11 ms·

Introducing the Dweb

• patkai 8y ago
  Ten years late, but hopefully not too late. In 2007 I worked in a project that promised a distributed IoT platform. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was called.
• stakhanov 8y ago
  What is this article even about? Sounds to me like simply someone making up a word, "Dweb", in the hope that it'll go into common usage, so they can later claim they invented it.
  • lucideer 8y ago
    "dweb" and "dex" have both been used a bit within the d-whatever community (that community being users/advocates of Mastodon/Matrix/DAT/Beaker/Scuttlebutt/IPFS/Peertube), though the latter is more common, and the former is usually used to refer to protocol handlers enabling centralised websites to refer to the decentralised ecosystem, rather than as a name for the ecosystem as a whole. So I don't think they're claiming to invent it. I do find it odd however that it's pretty much a zero-information lead-in article; it doesn't seem like this approach will hook many in unless they already know what they're referring to in advance.
  • Nition 8y ago
    The "Have you ever..." examples aren't exactly the most exciting either. For the first one, we already have Archive.org. For the second one, we already have flash drives. For the third one, well, I'm not sure distributed sites will be a whole lot more stable than traditional ones. Someone still has to be there supporting it.
    • RpFLCL 8y ago
      I think they're exciting. Archive.org might let you _see_ an old version of a website but it hardly lets you _use_ an old version of that site. Especially if the site in question is a dashboard-like service or single page application. (Imagine google docs, trello, or an amazon service's dashboard.) This is also true with apps. I had no way to go back to the old version of my feed reader app after they updated it and filled it with ads. Flash drives aren't an option if any of the devices in question is lacking of a USB port. My phone has no way to accept a flash drive without some sort of adapter that I don't own. And you're right that _someone_ still has to be there supporting the app. The goal of the distributed approach is that that someone can be any member of the distributed network. It no longer has to be a single central entity that can vanish without recourse.
  • hardwaresofton 8y ago
    It seems to be the first in a series of blog posts about the distributed web as it sits now. > This is the first post in a series. We’ll introduce projects that cover social communication, online identity, file sharing, new economic models, as well as high-level application platforms. All of this work is either decentralized or distributed, minimizing or entirely removing centralized control. I do agree they're making up a term, but naming/phrasing can change/shift dialogs and the default perspective and is actually important. Whether it's a good use of their time is another thing.
    • simen 8y ago
      It's a terrible name. Many of these projects have nothing to do with the web (the three concrete examples cited were two filesharing protocols and one cryptocurrency, none of which are about serving websites). And it's awkward to say.
      • Razengan 8y ago
        It's bringing horrible flashbacks of when "blog" was forced upon us; an ugly, dumb-sounding term that I still try not to acknowledge. "D-net" might have been better.
        • krapp 8y ago
          "Vlog" is even worse. It sounds like someone's about to vomit.
          • MrEldritch 8y ago
            Try actually pronouncing "Dweb." Say it a few times. Really get that mouthfeel. "Vlog" almost sounds cool in comparison.
            • deleted 8y ago
              [deleted]
            • 8y ago
  • imhoguy 8y ago
    DHTML came to my mind when I saw the title.
  • a_imho 8y ago
    Absolutely nothing. Which is coincidentally the answer to the question What does Moz://a have to do with any of this? too.
• gcb0 8y ago
  Starting the count down to mozilla currency token ICO... :(
  • simias 8y ago
    I was slightly worried about that as well but after reading through the article it doesn't seem to be about blockchains or cryptocurrencies, although we'll have to wait until the next posts to really figure out what it's actually about.
  • mtaksrud 8y ago
    Decentralised or distributed does not necessarily imply blockchain just because the blockchain has these features it could also be other things such as activitypub etc...
    • Yoric 8y ago
      Or distributed hashtables.
  • chj 8y ago
    Not necessarily a bad thing. Given Mozilla's track record, that would be a good investment opportunity.
• vntok 8y ago
  That "decentralized" image makes no sense at all. It's essentially the same one as the "centralized" one. What a joke.
  • lucideer 8y ago
    The difference is not all nodes are connected to a single central node, some are connected through 2 or more hops. One might argue this is the same as the current web where we have proxies, load balancers, etc. but the difference is the intermediate nodes are users. One could also argue this is the same as tor, but the difference is the technology is more at an application level then at a network level, and additionally that every user is effectively equivalent to someone running an exit node.
    • jwilk 8y ago
      But they give DNS as an example of a centralized system. Huh?
      • lucideer 8y ago
        Yeah that's very odd. I was just referring to the image used.
      • falcolas 8y ago
        One company is in control of the TLDs, and of the root name servers. That we've had DNS names blacklisted from being served (no matter how distasteful the services provided by those DNS names may be) shows that there is insufficient decentralization of authority over DNS.
  • cdoxsey 8y ago
    And he uses DNS as an example of a centralized system, but based on the image, it's a decentralized system. It's a multi-tier system with many sources of truth, and many layers of caching.
    • gregknicholson 8y ago
• birracerveza 8y ago
  I am actually really happy to see that Mozilla actually acknowledged decentralization as a possibility. Too many people in the tech industry (and outside) got scared by cryptocurrencies that they now immediately associate decentralization to pyramid schemes and dismiss it immediately, disregarding the possibilities it might open up. Here I hope that Mozilla's "Dweb" will bring something new to the table. I'll be following.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• billpg 8y ago
  Freenet?
• Comevius 8y ago
  Decentralization is never going to solve our hate speech, net neutrality or data exploitation problems. You either have the majority performing their civic duties, holding each other responsible or you don't. These are not technological, rather civic, political, even educational issues, but if you only have a hammer...
  • doombolt 8y ago
    I don't see why you can't have the majority of active community performing civic duties. Look at Stack Overflow. Most of active users vote down, vote up, flag inappropriate content. Then, people become tacit at expressing their view, knowing they will not be sidestepped by a loud and inappropriate populist. This is compared to unmoderated communities, which turn into shouting matches and then the most fervent get permanent bans. You can't create a community with a ban hammer only.
  • hardwaresofton 8y ago
    Those problems are unsolvable. But I can say that decentralization does in some small way constitute an attempt to solve the net neutrality issue. If built in the right way, a decentralized internet that sits on top of the "regular" internet can make it difficult to track (and charge different prices for) for certain kinds of traffic individually. Yes, you'll probably just get charged the highest possible rate (if the ISP can't figure out if they can give you subsidies or not), but the shift to difficult-by-default tracking is a good step in the right direction IMO.
    • Comevius 8y ago
      Unsolvable with a hammer (computer) at least. Such decentralized internet would be ripe for exploitation, only it would be even harder to tell apart those who are responsible. Instead of all that, go contact your representatives and your ISP. You either perform your civic duties or you don't. Despite what the 21th century made us believe there is no app for that.
  • LukeB42 8y ago
    > Decentralization is never going to solve our hate speech Now I know what IP addresses concepts are originating from. > net neutrality I can nowretrieve ostensibly blocked resources via my peers, instead. > data exploitation Use a DNS whitelist for this one.
• hardwaresofton 8y ago
  Glad mozilla is tackling this -- I think this is the next step. Forget trying to fight SOPA/net neutrality, whatever else where it comes up, let's just abandon the "traditional" internet all together where it makes sense and make something that's correct-by-construction in so far as we can make it (like an "internet" that does as much as it can to prevent centralization). Note that this isn't some random position they've taken, they also funded stuff like the Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society (WINS) challenge[0] [0]: https://wirelesschallenge.mozilla.org/#winners https://wirelesschallenge.mozilla.org/#winners
  • arnoooooo 8y ago
    > Forget trying to fight SOPA/net neutrality Please don't. Political discussion is needed to determine how we live together. Techonological solutions are just that. They are neutral and can be used for good or bad. If we don't discuss things, they will be used for bad. Attacks against net neutrality are just a symptom of people who want too much power. If they can't have it through the net, they will try by other means. These people need to be fought.
• jokoon 8y ago
  The problem with decentralization is the optimization and security. Plan 9 seemed to get it right at the core, but I don't know what it could be used for. With slow upload speed between peers, you have to change your networking model to have a high level of fault tolerance. There are many possible ideas to have about a decentralised internet, but should one integrate a software, make it better and wait to make a protocol later? The problem is that you have to change almost everything if you want it to work well.
  • swiley 8y ago
    Plan9 is very much centralized, that’s really its big selling point coming from Unix; you can centralize your distributed Unix machines.
• dtx1 8y ago
  sounds a lot like zeroweb to me
• legostormtroopr 8y ago
  How do you stop both hate speech and censorship? If you stop hate speech you are effectively censoring ideas. And then you have the challenge of who defines “hate speech”. If you prevent censorship, you’re allowing hate speech because there will always be people who abuse a free speech environment.
  • albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    This is a false dichtomy. We should spend time building an inclusive, diverse and fair society that reduces the amount of hate speech overall and the net impact of hate speech. Then you don't need to censor anyway.
    • Eridrus 8y ago
      Sure, but this article is about technical solutions, not social solutions, and technical solutions face this trade-off.
      • Sir_Substance 8y ago
        This thing that you see as a problem that desperately needs a solution, I do not see as a problem. So I don't see the trade-off. There are lots of incredibly racist people out there using email. Email does not need a solution to prevent racist people using it.
    • otabdeveloper1 8y ago
      Totally. If all the good people come together a kill all the bad people (maybe put them in special places and call them 'camps', need to think a bit more about this), then the world will be a paradise without crime. (Like murder, for example.)
    • naasking 8y ago
      > We should spend time building an inclusive, diverse and fair society that reduces the amount of hate speech overall and the net impact of hate speech. Then you don't need to censor anyway. So right, society would just be perfect if we could all think the same way! Terry Pratchett said it best, "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions."
• cimmanom 8y ago
  I’m immensely skeptical of the ability of a decentralized or distributed web to solve any of the problems mentioned in the article. It reminds me of a checklist that used to circulate on Slashdot in response to any suggestion to curb email spam. One of the items was: “you’re proposing a technical solution to a social problem”.
  • xyzzy123 8y ago
    Email is an interesting example I think, a fundamentally decentralised protocol that has become very centralised because the abuse was so hard to deal with. Other “not centralised” systems have met similar fates due to network effects, usenet springs to mind, and git to a lesser extent.
  • teddyh 8y ago
    > It reminds me of a checklist that used to circulate on Slashdot in response to any suggestion to curb email spam. It think you mean this one, but it does not contain that phrase: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
    • cimmanom 8y ago
      Yeah, I think it was a bit shorter, so probably an earlier version of that. And maybe not the exact phrase, but the concept.
• madethemcry 8y ago
  Seems to be a teaser for more articles about dweb yet to come. So here two links for people interested in this topic: 1. "Decentralized Web Summit 2018" is happening just now (July 31 - August 02 https://decentralizedweb.net/ https://decentralizedweb.net/. I'm looking forward watching the talks once released. 2. This year at JSConf EU 2018 Tara Vancil talked about Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com) an experimental peer-to-peer browser. This was really fascinating to listen to. Here is Tara's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_WvfF3FN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_WvfF3FN8
  • panic 8y ago
    Beaker is really cool! There's a big list of sites built for it here: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/explore https://github.com/beakerbrowser/explore.
    • deanclatworthy 8y ago
      Beaker in theory is great, and so is the demo. Soon as you try and put anything other than a few small files on it, the whole client crashes. There is an open issue about it [1]. We have a long way to go. [1] https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/952 https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/952
  • mattlondon 8y ago
    Thanks for the link to beaker - this is really interesting. I was curious what the difference with IPFS (that I had heard of) and Dat (that I had not heard of) - they have a FAQ entry on this on their page: https://docs.datproject.org/faq#dat-vs https://docs.datproject.org/faq#dat-vs
    • mattlondon 8y ago
      Just looking into this a bit more, the video briefly skims over their "Fritter" demo without going into detail. I didn't grok what it was doing from the video so dug deeper. This is basically a twitter clone (https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter/blob/master/README....), but the difference is that your profile and your posts (i.e. all your data) is stored in your own "archive" stored on Dat, and the APIs they have written simply load up that archive over Dat to get all your details (and cache it to provide some performance) WebDB source here that explains it: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/webdb https://github.com/beakerbrowser/webdb So you can go and edit/delete your posts and profile from the data on your computer, and it is updated in the Fritter application instantly. Posts you make from the app automatically appear in the files in your local archive too. That is pretty cool! In light of GDPR this is really interesting and potentially huge - you could imagine a lot of use cases for this where you are really in control of your data. I believe that only you can edit your own archive since only you have the private key - posts from Fritter made by you are writing to your own archive so that is how they handle auth I think. Question for anyone familiar with Dat: how do I properly secure access to my data? E.g. instead of the Fritter application, what if there was an ecommerce application? I put my home address, paypal/credit card etc data in my own archive that the ecommerce site uses. How can I make sure that only the ecommerce site can access that? I know in the FAQ it is basically relying on security by obscurity, but is there anything more concrete than that? It would be nice if asymmetric keys were somehow pinned to a Dat archive so that I could still edit my archive in plain text still and then have the application transparently encrypt it with the ecommerce site's public key so that I could be sure that only those with the ecommerce site's private key could unencrypt it. Also, are there common "micro-formats" for common applications? E.g. looks like Fritter has its particular format that it uses - is there a defined format for this that would allow me to reuse the same archive on another service? You can imagine the ecommerce one being very useful - no more entering your name, address and credit card over and over!
• yCloser 8y ago
  pied piper ?
  • LeonM 8y ago
    You are being downvoted, but I had the exact same thought. This sounds like 'the new internet'
• owens99 8y ago
  Was excited for this and then the, "have you ever" section totally lost me. Am I the only one whom none of these ever?
• jlebrech 8y ago
  something similar to https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
• StreamBright 8y ago
  I am wondering how can you achieve this with the current network layout where most of the core elements of the network is owned by big corporations.
  • LukeB42 8y ago
    You could have a private web on something like CJDNS. Sounds a bit sad though.
• smadge 8y ago
  DNS is a distributed system, basically a giant distributed database. I don't know why the article calls it a centralized system.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    The records themselves are centralized. You can't get an authoritative name from anywhere except the authoritative name server. Everything else is just caching and proxying. If a domain's authoritative name server is down, you can't get records for that domain. In a decentralized protocol, other name servers that had nothing to do with that domain could give you the records for the downed nodes. But how do we know it's authentic, or up to date? And now we go down the decentralization rabbit hole...
    • smadge 8y ago
      Thanks!
  • y04nn 8y ago
    There is only 13 IPs for DNS Root name servers (928 servers as of 3 June 2018 thanks to anycas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server http://www.root-servers.org/ http://www.root-servers.org/
• giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Makes me think of the scenes in Cowboy Bebop where Ed is 'browsing the web' or 'cyberspace' it is so cool looking, Ed is like a fish swimming through and seeing every single website by moving through them in some sort of 3 Dimensional interface. If such a web existed I would buy those fancy goggles just to be able to discover sites without google, just 'browse' the web literally and discover new types of sites that Google would of never have found otherwise (deep web they call it?).
  • caseyw 8y ago
    I remember discovering new sites from people who hosted on geocities, lycos, angelfire etc. (I feel old) Things don't seem so wild anymore :D
    • giancarlostoro 8y ago
      I remember those days too. Geocities had a directory full of sites they hosted, also I remember Maxpages, some magazines I subscribed to (Anime / Gundam) had a maxpages website, no domain, just a maxpages URL. Amazing how times have changed where you gotta have a domain. In Japan this is not so, you can be under a hosting provider's domain and it's still acceptable. The only remaining equivalent now is probably Neocities? Would love to hear of others.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• hessenwolf 8y ago
  Having worked a bunch of years in finance, Excel has more impact than any other single tool.
• z3t4 8y ago
  What we together can do for the decentralized Internet is to adapt the new IP protocol so everyone can participate bi-directional (p2p) without the need of a server middle-ware. And also make devices and applications secure by default eg. not leave them wide open on the Internet unless necessary.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• tenfold 8y ago
  This looks like another case of a spec/technology that is searching for a problem to solve. The first three bullet points are mere 'first world problems'. Hate speech and harassment on social networks can be addressed by regulators placing responsibility on social networks. Most regulation (e.g. GDPR) does guide behaviour of corporates. Yes, some of them subvert it but that doesn't mean the system is critically flawed. It's then just a case of increasing independence of the regulators and stronger enforcement. The remaining issues can be addressed through various existing political levers, look at how the EU squashed ridiculous cellular roaming rates between EU countries. Decentralisation of networks just seems like another idealistic distraction of human intellect (like cryptocurrencies) but that's just my own opinion.
• tw1010 8y ago
  Cool! But I'm not sure I can buy into it will all my heart unless I know filters against "hate speech, harassment and other attacks on social networks" won't have a high false-positive rate motivated by idea that it's worth trading away opinions at the tail by non-agreeables, for the upside of civil obedience and consensus.
• ldng 8y ago
  So, centralized is greener ?
• paultopia 8y ago
  Are they... making Pied Piper?!
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ken 8y ago
  "Have you ever ... Had a website or app you love get updated to a new version, and you wished to go back to the old version?" I've wished this about web browsers as much as about web sites, but Mozilla seems to be moving in the opposite direction there. I feel that this is not, in fact, a goal of the project at all, but merely an incidental feature of its current architecture.
• jakobegger 8y ago
  I think a ready-to-use peer-to-peer network component for service discovery would help a lot. Something like Bonjour/Zeroconf on the LAN, only for the whole internet. A lot of apps and services don't really need to be centralized, eg. messaging, file sharing, online games... But the problem is that writing peer-to-peer networking code is difficult, so people just set up a central server. If there was a ready-to-use library that people could just use, a lot of devs would probably consider that. Would make scaling a lot cheaper... (unfortunately everyone just talks about blockchains nowadays, and isn't interested in solving old problems)
• gglitch 8y ago
  This thread is making me realize that proponents of the "dweb" for conventional, popular use will probably want to figure out messaging for it that doesn't activate someone's strongly-held opinions on [hate|free] speech.
• desireco42 8y ago
  BeakerBrowser is the way to go. They already figured everything out, we just need to support them.