26 ms·

A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

279 points by staltz 9y ago

whimful 9y ago
scuttlebutt is my main social media these days... oh and in case you're looking for git that's not wedded to github via your comments and issues, scuttlebutt plays really well with git - you push comments and code into your gossip-cloud together
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  What is it?
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Secure scuttlebutt is a totally decentralized append-only "blockchain" with a single writer, that is replicated by various peers who want to get the latest posts. Their mantra is "no global singletons". https://scuttlebot.io/ https://scuttlebot.io/ Scuttlebutt is very good, but it would be cool to generalize it to the multiple-writers situation. Then we could have one standard for decentralized data streams and even currency tokens, without global networks: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0
  - staltz 9y ago
    If you asked about the GitHub alternative, it's this: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bGvXQApSXqOBwc%3D.sha256 https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bG...
    - mnzaki 9y ago
      The bit about being permissionless is kind of unclear. "This seems to work well: the SSB network thrives off of being a group of kind, respectful folks who don't push to each other's master branch. :)" Will this hold if the community expands to 10x or 100x the size? Surely conflicts of interest will arise, or just plain assholery/trolling.
  - grey_earthling 9y ago
    It's a community of people trying to build better tech to communicate with each other. """ If I were to write an internet health guide, it would start with: “THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU ARE INCREDIBLE. THESE COMPANIES ARE BAD AND THEY'RE RUINING EVERYTHING. BUT YOU? YOU'RE WONDERFUL.” Then the guide would say that it's alright to want to be online, because connection through the internet is good-as-hell. I'd only ask for one thing from the reader: to stop waiting for these companies to get better. Instead, learn enough technical skills so that you're no longer reliant on them. “You already have all the tools you need, so let's sharpen them!,” the guide would say. """ — https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/zachs-health-guide.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
- xj9 9y ago
  plays really well with git yes, but there are still some limitations that i've run up against (which i am trying to fix) when it comes to repos with a lot of history. you can work around this issue by using a lot of small repos, but once you reach a certain threshold it becomes impossible to clone a repo from ssb[0]. going further, you also cannot push repos beyond a certain size[1]. these are sample repos that these claims are true for, but i still have more measuring to do so i can say what the exact threshold is. i lean very heavily on the tech that i use to find the places that need improvement. that said, ssb is an amazing technology and quite new. it works very well for the social networking use case. with some work, we can make it fast/reliable enough for general applications. [0]: https://git.heropunch.io/%25SI144KecoPoa4uB8kGGUbC%2Fb6Mb4ePBmG9LbZffKAgw%3D.sha256/tree/2015 https://git.heropunch.io/%25SI144KecoPoa4uB8kGGUbC%2Fb6Mb4eP... [1]: https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/ https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  likewise, scuttlebutt is my primary digital social resource, and the #solarpunk community generally is incredibly inspiring to me.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
gregknicholson 9y ago
> Smartphone manufacturers sell mesh-first mobile devices for the developing world I hope puri.sm is listening. This is what I want my Librem 5 to be!
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  I would, without question, purchase this their device if it had mesh-first radios on-board.
- nicole_f 9y ago
  Hi, yes, we are listening :) First of all the Librem5 is as open as possible, i.e. if there is a way to support this or another kind of mesh networking then you will be able to add this function to the Librem5 - as long as the software needed for this is free and works on Linux on ARM (ARM64 to be more precise). There will be no restrictions from our side, none at all. But I also have to point out that we are bound to what we find on the market, concerning hardware and drivers. The latter can be modified to support what is needed for meshes but hardware usually is hard to change. We are currently looking for as good as possible free software supported WiFi and BT chips that do not require runtime firmware and are power saving enough for a mobile device. This turns out not to be very easy. Once we settle on some type we will check thoroughly for mesh requirements. So yes, your voice(s) are heard! And we will do our best to support mesh networking, in soft- and hardware on the Librem5. Cheers nicole
tannhaeuser 9y ago
I'm all for p2p (really), but how about taking back control (sorry) of the Web by actually developing and enforcing declarative/markup technologies and standards instead of praising JavaScript because "it's not half bad" and adding procedural features to the Web (APIs, WASM)? With the current state of affairs wrt privacy and self-proclaimed standardization bodies, I'm not sure the Web is worth preserving.
- ashark 9y ago
  HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connections or modify form data, isn't useful enough without that to justify the added bloat to the client. God, it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now. And it wouldn't be able to spy on you. A document-centric (once again) web that's somewhat less crippled than Gopher would be amazing, but we absolutely must cut out things like scripting in order to make the client trustworthy (and fast).
  - JohnStrange 9y ago
    I'd like to see a return to semantic markup, accompanied by pragmatic information about the purpose of the data and its intended size. The data should also be strongly typed. Then leave it to the client how to display, how to edit, and how to select the data. The receiver should decide how to best display e.g. a list of 20000 names or a choice between 4 options on his device.
    - dec0dedab0de 9y ago
      Me too, except I would say strongly duck typed. As in there should be sensible defaults when possible. In any case, the designers won this argument a long time ago. They want to decide how you consume their page, it is not a document to them, it is a work of art. How dare you want to display it differently from their vision.
EGreg 9y ago
I like the phrase "local-first" software. It's been happening for a while: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/power-to-the-people/ https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/power-to-the-people/
romaniv 9y ago
The reason the Web needs rescuing is because it's not a particularly well-designed system that has been patched over and over again for the last quarter century. And now it has been degraded to a delivery layer for JavaScript apps, a poor RPC protocol and an overly complex UI rendering toolkit. It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing. If you look closely, cloud services created tools to easily do all those things and that's how they got in control. "The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." -- Alan Kay. A lot of web devs were enraged by his comment without listening to the context. He was talking about the lack of protocol-level solutions for resilience of the Web.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Yeah, the Internet had coalesced around one standard, TCP-IP, after fighting with national standards and networks like Minitel. Now with the Web, the approach has always been to define the front end standards for "user agents" and leave the back end standards to "someone else". Here is what would make the Web wayyy better: Support for content-addressable protocols via IPFS ans SAFE. You can already leverage SRI to get some of the "content addressable hashes" but you need a DHT to locate and host the stuff. That way the Web becomes resilient (no single points of failure and you can trust the content) while retaining all its front end goodness. No more concepts of DOMAINS at all, but rather, each resource of information can be an evolving community in itself. Like people collaborating on a document. I think this could be the standard for a new multiple-readers-multiple-writers decentralized web: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 We are working on a mobile browser and extensions for desktop browsers to do these things.
- niftich 9y ago
  > protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing It does [1][2][3]. It's not the most elegant, it's not without flaws, but it's there, and enough to build against. Proprietary services weren't bound by having to code against a standard, so they cranked out something quick (and mutually incompatible), skinned an attractive interface, offered it for free (!) and attracted lots of users, who in turn attracted more users with the network effect. This is why Facebook, Wikipedia, Google Docs, Github won, and protocols like WebDAV lost. This future was crafted by the makers of web browsers themselves: first by shifting the focus onto rendering arbitrary mediatypes delivered by HTTP from focusing on the intrinsic builtins of HTTP as a protocol, and later by trying to "standardize" the rich interactivity offered by the likes of Shockwave, Flash, and Silverlight, creating more and more APIs inside the browser that allowed client-side Javascript to communicate with the underlying system. Web developers aren't blameless, but today's web is exactly how Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, in reverse order, steered it since the late 1990s. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3253 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3253 [3] https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...
shak77 9y ago
If I wanted to rescue something from the Internet, it would not be the web
- macawfish 9y ago
  Would it be the children?
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Personally, I'm on team "kill it with fire". I wonder if there is a group for that?
- dang 9y ago
  Would you kindly stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?
niftich 9y ago
The IPv4 perspective is a red herring. NATting was indeed necessitated by IP address scarcity, but a domestic installation that does NAT comes with ancillary benefits, like giving you, the home user, a single place to control access to your network. In IPv6 it's nice that you have an address space that's not only big enough to accommodate every device, but large enough to even burn through addresses and treat them as disposable, but once IPv6 becomes widespread there will need to be some rethinking as to how to manage firewall rules between your own devices, how to segregate your portion of the network from the spurious (and sometimes malicious) traffic of everywhere else.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  firewalling on a router/gateway gives you the same ability, and none of the downsides of NAT. Nat is in no way a requirement for this.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Not to mention that you really need to focus on securing the endpoint anyway because an increasing number of your devices are mobile and aren't "home" an increasing amount of time anyway. The period of central router/gateway/NAT management made the most sense was when the majority of your home were desktops fixed in their locations in the same rooms. In a world of a majority of laptops and hand computers, worrying about the strength of your home router/gateway/NAT is increasingly silly, as those devices may spend as much time or more at your work, or the coffee shop down the street, as they do at "home".
gregknicholson 9y ago
There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density](http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you by a single corporation. 2. They want to communicate with other people they know, physically nearby-ish. 3. Sneakernet is never slower than talking in person. 4. Isolated mesh networks and comms with days of latency are viable for these new net users. 5. Get enough people using a mesh and the networks will start to connect. 6. Where the internet is already pervasive, privacy and autonomy advocates are resisting corporate control, and choosing decentralised alternatives. 7. For now, we can exploit the existing internet to handle long-distance. 8. But eventually, enough people will have the bottom-up mindset, and the weak links in the mesh will become worrying. 9. So a solution will emerge to fill in the gaps in the mesh, using ships / beacons / balloons / satellites / modulated whalesong.
- staltz 9y ago
  Good observations about the need for the Internet to handle long-distances. I wrote on scuttlebutt that telecommunication channels could become multi-modal like public transportation is often in Europe: https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25OryfD6hGpjiqwFkKyFnhVPZMPsZFgdFutEhzxycyolQ%3D.sha256 https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25OryfD6hGpjiqwFkKyFnhVPZMPsZF... Another way of bridging the gap in that white map is through data gossip: the person who leaves a village and comes back can bring data updates with them and share that with the village. Sneakernets in Cuba (as far as I know) work like that, but shouldn't be as fast as mesh gossip.
- ashark 9y ago
  How does a mesh cope with most end-user Internet-connected devices (phones) running on battery power, especially in less developed areas? Would we be back to needing infrastructure nodes with wall power, or solar, or whatever? This is what's keeping me from being over-the-Moon thrilled about stuff like IPFS—it's a bad fit for cell phones, which are most devices.
genki_teacher 9y ago
People were sounding the same alarm in the '90s with AOL. History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  Who says it'll be a company?
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    less design by commitee
- glitcher 9y ago
  Yes, the history of the early, open web, which now is in danger of being... history.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  Well they were kinda right. AOL was merely an early iteration of what we have now. Maybe another company will surpass FB but I am pretty sure from iteration to iteration it will be harder and harder to replace an incumbent since each round's winner will be more powerful than the previous one. AOL, for instance, was mostly an American thing. FB, otoh, has global power.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook. Facebook has learned the same lesson, and is explicitly trying to keep it from ever happening again. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five...
niftich 9y ago
Content-addressed overlay networks work pretty well over the Internet, and they could work equally well on mesh networks (as the article posits), if not two rather awkward problems: storage at rest, and liveliness of a storage node. These two factors even interact to make the situation worse. Because at any point, nodes can drop off and you never know if this condition is temporary or permanent, a distributed datastore has to redundantly store everything. This needs much more space than just storing everything at its origin, as is done in location-addressed networks like Web. These are not insurmountable problems, of course; it's just that right now, conditions like storage on nodes, link asymmetry, traffic distribution asymmetry still favor centralization. And fundamentally, the operators of individual nodes (i.e. ordinary people) are often not very selfless, and not enough of them contribute to the health of the mesh even if they discretionarily choose the mesh: seeding ratios on BitTorrent networks that are not user-adjustable (e.g. old World of Warcraft downloader, Facebook patchsets) are much, much higher than seed ratios where the peer can bow out at any time, despite all of latter users choosing BitTorrent voluntarily.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  > a distributed datastore has to redundantly store everything Scuttlebutt gets around this: you only store and rebroadcast your friends' stuff (and anything else relevant to you). You're actually seeing content from your local storage — which is why Scuttlebutt works seamlessly offline — so there's no need for altruism.
  - malteof 9y ago
    Scuttlebutt?
    - niftich 9y ago
      "a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform" [1], also referenced in the article. [1] https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
- jerkstate 9y ago
quickben 9y ago
Funny. Before DRM, spam, i-have-to-monetize daily 5 minute of bloging into a full time pay, unskipable 30s YouTube ads, profiling every possible user behavior and other shady shit like that: We wondered how can we improve the web. Now, we wonder how to save it.
- soared 9y ago
  Spam, scams, and bad ads have been around since the start, what internet were you using?
  - mr_spothawk 9y ago
    Spam, scams and badvertizements have been around seemingly since long before the internet.
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    They were, but back then, that stuff seemed much more marginal, now it's seems front and center with even major players engaging in some bad behaviors.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Since the start of the web, arguably. Usenet used to be really pleasant to use apart from the first few weeks in September when a new bunch of college students had to be integrated into the system. Spammers blew up something wonderful for a quick buck.
- r3bl 9y ago
  I would say before algorithms started showing us different content even if we are subscribed to the same feed(s). DRM is hardly a problem unless you're using a handful of products, unskipable ads were hardly a problem before smartphones and their market stores took off, and spam was there since the Internet started. What is new is that Facebook, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and increasingly Twitter are all showing us different content, and our personal preferences (things we follow) are increasingly irrelevant to the information we're receiving. This all happened in this decade, and this is the decade where we started to fix instead of improve the web. I would point the breaking point somewhere around 2010-2011, when Google, YouTube and Facebook all decided to personalize the things we see.
dec0dedab0de 9y ago
Does anyone here have any experience with MANETs? I really like the idea, but is there any way to defend against malicious actors? Are there any protocols that are clear winners? Is the reason it hasn't caught on solely because the big ISPs are against the idea?
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > Is the reason it hasn't caught on solely because the big ISPs are against the idea? While I like the idea, it seems like it would be hard to get the same consistent QOS as you do with a network built using fixed infrastructure.
- elihu 9y ago
  In general, if you allow anyone to be a router then anyone can advertise a low-cost route to anywhere, and then drop the packets. You might be able to combat that with some kind of decentralizes reputation system or policies that prefer existing routes that have been in use for awhile and are known to work, or that sends a few test packets over any new "suspicious" link before using it send real data. I don't know what current research says about this problem, or whether any current routing protocols attempt to deal with it at all. In practice, I expect that real wireless meshes can still be somewhat secure by operating as managed clusters of routers that don't peer with other clusters of routers without the administrator explicitly enabling peering. So for instance, you might have one neighborhood with a dozen houses with routers managed by some guy, and a nearby HOA with another cluster of routers managed by someone else, and they might find out about each others' networks and agree to create a bigger network by peering. So, your network's trust model can piggyback on the trust model of the real world -- if you know someone in real life, it's a lot less likely they're going to try to take down your network than some random person you don't know.
pfraze 9y ago
I worked on Secure Scuttlebutt and then founded Beaker. Happy to answer questions.
- codeisawesome 9y ago
  1. Is there still going to be room for entrepreneurship on this new Web? 2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create large amounts of revenues and profits? 3. Does this community also know about projects like OpenMined which seek to democratise access to data & infra to run ML algorithms on? Any pattern like reason you can think of, for it to have not come up in André’s post?
  - pfraze 9y ago
    1. Yes. Economic models are challenging, especially if ads don't work well anymore. (One thing I'd point out is that most ad revenue is sucked up by Google and Facebook, and they're the entities most ripe for disruption.) A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clients only have the "rights" to consume and filter information, whereas servers have the "rights" to publish, moderate, and set the software. Clients have to borrow publishing rights from the servers, and that means that all authority is derived from the citizenry of servers. A peer-to-peer Web unifies publishing and consumption rights under one class of device (the "peer") and so it equally distributes the authority over moderation and software among the peers as well. I bring this up because it alters the service-driven packaging model for the Web. Rather than having software be delivered in a one-size-fits-all package from a given .com, the peer-to-peer Web is a customizable network of packages. There's no builtin authority over the composition of software. All users can customize and share customizations. Therefore no two devices have to share the same application code; they just need to share data formats and protocols. I'd keep an eye out for how software is packaged for non-hacker use in the p2p Web, because that's probably one place for economic models can emerge. It makes a lot of sense for indie programmers to think of themselves as content creators, and to then cultivate patreons around their modules and packages. For larger projects, we run an Open Collective [1] and have found some initial success there. The reality is, without a mechanism of user/data capture, it is very hard to create huge profits, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'd rather trade a situation where 1% of the population gets stinking rich if it meant we get the general wealth of FOSS and open data. I think enough incentives will remain to do good new work. 1. https://opencollective.com/beaker https://opencollective.com/beaker
coding123 9y ago
My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search terms (that mind you are so freaking obscure) all go to this same site. It's driving her nuts. At this point SEO has been totally gamed and search is totally useless now. We NEED an alternative.
- navls 9y ago
  Not sure if I am misunderstanding the problem, but are you aware you can exclude terms from the search results? For example with google "baseball cards -ebay" will omit pages where ebay is mentioned.
- jerkstate 9y ago
  I have a similar problem with SEO for recipes. There are tons of recipes SEO'd to a certain site that has a registration/paywall that frequently appear at the top of search results. Luckily they are relatively easy to avoid in the search results.
  - coding123 9y ago
    We have installed a few blockers in chrome to help with the mess, but no luck for my phone's browser which she uses quite a bit too. It's just sad that all content for a given domain of interest is quickly aggregating on just a few domain names. Also as a non-facebook user I am so saddened by the user experience facebook gives to people that are trying to look at a Restaurant menu where the idiotic restaurant decided to put their site up on Facebook. No employee of facebook or 66% of the users are going to complain about entering a Facebook CAPTCHA every damn-f-ing time because they are all logged in already.
- chubot 9y ago
  Hm, what about searching Amazon? Or Bing or Duck Duck Go? Do they have the same problems?
austincheney 9y ago
If you really want to rescue the web find a way to restrict adware, spyware, and the like. I upgraded internet at my house to 1gbps (about 890mbps down and 920mbps up) and I hardly notice any speed difference surfing the web. Sad. Everything else is fast as hell though.
- bo1024 9y ago
  The good news is we have tools (browser plugins) to help us take control of our own machines while web browsing. The bad news is that sites are actively hostile to these tools. I think it's as much an incentives problem as a technological problem.
- maxyme 9y ago
  I have this too. Sadly I think it's more likely due to the fact that some of the largest websites have a speed limit per connection.
dash2 9y ago
Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a ride from a driver. The author provides no evidence that the services of Airbnb, Uber etc. have no value added. These companies carefully designed interfaces to help us find what we need. If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups.
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  I don't see where the argument is made that there is no added value. Instead, i think the author rightly points out that it is possible to do it a different way.
- schnable 9y ago
  And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.
  - at-fates-hands 9y ago
    I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.
zxy_xyz 9y ago
Now we just need to save the web from slow JS apps. Is there something doing that right now by chance?
- tomcooks 9y ago
  You, by clicking on the "reader mode" of your browser and telling the owner of the site about it
dfabulich 9y ago
In my view of history, P2P takes off and does well when it's faster for end-users than centralized solutions; P2P solutions fail when centralized solutions are faster. This holds regardless of the political advantages (or disadvantages) of P2P. BitTorrent is often faster for large files than centralized solutions, so people use it. (It's still inconvenient for a new user to kick off their first torrent, but WebTorrent will help.) Freenet is essentially never faster than alternatives, and so it has stumbled. If some future P2P network can outperform HTTP, then it will succeed; otherwise, it will fail. Regardless, unless we see a breakthrough in battery technology, it will never be the case that lots of people will carry around mobile phones in their pockets whose radios are always on and participating in a mesh network. The battery would die in an hour or two. P2P networks work best when coupled with reliable power networks. But if you have reliable power, you can probably set up a reliable wired network, too.
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  I think this is an accurate assessment of how things play out in the real world. It seems like many people here are attracted to decentralized solutions for ideological reasons, but don't realize/acknowledge that the vast majority of people don't care and will go with whatever is convenient for them.
- adamcharnock 9y ago
  Maybe there will be a time in the future when the necessary factors will all coincide. Improved battery technology, slowing Internet speeds (for Reasons), and change in the public's attitudes (probably starting with those generation or two below us). Anything attempting to solve the problem before this time could be cursed as "before its time".
robotbikes 9y ago
What makes people use centralized services is their utility. People will pick up new tools and repurpose them if they find them useful. In theory the web is supposed to be about communication and connection. I think the emphasis on building a local network is a good idea. P2P mesh is cool but until it provides opportunities that don't exist otherwise it is unlikely to surpass. The notion of building this for places without internet access is a positive angle but also tricky. Charity is seldom as successful or scalable as user driven initiatives. A lot of mobile phones now exist in places w/o "internet" per se. But from my understanding say converting a 3 year old smartphone into a mesh 1st device seems challenging from a wifi driver and power consumption and app perspective. Balancing the project of design that is easy for non-technical people with the notion of eating your own dogfood one can theorize about building alternatives to the hierarchical Internet. This is the challenge though, figuring out how to build utility that is superior to the walled gardens and is in the hands of the users to control.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  > The notion of building this for places without internet access is a positive angle but also tricky. Charity is seldom as successful or scalable as user driven initiatives. Scuttlebutt's founder lives on a boat. There's no need for charity. We're all “us”. > converting a 3 year old smartphone into a mesh 1st device seems challenging from a wifi driver and power consumption and app perspective. Yeah, actually engineering the bloody thing is always the tricky bit. > This is the challenge though, figuring out how to build utility that is superior to the walled gardens and is in the hands of the users to control. Yeah, actually designing the bloody thing is always the tricky bit.
deleted 9y ago
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tobbyb 9y ago
The first choke point is the ISP. You are completely dependent on the ISP or mobile provider to get on the network. Once on the network there are multiple choke points around IP addresses, dns, ca authorities, registries and more. As long as you are dependent on anyone to get on the network it by definition can't be decentralized. Consumer wireless tech is heavily regulated and governments are extremely paranoid about communication channels they don't control and can't monitor. This is unlikely to change because there are no incentives to develop technology that truly empowers individuals, there is no profit in it, it's a social good. If developed it will be demonized and made illegal, and limited to minority dissenters, the general population is unlikely to go through hoops to get on a network.
- ytjohn 9y ago
  He takes a while to get there, and doesn't quite drive the point home, but this is actually what André Staltz is proposing. Mesh-first devices. If we start at the bottom of his article, here's basically the plan: 1. Work on polishing IPFS, CJDNS, SSB[1], Beaker Bowser and some others into a "mesh-first" setup. 2. Sell, subsidize, or outright gift mobile devices to offline users in Africa (I'm going to assume these are android smartphones) setup to automatically join a mesh network, with these apps installed. 3. Users will transport these phones around, adding and creating content. Their phones will automatically sync content with other devices as they come in range. In general, only content that the user is interested in (that they follow) will be synchronized, though some may act as hubs syncing all manner of content for later redistribution. 4. As usage grows, there will be various regional and national mesh networks that build up. I think a good comparison is to Cuba's weekly sneakernet[2] distribution, just with wireless mesh. [1]: Secure Scuttlebut is one of the author's creations: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ [2]: https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revolution/ https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...
zeep 9y ago
I thought that was what the web archive and similar projects were doing...
VectorLock 9y ago
If he figures out how to make a good mesh network and bootstrap it then everything else is easy. That blogpost was pretty much a long winded way of saying "we don't have a mesh network that works."
idooontcare 9y ago
You mean rescue from facebook's and google's agenda ? Mind controll ? Cmon, people love to be controlled Seriously, people want to put whole life in facebook
feelin_googley 9y ago
After reading the FCC Chairman's idea of "the Internet" in his Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (below), I think maybe a better plan would be to rescue the internet from the web. Every example he references of internet usage is web usage or email. He does mention "DNS and caching" but in the context of the potential effect of removing these from the services available to users. (para. 37) The general tone of the NPRM seems to be that an ISP can and will block or throttle any non-web or non-email traffic. That could include any peer-to-peer innovations that seek to restore the original functionality of the internet, such as those mentioned by the author. On the contrary, the dissent by Commissioner Clyburn specifically mentions Skype as an example of internet usage. He believes the traditional notion of "permission-less innovation" is under threat from the Chairman's proposed approach. https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-17-60A1.pdf https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-17-60A1.pd... The author highlights the importance of distinguishing "the web" from the internet. Perhaps nothing is more important. The internet has more value than the web. The web is severely limited in functionality. The internet, still underexploited in its potential, does not suffer from the same limitations.
mwcampbell 9y ago
Unless I missed something, this article lacks a call to action (or multiple calls to action for different people). What can individual readers of this article do to help realize this plan? For example, if I have money, where can I give it?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bane 9y ago
For us "old" people who remember the internet before the web -- one of the things that's really different about the modern internet is the very limited set of protocols and applications that the average user interacts with. It really used to be that every different service type mapped to a different protocol and HTTP (and HTTPS) has just sort of subsumed everything. Back in the old days to minimally use the internet you'd have to know at least telnet, ftp, nntp, gopher (maybe), smtp, pop and maybe a handful of others. (okay, maybe modern users use more protocols than I'm admitting to, but it's very obscured these days but so many different applications just ride on HTTP(S) anyways). There's really nothing preventing some motivated group to just spin up an entirely new kind of service that "fixes" all that's wrong with the web, custom protocol and application stack. "But the network effect!" And that's something us old timers remember, we remember lots of great services spinning up and down and even when the web was just a handful of sites. The web earned its network by having better general utility than other things that were attempted, but why can't a new better service eventually earn it? (In the meanwhile us hacker types will enjoy having a cool new playground to muck around on for a few years).
- acdha 9y ago
  > There's really nothing preventing some motivated group to just spin up an entirely new kind of service that "fixes" all that's wrong with the web, custom protocol and application stack. Firewalls and security policy. The internet is a much less trusting place these days[1] and anything too new will have adoption issues once it gets out of a core hacker group. 1. Remember IRIX shopping with telnet and a guest/guest login enabled by default to “foster the spirit of collaboration”?

279 points by staltz 9y ago

scuttlebutt is my main social media these days... oh and in case you're looking for git that's not wedded to github via your comments and issues, scuttlebutt plays really well with git - you push comments and code into your gossip-cloud together

pavel_lishin 9y ago
What is it?
- EGreg 9y ago
  Secure scuttlebutt is a totally decentralized append-only "blockchain" with a single writer, that is replicated by various peers who want to get the latest posts. Their mantra is "no global singletons". https://scuttlebot.io/ https://scuttlebot.io/ Scuttlebutt is very good, but it would be cool to generalize it to the multiple-writers situation. Then we could have one standard for decentralized data streams and even currency tokens, without global networks: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0
- staltz 9y ago
  If you asked about the GitHub alternative, it's this: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bGvXQApSXqOBwc%3D.sha256 https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bG...
  - mnzaki 9y ago
    The bit about being permissionless is kind of unclear. "This seems to work well: the SSB network thrives off of being a group of kind, respectful folks who don't push to each other's master branch. :)" Will this hold if the community expands to 10x or 100x the size? Surely conflicts of interest will arise, or just plain assholery/trolling.
- grey_earthling 9y ago
  It's a community of people trying to build better tech to communicate with each other. """ If I were to write an internet health guide, it would start with: “THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU ARE INCREDIBLE. THESE COMPANIES ARE BAD AND THEY'RE RUINING EVERYTHING. BUT YOU? YOU'RE WONDERFUL.” Then the guide would say that it's alright to want to be online, because connection through the internet is good-as-hell. I'd only ask for one thing from the reader: to stop waiting for these companies to get better. Instead, learn enough technical skills so that you're no longer reliant on them. “You already have all the tools you need, so let's sharpen them!,” the guide would say. """ — https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/zachs-health-guide.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
xj9 9y ago
plays really well with git yes, but there are still some limitations that i've run up against (which i am trying to fix) when it comes to repos with a lot of history. you can work around this issue by using a lot of small repos, but once you reach a certain threshold it becomes impossible to clone a repo from ssb[0]. going further, you also cannot push repos beyond a certain size[1]. these are sample repos that these claims are true for, but i still have more measuring to do so i can say what the exact threshold is. i lean very heavily on the tech that i use to find the places that need improvement. that said, ssb is an amazing technology and quite new. it works very well for the social networking use case. with some work, we can make it fast/reliable enough for general applications. [0]: https://git.heropunch.io/%25SI144KecoPoa4uB8kGGUbC%2Fb6Mb4ePBmG9LbZffKAgw%3D.sha256/tree/2015 https://git.heropunch.io/%25SI144KecoPoa4uB8kGGUbC%2Fb6Mb4eP... [1]: https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/ https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/
mr_spothawk 9y ago
likewise, scuttlebutt is my primary digital social resource, and the #solarpunk community generally is incredibly inspiring to me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

gregknicholson 9y ago

> Smartphone manufacturers sell mesh-first mobile devices for the developing world I hope puri.sm is listening. This is what I want my Librem 5 to be!

mr_spothawk 9y ago
I would, without question, purchase this their device if it had mesh-first radios on-board.
nicole_f 9y ago
Hi, yes, we are listening :) First of all the Librem5 is as open as possible, i.e. if there is a way to support this or another kind of mesh networking then you will be able to add this function to the Librem5 - as long as the software needed for this is free and works on Linux on ARM (ARM64 to be more precise). There will be no restrictions from our side, none at all. But I also have to point out that we are bound to what we find on the market, concerning hardware and drivers. The latter can be modified to support what is needed for meshes but hardware usually is hard to change. We are currently looking for as good as possible free software supported WiFi and BT chips that do not require runtime firmware and are power saving enough for a mobile device. This turns out not to be very easy. Once we settle on some type we will check thoroughly for mesh requirements. So yes, your voice(s) are heard! And we will do our best to support mesh networking, in soft- and hardware on the Librem5. Cheers nicole

tannhaeuser 9y ago

I'm all for p2p (really), but how about taking back control (sorry) of the Web by actually developing and enforcing declarative/markup technologies and standards instead of praising JavaScript because "it's not half bad" and adding procedural features to the Web (APIs, WASM)? With the current state of affairs wrt privacy and self-proclaimed standardization bodies, I'm not sure the Web is worth preserving.

ashark 9y ago
HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connections or modify form data, isn't useful enough without that to justify the added bloat to the client. God, it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now. And it wouldn't be able to spy on you. A document-centric (once again) web that's somewhat less crippled than Gopher would be amazing, but we absolutely must cut out things like scripting in order to make the client trustworthy (and fast).
- JohnStrange 9y ago
  I'd like to see a return to semantic markup, accompanied by pragmatic information about the purpose of the data and its intended size. The data should also be strongly typed. Then leave it to the client how to display, how to edit, and how to select the data. The receiver should decide how to best display e.g. a list of 20000 names or a choice between 4 options on his device.
  - dec0dedab0de 9y ago
    Me too, except I would say strongly duck typed. As in there should be sensible defaults when possible. In any case, the designers won this argument a long time ago. They want to decide how you consume their page, it is not a document to them, it is a work of art. How dare you want to display it differently from their vision.

EGreg 9y ago

I like the phrase "local-first" software. It's been happening for a while: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/power-to-the-people/ https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/power-to-the-people/

romaniv 9y ago

The reason the Web needs rescuing is because it's not a particularly well-designed system that has been patched over and over again for the last quarter century. And now it has been degraded to a delivery layer for JavaScript apps, a poor RPC protocol and an overly complex UI rendering toolkit. It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing. If you look closely, cloud services created tools to easily do all those things and that's how they got in control. "The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." -- Alan Kay. A lot of web devs were enraged by his comment without listening to the context. He was talking about the lack of protocol-level solutions for resilience of the Web.

EGreg 9y ago
Yeah, the Internet had coalesced around one standard, TCP-IP, after fighting with national standards and networks like Minitel. Now with the Web, the approach has always been to define the front end standards for "user agents" and leave the back end standards to "someone else". Here is what would make the Web wayyy better: Support for content-addressable protocols via IPFS ans SAFE. You can already leverage SRI to get some of the "content addressable hashes" but you need a DHT to locate and host the stuff. That way the Web becomes resilient (no single points of failure and you can trust the content) while retaining all its front end goodness. No more concepts of DOMAINS at all, but rather, each resource of information can be an evolving community in itself. Like people collaborating on a document. I think this could be the standard for a new multiple-readers-multiple-writers decentralized web: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 We are working on a mobile browser and extensions for desktop browsers to do these things.
niftich 9y ago
> protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing It does [1][2][3]. It's not the most elegant, it's not without flaws, but it's there, and enough to build against. Proprietary services weren't bound by having to code against a standard, so they cranked out something quick (and mutually incompatible), skinned an attractive interface, offered it for free (!) and attracted lots of users, who in turn attracted more users with the network effect. This is why Facebook, Wikipedia, Google Docs, Github won, and protocols like WebDAV lost. This future was crafted by the makers of web browsers themselves: first by shifting the focus onto rendering arbitrary mediatypes delivered by HTTP from focusing on the intrinsic builtins of HTTP as a protocol, and later by trying to "standardize" the rich interactivity offered by the likes of Shockwave, Flash, and Silverlight, creating more and more APIs inside the browser that allowed client-side Javascript to communicate with the underlying system. Web developers aren't blameless, but today's web is exactly how Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, in reverse order, steered it since the late 1990s. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3253 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3253 [3] https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...

shak77 9y ago

If I wanted to rescue something from the Internet, it would not be the web

macawfish 9y ago
Would it be the children?
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Personally, I'm on team "kill it with fire". I wonder if there is a group for that?
dang 9y ago
Would you kindly stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?

niftich 9y ago

The IPv4 perspective is a red herring. NATting was indeed necessitated by IP address scarcity, but a domestic installation that does NAT comes with ancillary benefits, like giving you, the home user, a single place to control access to your network. In IPv6 it's nice that you have an address space that's not only big enough to accommodate every device, but large enough to even burn through addresses and treat them as disposable, but once IPv6 becomes widespread there will need to be some rethinking as to how to manage firewall rules between your own devices, how to segregate your portion of the network from the spurious (and sometimes malicious) traffic of everywhere else.

throwaway2048 9y ago
firewalling on a router/gateway gives you the same ability, and none of the downsides of NAT. Nat is in no way a requirement for this.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  Not to mention that you really need to focus on securing the endpoint anyway because an increasing number of your devices are mobile and aren't "home" an increasing amount of time anyway. The period of central router/gateway/NAT management made the most sense was when the majority of your home were desktops fixed in their locations in the same rooms. In a world of a majority of laptops and hand computers, worrying about the strength of your home router/gateway/NAT is increasingly silly, as those devices may spend as much time or more at your work, or the coffee shop down the street, as they do at "home".

gregknicholson 9y ago

There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density](http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you by a single corporation. 2. They want to communicate with other people they know, physically nearby-ish. 3. Sneakernet is never slower than talking in person. 4. Isolated mesh networks and comms with days of latency are viable for these new net users. 5. Get enough people using a mesh and the networks will start to connect. 6. Where the internet is already pervasive, privacy and autonomy advocates are resisting corporate control, and choosing decentralised alternatives. 7. For now, we can exploit the existing internet to handle long-distance. 8. But eventually, enough people will have the bottom-up mindset, and the weak links in the mesh will become worrying. 9. So a solution will emerge to fill in the gaps in the mesh, using ships / beacons / balloons / satellites / modulated whalesong.

staltz 9y ago
Good observations about the need for the Internet to handle long-distances. I wrote on scuttlebutt that telecommunication channels could become multi-modal like public transportation is often in Europe: https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25OryfD6hGpjiqwFkKyFnhVPZMPsZFgdFutEhzxycyolQ%3D.sha256 https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25OryfD6hGpjiqwFkKyFnhVPZMPsZF... Another way of bridging the gap in that white map is through data gossip: the person who leaves a village and comes back can bring data updates with them and share that with the village. Sneakernets in Cuba (as far as I know) work like that, but shouldn't be as fast as mesh gossip.
ashark 9y ago
How does a mesh cope with most end-user Internet-connected devices (phones) running on battery power, especially in less developed areas? Would we be back to needing infrastructure nodes with wall power, or solar, or whatever? This is what's keeping me from being over-the-Moon thrilled about stuff like IPFS—it's a bad fit for cell phones, which are most devices.

genki_teacher 9y ago

People were sounding the same alarm in the '90s with AOL. History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.

gregknicholson 9y ago
Who says it'll be a company?
- jlebrech 9y ago
  less design by commitee
glitcher 9y ago
Yes, the history of the early, open web, which now is in danger of being... history.
cJ0th 9y ago
Well they were kinda right. AOL was merely an early iteration of what we have now. Maybe another company will surpass FB but I am pretty sure from iteration to iteration it will be harder and harder to replace an incumbent since each round's winner will be more powerful than the previous one. AOL, for instance, was mostly an American thing. FB, otoh, has global power.
Chaebixi 9y ago
> History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook. Facebook has learned the same lesson, and is explicitly trying to keep it from ever happening again. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five...

niftich 9y ago

Content-addressed overlay networks work pretty well over the Internet, and they could work equally well on mesh networks (as the article posits), if not two rather awkward problems: storage at rest, and liveliness of a storage node. These two factors even interact to make the situation worse. Because at any point, nodes can drop off and you never know if this condition is temporary or permanent, a distributed datastore has to redundantly store everything. This needs much more space than just storing everything at its origin, as is done in location-addressed networks like Web. These are not insurmountable problems, of course; it's just that right now, conditions like storage on nodes, link asymmetry, traffic distribution asymmetry still favor centralization. And fundamentally, the operators of individual nodes (i.e. ordinary people) are often not very selfless, and not enough of them contribute to the health of the mesh even if they discretionarily choose the mesh: seeding ratios on BitTorrent networks that are not user-adjustable (e.g. old World of Warcraft downloader, Facebook patchsets) are much, much higher than seed ratios where the peer can bow out at any time, despite all of latter users choosing BitTorrent voluntarily.

gregknicholson 9y ago
> a distributed datastore has to redundantly store everything Scuttlebutt gets around this: you only store and rebroadcast your friends' stuff (and anything else relevant to you). You're actually seeing content from your local storage — which is why Scuttlebutt works seamlessly offline — so there's no need for altruism.
- malteof 9y ago
  Scuttlebutt?
  - niftich 9y ago
    "a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform" [1], also referenced in the article. [1] https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
jerkstate 9y ago

quickben 9y ago

Funny. Before DRM, spam, i-have-to-monetize daily 5 minute of bloging into a full time pay, unskipable 30s YouTube ads, profiling every possible user behavior and other shady shit like that: We wondered how can we improve the web. Now, we wonder how to save it.

soared 9y ago
Spam, scams, and bad ads have been around since the start, what internet were you using?
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  Spam, scams and badvertizements have been around seemingly since long before the internet.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  They were, but back then, that stuff seemed much more marginal, now it's seems front and center with even major players engaging in some bad behaviors.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Since the start of the web, arguably. Usenet used to be really pleasant to use apart from the first few weeks in September when a new bunch of college students had to be integrated into the system. Spammers blew up something wonderful for a quick buck.
r3bl 9y ago
I would say before algorithms started showing us different content even if we are subscribed to the same feed(s). DRM is hardly a problem unless you're using a handful of products, unskipable ads were hardly a problem before smartphones and their market stores took off, and spam was there since the Internet started. What is new is that Facebook, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and increasingly Twitter are all showing us different content, and our personal preferences (things we follow) are increasingly irrelevant to the information we're receiving. This all happened in this decade, and this is the decade where we started to fix instead of improve the web. I would point the breaking point somewhere around 2010-2011, when Google, YouTube and Facebook all decided to personalize the things we see.

dec0dedab0de 9y ago

Does anyone here have any experience with MANETs? I really like the idea, but is there any way to defend against malicious actors? Are there any protocols that are clear winners? Is the reason it hasn't caught on solely because the big ISPs are against the idea?

Chaebixi 9y ago
> Is the reason it hasn't caught on solely because the big ISPs are against the idea? While I like the idea, it seems like it would be hard to get the same consistent QOS as you do with a network built using fixed infrastructure.
elihu 9y ago
In general, if you allow anyone to be a router then anyone can advertise a low-cost route to anywhere, and then drop the packets. You might be able to combat that with some kind of decentralizes reputation system or policies that prefer existing routes that have been in use for awhile and are known to work, or that sends a few test packets over any new "suspicious" link before using it send real data. I don't know what current research says about this problem, or whether any current routing protocols attempt to deal with it at all. In practice, I expect that real wireless meshes can still be somewhat secure by operating as managed clusters of routers that don't peer with other clusters of routers without the administrator explicitly enabling peering. So for instance, you might have one neighborhood with a dozen houses with routers managed by some guy, and a nearby HOA with another cluster of routers managed by someone else, and they might find out about each others' networks and agree to create a bigger network by peering. So, your network's trust model can piggyback on the trust model of the real world -- if you know someone in real life, it's a lot less likely they're going to try to take down your network than some random person you don't know.

pfraze 9y ago

I worked on Secure Scuttlebutt and then founded Beaker. Happy to answer questions.

codeisawesome 9y ago
1. Is there still going to be room for entrepreneurship on this new Web? 2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create large amounts of revenues and profits? 3. Does this community also know about projects like OpenMined which seek to democratise access to data & infra to run ML algorithms on? Any pattern like reason you can think of, for it to have not come up in André’s post?
- pfraze 9y ago
  1. Yes. Economic models are challenging, especially if ads don't work well anymore. (One thing I'd point out is that most ad revenue is sucked up by Google and Facebook, and they're the entities most ripe for disruption.) A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clients only have the "rights" to consume and filter information, whereas servers have the "rights" to publish, moderate, and set the software. Clients have to borrow publishing rights from the servers, and that means that all authority is derived from the citizenry of servers. A peer-to-peer Web unifies publishing and consumption rights under one class of device (the "peer") and so it equally distributes the authority over moderation and software among the peers as well. I bring this up because it alters the service-driven packaging model for the Web. Rather than having software be delivered in a one-size-fits-all package from a given .com, the peer-to-peer Web is a customizable network of packages. There's no builtin authority over the composition of software. All users can customize and share customizations. Therefore no two devices have to share the same application code; they just need to share data formats and protocols. I'd keep an eye out for how software is packaged for non-hacker use in the p2p Web, because that's probably one place for economic models can emerge. It makes a lot of sense for indie programmers to think of themselves as content creators, and to then cultivate patreons around their modules and packages. For larger projects, we run an Open Collective [1] and have found some initial success there. The reality is, without a mechanism of user/data capture, it is very hard to create huge profits, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'd rather trade a situation where 1% of the population gets stinking rich if it meant we get the general wealth of FOSS and open data. I think enough incentives will remain to do good new work. 1. https://opencollective.com/beaker https://opencollective.com/beaker

coding123 9y ago

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search terms (that mind you are so freaking obscure) all go to this same site. It's driving her nuts. At this point SEO has been totally gamed and search is totally useless now. We NEED an alternative.

navls 9y ago
Not sure if I am misunderstanding the problem, but are you aware you can exclude terms from the search results? For example with google "baseball cards -ebay" will omit pages where ebay is mentioned.
jerkstate 9y ago
I have a similar problem with SEO for recipes. There are tons of recipes SEO'd to a certain site that has a registration/paywall that frequently appear at the top of search results. Luckily they are relatively easy to avoid in the search results.
- coding123 9y ago
  We have installed a few blockers in chrome to help with the mess, but no luck for my phone's browser which she uses quite a bit too. It's just sad that all content for a given domain of interest is quickly aggregating on just a few domain names. Also as a non-facebook user I am so saddened by the user experience facebook gives to people that are trying to look at a Restaurant menu where the idiotic restaurant decided to put their site up on Facebook. No employee of facebook or 66% of the users are going to complain about entering a Facebook CAPTCHA every damn-f-ing time because they are all logged in already.
chubot 9y ago
Hm, what about searching Amazon? Or Bing or Duck Duck Go? Do they have the same problems?

austincheney 9y ago

If you really want to rescue the web find a way to restrict adware, spyware, and the like. I upgraded internet at my house to 1gbps (about 890mbps down and 920mbps up) and I hardly notice any speed difference surfing the web. Sad. Everything else is fast as hell though.

bo1024 9y ago
The good news is we have tools (browser plugins) to help us take control of our own machines while web browsing. The bad news is that sites are actively hostile to these tools. I think it's as much an incentives problem as a technological problem.
maxyme 9y ago
I have this too. Sadly I think it's more likely due to the fact that some of the largest websites have a speed limit per connection.

dash2 9y ago

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a ride from a driver. The author provides no evidence that the services of Airbnb, Uber etc. have no value added. These companies carefully designed interfaces to help us find what we need. If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups.

mr_spothawk 9y ago
I don't see where the argument is made that there is no added value. Instead, i think the author rightly points out that it is possible to do it a different way.
schnable 9y ago
And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.

zxy_xyz 9y ago

Now we just need to save the web from slow JS apps. Is there something doing that right now by chance?

tomcooks 9y ago
You, by clicking on the "reader mode" of your browser and telling the owner of the site about it

dfabulich 9y ago

In my view of history, P2P takes off and does well when it's faster for end-users than centralized solutions; P2P solutions fail when centralized solutions are faster. This holds regardless of the political advantages (or disadvantages) of P2P. BitTorrent is often faster for large files than centralized solutions, so people use it. (It's still inconvenient for a new user to kick off their first torrent, but WebTorrent will help.) Freenet is essentially never faster than alternatives, and so it has stumbled. If some future P2P network can outperform HTTP, then it will succeed; otherwise, it will fail. Regardless, unless we see a breakthrough in battery technology, it will never be the case that lots of people will carry around mobile phones in their pockets whose radios are always on and participating in a mesh network. The battery would die in an hour or two. P2P networks work best when coupled with reliable power networks. But if you have reliable power, you can probably set up a reliable wired network, too.

workthrowaway27 9y ago
I think this is an accurate assessment of how things play out in the real world. It seems like many people here are attracted to decentralized solutions for ideological reasons, but don't realize/acknowledge that the vast majority of people don't care and will go with whatever is convenient for them.
adamcharnock 9y ago
Maybe there will be a time in the future when the necessary factors will all coincide. Improved battery technology, slowing Internet speeds (for Reasons), and change in the public's attitudes (probably starting with those generation or two below us). Anything attempting to solve the problem before this time could be cursed as "before its time".

robotbikes 9y ago

What makes people use centralized services is their utility. People will pick up new tools and repurpose them if they find them useful. In theory the web is supposed to be about communication and connection. I think the emphasis on building a local network is a good idea. P2P mesh is cool but until it provides opportunities that don't exist otherwise it is unlikely to surpass. The notion of building this for places without internet access is a positive angle but also tricky. Charity is seldom as successful or scalable as user driven initiatives. A lot of mobile phones now exist in places w/o "internet" per se. But from my understanding say converting a 3 year old smartphone into a mesh 1st device seems challenging from a wifi driver and power consumption and app perspective. Balancing the project of design that is easy for non-technical people with the notion of eating your own dogfood one can theorize about building alternatives to the hierarchical Internet. This is the challenge though, figuring out how to build utility that is superior to the walled gardens and is in the hands of the users to control.

gregknicholson 9y ago
> The notion of building this for places without internet access is a positive angle but also tricky. Charity is seldom as successful or scalable as user driven initiatives. Scuttlebutt's founder lives on a boat. There's no need for charity. We're all “us”. > converting a 3 year old smartphone into a mesh 1st device seems challenging from a wifi driver and power consumption and app perspective. Yeah, actually engineering the bloody thing is always the tricky bit. > This is the challenge though, figuring out how to build utility that is superior to the walled gardens and is in the hands of the users to control. Yeah, actually designing the bloody thing is always the tricky bit.

deleted 9y ago

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tobbyb 9y ago

The first choke point is the ISP. You are completely dependent on the ISP or mobile provider to get on the network. Once on the network there are multiple choke points around IP addresses, dns, ca authorities, registries and more. As long as you are dependent on anyone to get on the network it by definition can't be decentralized. Consumer wireless tech is heavily regulated and governments are extremely paranoid about communication channels they don't control and can't monitor. This is unlikely to change because there are no incentives to develop technology that truly empowers individuals, there is no profit in it, it's a social good. If developed it will be demonized and made illegal, and limited to minority dissenters, the general population is unlikely to go through hoops to get on a network.

ytjohn 9y ago
He takes a while to get there, and doesn't quite drive the point home, but this is actually what André Staltz is proposing. Mesh-first devices. If we start at the bottom of his article, here's basically the plan: 1. Work on polishing IPFS, CJDNS, SSB[1], Beaker Bowser and some others into a "mesh-first" setup. 2. Sell, subsidize, or outright gift mobile devices to offline users in Africa (I'm going to assume these are android smartphones) setup to automatically join a mesh network, with these apps installed. 3. Users will transport these phones around, adding and creating content. Their phones will automatically sync content with other devices as they come in range. In general, only content that the user is interested in (that they follow) will be synchronized, though some may act as hubs syncing all manner of content for later redistribution. 4. As usage grows, there will be various regional and national mesh networks that build up. I think a good comparison is to Cuba's weekly sneakernet[2] distribution, just with wireless mesh. [1]: Secure Scuttlebut is one of the author's creations: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ [2]: https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revolution/ https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...

zeep 9y ago

I thought that was what the web archive and similar projects were doing...

VectorLock 9y ago

If he figures out how to make a good mesh network and bootstrap it then everything else is easy. That blogpost was pretty much a long winded way of saying "we don't have a mesh network that works."

idooontcare 9y ago

You mean rescue from facebook's and google's agenda ? Mind controll ? Cmon, people love to be controlled Seriously, people want to put whole life in facebook

feelin_googley 9y ago

After reading the FCC Chairman's idea of "the Internet" in his Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (below), I think maybe a better plan would be to rescue the internet from the web. Every example he references of internet usage is web usage or email. He does mention "DNS and caching" but in the context of the potential effect of removing these from the services available to users. (para. 37) The general tone of the NPRM seems to be that an ISP can and will block or throttle any non-web or non-email traffic. That could include any peer-to-peer innovations that seek to restore the original functionality of the internet, such as those mentioned by the author. On the contrary, the dissent by Commissioner Clyburn specifically mentions Skype as an example of internet usage. He believes the traditional notion of "permission-less innovation" is under threat from the Chairman's proposed approach. https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-17-60A1.pdf https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-17-60A1.pd... The author highlights the importance of distinguishing "the web" from the internet. Perhaps nothing is more important. The internet has more value than the web. The web is severely limited in functionality. The internet, still underexploited in its potential, does not suffer from the same limitations.

mwcampbell 9y ago

Unless I missed something, this article lacks a call to action (or multiple calls to action for different people). What can individual readers of this article do to help realize this plan? For example, if I have money, where can I give it?

deleted 9y ago
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bane 9y ago

For us "old" people who remember the internet before the web -- one of the things that's really different about the modern internet is the very limited set of protocols and applications that the average user interacts with. It really used to be that every different service type mapped to a different protocol and HTTP (and HTTPS) has just sort of subsumed everything. Back in the old days to minimally use the internet you'd have to know at least telnet, ftp, nntp, gopher (maybe), smtp, pop and maybe a handful of others. (okay, maybe modern users use more protocols than I'm admitting to, but it's very obscured these days but so many different applications just ride on HTTP(S) anyways). There's really nothing preventing some motivated group to just spin up an entirely new kind of service that "fixes" all that's wrong with the web, custom protocol and application stack. "But the network effect!" And that's something us old timers remember, we remember lots of great services spinning up and down and even when the web was just a handful of sites. The web earned its network by having better general utility than other things that were attempted, but why can't a new better service eventually earn it? (In the meanwhile us hacker types will enjoy having a cool new playground to muck around on for a few years).

acdha 9y ago
> There's really nothing preventing some motivated group to just spin up an entirely new kind of service that "fixes" all that's wrong with the web, custom protocol and application stack. Firewalls and security policy. The internet is a much less trusting place these days[1] and anything too new will have adoption issues once it gets out of a core hacker group. 1. Remember IRIX shopping with telnet and a guest/guest login enabled by default to “foster the spirit of collaboration”?