperbolic tone (formerly known as Yellow Journalism) to pander or incite, which makes you stick around long after you got the information you thought you came for. Relatively wholesome sites like Wikipedia can't compete on numbers and hours of visitors because they limit themselves mostly to 'see also', and commentary is split onto another page so you have to choose to see it every time.
    - nsgi 9y ago
      At the end of the day it's peoples' choice whether they choose to read sites like that, which pages they like on Facebook, etc. Those sites are popular for the same reason newspapers like the New York Post and the Daily Mail are popular. For as long as newspapers have been published online, those sites have been part of the web. Maybe not BuzzFeed, but sites posting sensationalist content. Wikipedia is definitely able to compete. It is the 5th most popular website, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of every online tabloid and content farm.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Mastodon/GNUSocial seems to be the counter-argument to most of your points.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
calgoo 9y ago
So my idea would be to build a private cloud for your house. The idea goes something like this: Sell a "box" (think something that looks like a apple airport extreme). The device will have a nfc / bluetooth / wireless / rj45 and internal storage. To link your device to the private cloud box, you use the app on your device and sync public encryption keys. Now there would be two ways of syncing photos / data between the cloud box and your device: 1. Local Wifi sync - when the device detects that is on its home network it will sync any changes. 2. Remote Sync - Use a public server, upload encrypted data using the public encryption keys, and the home cloud will download them. For sharing with others, im thinking of of web / circle of trust, where you can share your public keys with your friends / family. There would be privacy levels: 1 - Me & wife / 2 - Close family / 3 - Close friends etc... Anyway, this is just an idea i have been thinking about for some time now. There is still a lot of details to work out but I do believe that we need to try moving away from the public cloud.
- tyingq 9y ago
  It would be interesting if it were possible to hijack the infrastructure of the existing cloud players to do something similar. Like using encrypted blobs on Google drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc, as the backing store. In some way that provides redundancy, safe peer-to-peer key exchange, opacity (your account is storing not just your encrypted blobs) etc. Foisting off the infrastructure funding on the opposition has a sort of poetic justice to it.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Google "parasitic storage." That's what CompSci called such schemes when I last saw them. They might even have done "parasitic computing" or something like that by now.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Interesting. I could see using something like the blockchain as proof of which domains/urls are the current central authority to get the rest of the info from. Such that the base reference isn't easily shut down. It's whack-a-mole to try and kill the head, no need for complex decentralization. Would be kind of fun to watch the giants trying to shut it down. Given some level of popularity, it might become too difficult for them to do. Users donate newly minted Google/Microsoft accounts as old ones get shut down. With some sort of karma reward for doing that.
tyingq 9y ago
>4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. It does seem like "incentive" is the missing piece. The two somewhat successful, somewhat decentralized things I can think of are Bitcoin and TOR. Both provide some compelling incentive to either join as a user or to subsidize infrastructure.
- m-j-fox 9y ago
  And BitTorrent.
dorfsmay 9y ago
Aren't the different static generators a good step towards re-decentralising the web?
nickpsecurity 9y ago
"4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?" BitTorrent is the only one that I'm aware of past the core Internet protocols. As I said elsewhere, it spread because of the problems it solved for users in a way they could learn easily. Most probably didn't even know it was decentralized. So, best advice is to solve a problem for users really well with extra benefit of "we also protect your privacy instead of selling you out."
- pherq 9y ago
  Usenet, back in its heyday, might also qualify
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Oh yeah. It did get a lot of usd at least in the early days.
PuercoPop 9y ago
> Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. E-mail fits all of your requirements. Even the now being centralized (Gmail)
syrrim 9y ago
>4. Yes. Bittorrent. It makes use of centralized directories, and centralized trackers, but is otherwise p2p. It suffers from everything weve come to expect from decentralized services. It is only able to survive because no startup can legally disrupt it (not to say no one's tried). In order to use it, a person first has to download a custom client. They also have to visit a completely separate website to get a list of possible torrents. Both the most popular client and the most popular website are riddled with obscene and intrusive ads. What it should have, if it wanted to compete with netflix and spotify, is a web client with the ability to play things instantly. Both those things are antithetical to bittorrent, and so it will continue to lose to the legal avenues.
syrrim 9y ago
>2. I have thought fairly hard about compatibility. What you could do would be to serve a standard website over http, but allow anyone to act as a cdn. The only centralized piece would be dns to route people to their closest peer. Most clients would think the peer was a normal http server, under control of the website owner. In reality it would be any random person on the internet who had decided to rehost the content. Therein lies the problem: how do clients ensure the integrity of resources if they don't even know to look for it. One of your cdns could be serving fraudulent content, and none of the clients would question it. In order to distribute http, you would therefore be forced to get at least some custom code into browsers. At that point, why not shove a whole ipfs implementation in?
shea256 9y ago
Hi! This post really resonated with me because of my experience with how previous efforts at re-decentralizing the web have failed. In my view, adoption will always be held back as long as there's: a. a UX gap (in both software and dev skills) b. a lack of innovative open source business models c. an absence of completely novel apps that couldn't have been done before We're trying to tackle all 3 at Blockstack with our developer platform but it's not easy. Would love your thoughts sometime on whether we're on the right track and how else we could help you out as a developer.
laughingman2 9y ago
> The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Really? how does wikipedia function then, why do lots of people create meaningful content in web for free? Applying the results of a system (aka web being currently commercialized) as its cause is circular reasoning at its finest.
- curt15 9y ago
  >Really? how does wikipedia function then, why do lots of people create meaningful content in web for free? I get the impression that sometimes it's barely getting by; very few months I see a banner at the top of its webpage suggesting that it's close to running out of money and pleading for donations.

mynewtb 9y ago

The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.

tuxt 9y ago
Someone has to pay the bill.
- astrobe_ 9y ago
  We already do. The hard disks, the bandwidth, the electricity. Give me a ready-made virtual machine image [1] pre-configured to share files. I don't care about the protocols, I don't care about super-duper-unbreakable encryption because I won't share or host copyrighted content nor wombat porn. [1] Not a freaking docker image or whatnot (hi, Mediagoblin!) - if you want it to succeed it has to be dead simple so that mere mortals can do it.
- a3_nm 9y ago
  If you want to write things on a self-hosted static blog in your free time, the hosting costs add up to a few dollars per month for a domain name and (e.g.) a VPS, for something that can scale to thousands of simultaneous readers. This is completely negligible, so I don't think "the bill" is a very important factor.
qznc 9y ago
Has this old web really disappeared or us it just dwarfed by the new web today?
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  The old web is still there but it is definitely dwarfed by the new web. Search results are gamed, comment sections are spammed, product placement and paid reviews are rampant, fake neutral information websites erode trust. Because there is money involved and access to the Internet is not controlled, some people chasing the dollars ruin the experience for everyone. They keep generating noise in their chase of money so that eventually the old web is impossible to find because most links lead to the new web.
  - qznc 9y ago
    It sounds like an interesting technical problem at first. A search engine for hobbyists. Use AI or whatever to filter out commercial interests. The problem is that nobody will pay you by definition and you are in an arms race against commercial interests. Does not sound sustainable.
    - jsilence 9y ago
      Remove the cause and not the symptoms!
      - qznc 9y ago
        Remove capitalism?
        laughingman2 9y ago
        Yes!
        beaconstudios 9y ago
        haha, stop capitalism - it took GeoCities away from us! Very compelling.
nsgi 9y ago
That web still exists: look at Wikipedia, one of the largest websites, run entirely not-for-profit with the aim of sharing the sum of human knowledge. Nothing stops people from starting not-for-profit websites today and only linking to other not-for-profit websites. Running a website has never been cheaper and search engines are light years ahead of anything that existed then. They may never be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but that's because the web has grown in audience to people looking for something similar to watching TV, reading newspapers and going to the pub. Those activities will always be more popular than people hacking in a garage, but they can coexist.
- RRRA 9y ago
  They CAN, sure, but they MUST coexist... and that is less guaranteed considering market forces and network effects.
- hinkley 9y ago
  The changing audience isn't the biggest reason they're more popular. When people talk about 'stickiness' they're talking about using Dark Patterns of UI and/or using hyperbolic tone (formerly known as Yellow Journalism) to pander or incite, which makes you stick around long after you got the information you thought you came for. Relatively wholesome sites like Wikipedia can't compete on numbers and hours of visitors because they limit themselves mostly to 'see also', and commentary is split onto another page so you have to choose to see it every time.
  - nsgi 9y ago
    At the end of the day it's peoples' choice whether they choose to read sites like that, which pages they like on Facebook, etc. Those sites are popular for the same reason newspapers like the New York Post and the Daily Mail are popular. For as long as newspapers have been published online, those sites have been part of the web. Maybe not BuzzFeed, but sites posting sensationalist content. Wikipedia is definitely able to compete. It is the 5th most popular website, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of every online tabloid and content farm.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Mastodon/GNUSocial seems to be the counter-argument to most of your points.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

calgoo 9y ago

So my idea would be to build a private cloud for your house. The idea goes something like this: Sell a "box" (think something that looks like a apple airport extreme). The device will have a nfc / bluetooth / wireless / rj45 and internal storage. To link your device to the private cloud box, you use the app on your device and sync public encryption keys. Now there would be two ways of syncing photos / data between the cloud box and your device: 1. Local Wifi sync - when the device detects that is on its home network it will sync any changes. 2. Remote Sync - Use a public server, upload encrypted data using the public encryption keys, and the home cloud will download them. For sharing with others, im thinking of of web / circle of trust, where you can share your public keys with your friends / family. There would be privacy levels: 1 - Me & wife / 2 - Close family / 3 - Close friends etc... Anyway, this is just an idea i have been thinking about for some time now. There is still a lot of details to work out but I do believe that we need to try moving away from the public cloud.

tyingq 9y ago
It would be interesting if it were possible to hijack the infrastructure of the existing cloud players to do something similar. Like using encrypted blobs on Google drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc, as the backing store. In some way that provides redundancy, safe peer-to-peer key exchange, opacity (your account is storing not just your encrypted blobs) etc. Foisting off the infrastructure funding on the opposition has a sort of poetic justice to it.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Google "parasitic storage." That's what CompSci called such schemes when I last saw them. They might even have done "parasitic computing" or something like that by now.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Interesting. I could see using something like the blockchain as proof of which domains/urls are the current central authority to get the rest of the info from. Such that the base reference isn't easily shut down. It's whack-a-mole to try and kill the head, no need for complex decentralization. Would be kind of fun to watch the giants trying to shut it down. Given some level of popularity, it might become too difficult for them to do. Users donate newly minted Google/Microsoft accounts as old ones get shut down. With some sort of karma reward for doing that.

tyingq 9y ago

>4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. It does seem like "incentive" is the missing piece. The two somewhat successful, somewhat decentralized things I can think of are Bitcoin and TOR. Both provide some compelling incentive to either join as a user or to subsidize infrastructure.

m-j-fox 9y ago
And BitTorrent.

dorfsmay 9y ago

Aren't the different static generators a good step towards re-decentralising the web?

nickpsecurity 9y ago

"4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?" BitTorrent is the only one that I'm aware of past the core Internet protocols. As I said elsewhere, it spread because of the problems it solved for users in a way they could learn easily. Most probably didn't even know it was decentralized. So, best advice is to solve a problem for users really well with extra benefit of "we also protect your privacy instead of selling you out."

pherq 9y ago
Usenet, back in its heyday, might also qualify
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Oh yeah. It did get a lot of usd at least in the early days.

PuercoPop 9y ago

> Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. E-mail fits all of your requirements. Even the now being centralized (Gmail)

syrrim 9y ago

>4. Yes. Bittorrent. It makes use of centralized directories, and centralized trackers, but is otherwise p2p. It suffers from everything weve come to expect from decentralized services. It is only able to survive because no startup can legally disrupt it (not to say no one's tried). In order to use it, a person first has to download a custom client. They also have to visit a completely separate website to get a list of possible torrents. Both the most popular client and the most popular website are riddled with obscene and intrusive ads. What it should have, if it wanted to compete with netflix and spotify, is a web client with the ability to play things instantly. Both those things are antithetical to bittorrent, and so it will continue to lose to the legal avenues.

syrrim 9y ago

>2. I have thought fairly hard about compatibility. What you could do would be to serve a standard website over http, but allow anyone to act as a cdn. The only centralized piece would be dns to route people to their closest peer. Most clients would think the peer was a normal http server, under control of the website owner. In reality it would be any random person on the internet who had decided to rehost the content. Therein lies the problem: how do clients ensure the integrity of resources if they don't even know to look for it. One of your cdns could be serving fraudulent content, and none of the clients would question it. In order to distribute http, you would therefore be forced to get at least some custom code into browsers. At that point, why not shove a whole ipfs implementation in?

shea256 9y ago

Hi! This post really resonated with me because of my experience with how previous efforts at re-decentralizing the web have failed. In my view, adoption will always be held back as long as there's: a. a UX gap (in both software and dev skills) b. a lack of innovative open source business models c. an absence of completely novel apps that couldn't have been done before We're trying to tackle all 3 at Blockstack with our developer platform but it's not easy. Would love your thoughts sometime on whether we're on the right track and how else we could help you out as a developer.

laughingman2 9y ago

> The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Really? how does wikipedia function then, why do lots of people create meaningful content in web for free? Applying the results of a system (aka web being currently commercialized) as its cause is circular reasoning at its finest.

curt15 9y ago
>Really? how does wikipedia function then, why do lots of people create meaningful content in web for free? I get the impression that sometimes it's barely getting by; very few months I see a banner at the top of its webpage suggesting that it's close to running out of money and pleading for donations.