35 ms·

Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

532 points by carsonfarmer 8y ago

microcolonel 8y ago
Back to the future! (looking forward to the past?)
icc97 8y ago
I hadn't heard of the Dweb, the term appears to have been coined by Mozilla [0]. [0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/
- lgierth 8y ago
  Nah, long before that, by the dweb community and the Internet Archive, leading up to the first Decentralized Web Summit / DWeb Summit in 2016 :) https://2016.decentralizedweb.net/ https://2016.decentralizedweb.net/
jotm 8y ago
How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others? This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online. Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe. Fix the users - save the Internet! :)
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  It will always be a struggle, just like the offline world. It doesn’t mean you give up, we haven’t defected to a new world order offline so why do it online?
- bradgessler 8y ago
  It will probably look and feel a lot like how Github has effectively centralized git repos. At least in this world if we don’t like how somebody is centralizing something it can be easily and quickly moved.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  I think a lot about this. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power from accumulating within any one party and "evening it out" among everyone. The applicability of D&G's ideas on the war machine to our current problem of platform power is immediately apparent. A centralized platform is exactly like a state apparatus. In our situation the collective mechanisms of inhibition might be something like stronger/more proactive antitrust laws to break up/nationalize entities that become infrastructural components of the society. But as you've mentioned, I think this problem of "uneven development" is a feature of any marketplace-like structure. In sufficiently large numbers, a power law tends to assert itself with no other checks on power. This is why blockchains by themselves won't solve the problem. The debate, then, shifts to be about whether this is a feature or a bug, which is something that I'm never sure about. To close, another quote from ATP comes to mind ("smooth space" is another term they use for nomadic spaces): > Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.
  - hestefisk 8y ago
    Awesome to see others on HN loving D&G. But perhaps also power is cyclical. When the web was first popularised, it had the same potential as what DWeb has now. TCP/IP was written to be inherently distributed and provide resilient routing. Then, as soon as it starts to threaten existing power structures, forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’. It becomes part of the rhizome, the rhizomatic system of power, that the new system (in this case TCP/IP / www) set out to challenge, creating an even more complex, ever-evolving rhizome of power (surveillance, paywalls, censorship). The same thing happened with other revolutions throughout history — the power base they set out to challenge, transmorphed into a similar power structure as an unintended consequence.
    - 8y ago
- golemiprague 8y ago
  Fixing the users usually brings more blood and sorrow than not fixing them, equality of outcome is not practical. All we can do is find some middle path with some checks and balances.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  It's not really technological or social, it's logistical. We've had all kinds of redundant network topologies that used independent networks for decades. The internet is decentralized, and it works pretty well, all things considered. The web is fairly decentralized, too: DNS is independent of a registrar is independent of a network service provider and all are independent of ISP's, and even those are independent of backbones. The only thing that isn't very decentralized is the client-server IP/TCP/HTTP model. You can provide decentralized versions of HTTP services, but those are the things that are the most costly and inconvenient to decentralize. It can be done, but it's a huge pain with very little benefit.
  - hestefisk 8y ago
    HTTP is client / server (session) based, but TCP / IP certainly isn’t. I’m is act as a client / server protocol because we tell it to, but IP networking was written to be distributed / decentralised so as to provide better resilience, unlike other networking standards at that time (token ring, anyone?).
    - peterwwillis 8y ago
      TCP is connection-oriented, and each connection is a session. IP is decentralized, but the way it's used now in consumer devices makes initiating connections to them difficult and dangerous. Any realistic hope of a successful new distributed web should address this problem, though probably the current solution is "have clients join a private network and route back through it", completely side-stepping firewall concerns. If you ignore the concerns, I guess these protocols aren't that big a stumbling block.
- r32a_ 8y ago
  Imho it comes to incentives and different factions keeping each other in check, the same way it's done in Bitcoin and in some ways in Democracy. Although it's important to note that Decentralised systems are different to Distributed systems. In decentralized systems, there exist parties with more influence than others but none of those has enough influence to overpower all of the other ones. You could see this play out every time any party has tried to take full control of Bitcoin. So far everyone has failed
- matchagaucho 8y ago
  And eventually a decentralized node will become the new central node for the next big thing. It's all cyclical.
- zoomablemind 8y ago
  The very notion of the present Internet is grounded on the network infrastructure that is formed through ISPs. Everyone needs a gateway and a 'bus' to reach the desired end-point. Most ISPs still limit the upstream bandwidth for consumers and charge a premium making it a friction point. In a way the centralization is just a logical outcome of such 'rationing'. Distributed network will even more depend on the ISPs due to self-serving nature. Perhaps the 'decentralized' web should also address the very foundation of the network - the network infrastructure and access to it. Does Internet need to depend on the ISPs?
moltar 8y ago
I thought pied piper solved it already
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
"lose your password and you lose access to everything" - I'm sorry but this UX blunder just won't fly. If we are to have decentralized web we'll need services for key recovery.
- CodeWriter23 8y ago
  I think you mean "services for account exploitation and warrantless search by law enforcement"
  - UpshotKnothole 8y ago
    I, and I suspect many other people, often have online profiles and existences and we simply don’t care about the government seeing it. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like a high security option for some things, but most of what I do online is frankly trivial nonsense. I’d be much more upset if I lost access to it forever than I would if some jackbooted thug decided to snoop around it. Why does everything need to be the digital equivalent of a Supermax prison? I want the full range from a guy on furlough to Hannibal Lector fullly restrained, mask and all. If you’re only willing to offer me the “Lector” package, I’m going to pass.
    - CodeWriter23 8y ago
      I'm more concerned about criminals using such proposed credential recovery procedures to rob me. Thanks however for sharing your views about how we should all trust the government without question.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    If public blockchains prevail then everything is already public and traceable to a single individual. Search wouldn't even be necessary. As long as financial gateways are tied into decentralized web, AML/KYC will prevent total anonymity so there is always room for forensic services.
- Hnrobert42 8y ago
  Maybe a digital locker for your password that can only be decrypted by the password of 3 out of 5 friends.
empath75 8y ago
> And one of those is speed. Because of the way the DWeb works differently from the current web, it should intrinsically be faster This seems wrong to me.
- naasking 8y ago
  It depends what's meant by "distributed". A content-addressable network could very well be faster because of the pervasive caching and it's immune to (D)DoS attacks. Things that aren't accessed frequently by a lot of people would be much slower.
- lbriner 8y ago
  I think the logic is that instead of everything going via a handful of servers at the big companies, it goes through many more thousands of individual PCs but of course, that depends on the technology used. Torrents should be faster but only if lots of people seed and don't simply download and disconnect.
  - na85 8y ago
    Torrents themselves are often faster but it destroys the speed of anything else on the same pipe.
    - voxadam 8y ago
      I found that configuring Smart Queue Management (SQM) on my OpenWrt router drastically improved this issue. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/... https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm-details https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/... https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechnical/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechnica...
avhwl 8y ago
There are inherent benefits to large, centralized platforms. Users, especially content creators, desire a large network of users and excellent UX, both of which have typically been properties of centralized systems or at least far easier to achieve with centralized systems. Every decentralized social network thus far has failed, and the modestly successful ones (Mastodon, for example) are in fact federated. Many of the problems alluded to in this article, in particular the privacy risk of centralized data, are more effectively solved by policy changes and iterated technology (differential privacy as well as bread-and-butter cryptography) rather than furious hand-waving about blockchain protocols.
IThoughtYouGNU 8y ago
Lol, they mention Filecoin which has no product and not Storj or Sia
orasis 8y ago
Large systems want to centralize for the sake of efficiency. I was among the first wave of P2P hackers in the 2000s and we learned the hard way that decentralization leaves a LOT to be desired.
- antt 8y ago
  Not to mention that back then we a performance ratio of edge to node that was order of magnitude better than the one we have today. A laptop today and one from 2010 don't have that much difference in performance, a data center from 2010 and one from today are day and night. And who will pay for it? With experience Xanadu seems like the only solution. The reason why it's in development hell is because the problem it's trying to solve is so hard.
- lolive 8y ago
  Remember when Audiogalaxy arrived in the P2P world. It was a (limited) form of centralization. But it made the P2P MUCH more usable.
kickscondor 8y ago
Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "editable copy" of a website. It's a choice in the address bar. * Making an "editable copy" doesn't have to mean you're now editing raw HTML. An editable copy can direct how it is edited through JS. (See the recently released "dead-lite" for an example of this.) All these attempts are exciting but I'm actually starting to use Beaker because it's so useful even without adoption.
- styfle 8y ago
  Can you explain what you can use beaker browser for, even without adoption?
  - kickscondor 8y ago
    Yeah, so in my case, I wrote a blogging thing that runs in Beaker. I can run it from any of my machines and it has no server. This is great because it is insanely portable - I can setup the software on a new machine by just going to the URL. It is just "software as a service" but there is no server. It's somewhat similar to TiddlyWiki but Beaker adds automatic synchronization. (I still manage the JS code itself in git, but the blog posts are managed by Beaker.) Thank you for the question, styfle. Look up Tara Vancil's talk on "A Web Without Servers" if you need a crystal clear explanation - don't know if I'm doing adequately. And my blog is at kickscondor.com if you're curious why I had to write my own blog warez. Also, there is a resurgence in blogging happening right now with the shakedown of social media. It's great.
    - kingnight 8y ago
      For blogging use case, I have a few questions: 1. A (current?) limitation I've noticed with Beaker is that you can only edit a site implementation (for a specific address) on a single machine. What would you do if you had multiple computers / locations that would want to make updates (JS or User Content) 2. What about errors. Don't they persist in the address's history? What if there's something undesirable that got added by accident 3. What about mobile? How could someone visit/browse on mobile without a non-distributed proxy http address
sheeshkebab 8y ago
With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 8y ago
  This seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Interestingly it's the centralized network that will grow radically more powerful, while the home devices continue to stagnate. The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants. Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role. The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations. It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.
tomhallett 8y ago
I have started a project as a way to explore how web applications can become more decentralized. In the blockchain the starting point are dapps, so I’m calling mine ddapps. Would love any constructive criticism (not quite ready for ShowHN yet): ddapp.org
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I'm all for decentralized apps, but before venturing into that kind of complexity, how about getting back control over the Web? It was created as decentralized net (if not in the blockchain sense) and is the work of an entire generation.
- dcposch 8y ago
  That's what this is about. Current web tech is inherently centralizing. Say you want to create an experience like Instagram or Twitter, delivered via HTTP. You have to pay for bandwidth, CDNs, storage, app servers, DB servers, etc etc. At scale, it's millions a month. So only corporations can do it, and with a few exceptions (eg Craigslist, Stack Exchange) they end up monetizing and "growth hacking" in user hostile ways. The big open question is: can we create an experience as compelling as Instagram or Twitter over the P2P web? It's a hard technical challenge, and today the answer is no. But if we get there, then internet mass media can be delivered via open source projects over open protocols, with a bunch of competing clients to chose from. No central organization controls and monetizes the thing. Like BitTorrent, but for applications more complex and interactive than just file sharing. -- If you're interested, here are imo the most compelling projects in this space: - Dat - Beaker - Augur - OpenBazaar - Patchwork / Secure Scuttlebutt They are working on overlapping subsets of the same fundamental challenges, eg: - How does a node choose what to download? The BitTorrent answer is "only things the user explicitly asked for". The blockchain answer is "the entire global dataset since the start of time". For something like a decentralized Twitter, both of those are unsatisfactory, you need something in between. - How do you log in? Current systems either have no persistent identity at all (eg BitTorrent) or they just generate a local keypair, and it's your job to back it up and never lose it (eg SSB, Dat, all blockchain protocols). Both are unacceptable for wide-audience social media. Ppl lose their devices, get new devices, forget their password, etc all the time. They expect and rely on password reset, etc. So there's a lot of hard tech and UX problems left unsolved, but also a lot of recent projects making solid progress
  - magila 8y ago
    The hosting cost for things like Facebook and Twitter are a pittance compared to the cost of employing all of the engineers/designers/etc who enhance and maintain those services. That IMO is the biggest economic challenge facing decentralized applications. You can make some nice proof-of-concepts with a group of volunteers, but the effort required to provide a UX comparable to centralized services is going to take more than a handful of people working evenings and weekends. Decentralized services generally do not afford the same monetization opportunities as central services. Decentralized proponents consider this a feature rather than a bug, but it leaves open the question: Who is going to pay for all of this?
antpls 8y ago
When we think about decentralization, we sometime think about uncontrolled extreme decentralization. That's the ideal : no single point of failure, with everyone hosting their data where they want, and deciding who access what about them. Practically, as pointed in the article, there are laws to comply with and those are IMHO the biggest lock to decentralization. The fair middle ground between extreme centralization à la Facebook/Twitter and total network anarchy is something based on federation, like emails and Mastodon. With federations, there are several providers for the same end-user application, with native data exchange and interoperability. The idea is to give the power to anyone with hosting capabilities to compete with the Giants, even if only a few domains will actually survive (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc because of network effects and funds, probably). What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance.
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  > What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance. I agree that this is probably the way forward. The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. It was a PITA when Lavabit went down and I lost that email address.
  - synctext 8y ago
    > The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. Fully agree with this. The link to identity is not often brought up. I run a university lab focussed on re-decentralisation of the Internet as a day job. We focus on identity & p2p + trust. Beaker browser is impressive early work focussed on the raw bit transport. It re-uses DNS for global discovery, its hard to do everything decentralised at once. How to do global search on a decentralised Twitter or spam control? The hard issue we need to solve in the coming decade is the governance of such systems. Ideally it would rule itself. Definition of a self-governance system as: a distributed system in which autonomous individuals can collectively exercise all of the necessary functions of power without intervention from any authority which they cannot themselves alter.
sixdimensional 8y ago
It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net". We're obviously a long way off from colonizing space and needing the Internet to spread, but we still have the physics problems here on Earth. I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run. As we saw with the recent Azure outage in South Central US, even the huge infrastructure can have problems too. Secure decentralization has seemed like a panacea for a long time - for all things that resemble a public utility. Even things like the power grid.
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication. That makes for good science fiction, because Quantum Mechanics is so poorly understood by most people, but it’s in no way possible or implied by the theory. Any entangled channel of communication would appear to be random noise without a Classical channel of communication, which effectively limits entanglement to light speed. The first answer gives a nice explanation in depth. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-communication-with-quantum-entanglement https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-commu... The key point is this: Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall! Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns... That comparison is what requires the Classical channel, and we’re back to light speed. If you try to use a Quantum channel to compare you just have two things to compare and a lot of noise.
cryptozeus 8y ago
May be a bit philosophical but I feel real decentralization can only be achieved if it’s created by not human. Like air , no one controls it and its free to breathe. Blockchain started this way to be totally decentralized but as we know if someone gets control of the 51% of the mines then its game over.
dfee 8y ago
Is there anywhere we can track the growth of these platforms though? For entrepreneurs, we need to understand the opportunity, not to menation OS developers adding support to their browsers to make this mainstream.
- lgierth 8y ago
  Just the other day, Chrome declared their Intent-to-Implement-and-Ship for more URL schemes in registerProtocolHandler(), which is a small first step: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/29sFh4tTdcs https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink... Firefox has been supportive of the effort for some time already, working on libdweb: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb
wslh 8y ago
There is an easy contrarian view about decentralization: even if a decentralized protocol wins, at the end it is all about the UI/UX/Aggregation which clearly cannot be decentralized. For example, OpenBazaar can be great but the one who develop the best UI and search engine will win.
- amelius 8y ago
  There is a semi-centralized solution: make search run on a handful of central machines, and check if the results of (e.g.) two of them match.
  - fghtr 8y ago
    This problem is essentially solved by YaCy: http://yacy.net http://yacy.net
    - wslh 8y ago
      I don't think you both understood what I said. It does not matter if you can find a decentralized solution to a problem because at the end the user will access it through an UI/UX/App that, in you example, can choose how to rank the search results beyond what the protocol dictates. In the past people used the simple "mail" command to read emails but now they choose GMail or others because the UI/UX (or any other reason) is better or they like it more. The SMTP (federated) protocol is hidden.
cityzen 8y ago
I think the web is still so new that people will really struggle to understand a decentralized web. Even 20 years on and .com still reigns supreme as the best TLD around. I'm in tech and I'm interested in a decentralized web but I also feel that throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a great idea. The article says, "The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms." To me it sounds like we're basically saying, "ok Facebook/Google/Twitter/Instagram... you're all too big to regulate so we're going to build A WHOLE NEW INTERNET". If they're smart enough to pollute the current system, they're smart enough to pollute a new system. In fact, these corporations are so big that you'll find out eventually that they've funded quite a bit of this decentralized web. As a parent, I would feel at least a little better seeing some bankers, Pharma bros, tech execs, etc. actually go to jail and have their lives ruined for their blatant disregard of pretty much everything. I don't want to tell my kids, "well, we're too dumb to regulate the internet so we made another one.. and that one got messed up too... herp derp"
- troquerre 8y ago
  .com still reigns supreme but the icann only recently started letting people register new TLDs, and even then only 500 a year are registered. Handshake is helping to solve this by decentralizing DNS and letting anyone register new TLDs, so in the future .com may be way less popular than it is today. Disclosure: I founded Namebase.io which is a registrar for Handshake
  - wolco 8y ago
    When you use a .com you expect the domain to just work. When you pick a random tld like .io for example you are not getting the reliability of a .com. .io had a few big issues last year (1/5 of dns queries were failing, ex-google employee bought ns-a1.io and was able to take over all .ios). As more tlds come from good and bad faith actors people will flock to .com as a known respected entity. Limiting to .com, .org, .net and country codes and slowly introducing new tlds made more sense and gave time to estiblish trust / create brand awareness. 500 a year creates noise and forces distrust of any unusual or new tld.
bushin 8y ago
Let's be realistic here, AMP is the next big step for the web :(
- superkuh 8y ago
  You're not wrong. But it's a step backwards and not forwards. AMP is not any faster to load than the actual site not on google's CDN. The only reason it appears faster in most situations is because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load and prioritize AMP results. AMP gives google more control and that's why they push it so hard. This plus their quest for hiding and/or getting rid of URLs so they can use AOL-style keywords within their AMP walled garden is multiple steps back. All the way to the late 90s.
troquerre 8y ago
Handshake.org is tackling this problem by decentralizing DNS and removing the need for (and vulnerabilities associated with) certificate authorities. Disclosure: I founded Namebase which is a registrar for Handshake
- legionof7 8y ago
  I'm using the Namebase beta right now, it's great!
  - troquerre 8y ago
    Awesome, I'm glad you like it! We're shipping a mobile-first redesign soon that's much better. Lmk if you'd like more testnet HNS when we do :)
brianzelip 8y ago
A good recent podcast about the decentralized web, with a technical focus, is JS Party #42, https://changelog.com/jsparty/42 https://changelog.com/jsparty/42. Featuring Mathias Buus and Paul Frazee from the Beaker project.
- kickscondor 8y ago
  Thankyou for mentioning this! I hadn't seen it passed around I guess.
cyberpunk0 8y ago
No. Shit. Where the fuck have you been Guardian
briatx 8y ago
Repeat after me: The Internet is already decentralized. The web is already decentralized. Blockchains do not have a monopoly on decentralization. People who assert this are trying to redefine the term to mean some kind of extreme P2P model that fits their narrative.
- hazz99 8y ago
  Repeat after me: It's effectively centralised. It's effectively centralised. Almost all our traffic goes through Google, Amazon and Facebook. It's extremely centralised. Blockchain a don't claim to have a monpoloy - they're just the most recent thing that's repopularised decentralisation. If Amazon servers go down, so does a significant portion of the internet. That's centralisation at work! Blockchain tech doesn't claim to have a monopoly on the term 'decentralisation', it's just re-popularised the technology.
  - briatx 8y ago
    > Repeat after me: It's effectively centralised. It's effectively centralised. So is bitcoin. Only 3 or 4 companies own the majority of mining. Companies on the internet are centralized, but not the internet itself.
    - hazz99 8y ago
      Yeah, Bitcoin-based consensus probably isn't the best choice for a project like this. I'd love to see a project that uses non-blockchain (but similarly publicly immutable) tech, like Nano or Iota. Still some issues with centralisation (since consesus is achieved through vote delegates), but that's much easier to fix than redistributing hashpower.
pankajdoharey 8y ago
Hasnt half of the decentralisation problem been already solved by the Tor network which is encrypted and already decentralised? And they still regularly identify and stop tor servers. What makes them so sure that the decentralised nodes on a bitcoin network cannot be physically identified and stopped ? A truly decentralised network cannot be built on borrowed network. A truly decentralised interruption free, government free Internet would probably be built on a satellite based network not this.
- hazz99 8y ago
  Important note: Tor does not encrypt your traffic Tor simply hides where your web requests originate from - it's up to you to to visit HTTPS sites and encrypt your communications. Also, Tor is quite decentralised but the existence of directory authorities undermines this, since presents a centralised component.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    Sorry you are getting downvoted. This is very much correct and folks simply put a lot of faith in the proxy transport as the ends to a means. One vulnerability / bug (Tor has had many) can weaken that link. Tor is rarely installed correctly or in a secure manor. (forcing all packets through it and dropping anything that leaks from the browser, for starters)
    - hazz99 8y ago
      Do you have any links on how to install it properly, and to test that? (Maybe through Wireshark or something similar) I admit I've haven't used it in-depth (although I've studied the protocol quite a bit)
      - LinuxBender 8y ago
        I don't have one handy, though if you might find one in the documentation for Tails linux OS. At a high level, the client workstation must not be allowed to send any packets to anything other than the socks port running on the Tor host. The Workstation must have a static arp entry for it's gateway. The Workstation should use a ram-disk linux distro and not persist anything to unencrypted disk. The Tor host must not allow anything inbound other than the Tor SOCKS port. The Tor node must only speak outbound on 80 and 443 (formerly known as the fascist firewall setup). Ideally, the Tor node should be running on a cheap VPS host, ideally payed for with a burner card and accessed via a VPN so that Tor traffic from the home ISP is not evident. The VPS host should be cycled from time to time. This is of course a lot of setup work, but most of it can be automated. [Edit] Speak of the devil. Here is a zero-day published on the Tor browser [1] [1] - https://www.zdnet.com/article/exploit-vendor-drops-tor-browser-zero-day-on-twitter/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/exploit-vendor-drops-tor-brows...
imranq 8y ago
Isn’t this the premise of HBOs Silicon Valley?
mrtnmcc 8y ago
Just use WebRTC? Built in to most browsers (Chrome 28+, Firefox 22+, Edge 12+). Main hurdle is the UDP hole punching of NAT for users behind it needing a third party to help initiate the peer to peer connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching
d--b 8y ago
The web has some parts that are decentralized, and I think it’s worth noting the bad aspects of what exists today. Perhaps the most decentralized part of the internet today is BitTorrent. It’s a very efficient way of sharing files and has a lot of success. One can see how BitTorrent could become the backbone of a decentralized web. However: 1 BitTorrent “naturally” throttles popular files over anything else. Niche items which are hosted by fewer people will be slower to download => BitTorrent makes a cultural echo chamber 2 BitTorrent needs some kind of centralized search engine: it’s not possible for everyone on the network to host a copy of the entire index of files on the network. The only way is to have a search engine, much like Pirate Bay. In fact one could say that google was this in the first place. 3 decentralized social media would be much more polluted with fake accounts since no “authority” would be able to fix it. People have been excited by decentralized web for at least 5 years. The technology has existed for at least 10 years. If it was to happen, I think it would have happened already...
cecja 8y ago
Everone is talking about decentralization but everywhere you look the internet gets more centralized.
int_19h 8y ago
Can there be a truly decentralized web without decentralized physical layer? Mesh networks etc. Which, of course, will not necessarily be connected... but that's a part of decentralization and freedom. "Diamond Age" and its virtual polities come to mind.
PaveSteel 8y ago
Where can I buy coins for that?
godelmachine 8y ago
Isn’t the founding concept of the Internet & by extension, WWW - decentralization?
vezycash 8y ago
IMO, there are two key barriers to a decentralized internet (other factors are minor in comparison.) (1) IPv4 (2) Bandwidth limits IPv6 makes NAT unnecessary. With IP scarcity gone, IP addresses might become permanent like phone numbers. ISPs are currently making money off fixed IP addresses. Market forces would change that eventually.
- lolive 8y ago
  The need for a search engine seems, imho, to be the major argument versus (full) decentralization. Another formulation for that: there is a (valid) need for (some kind of) centralization. (and from there, you all go back to full centralization, first because of search, then because of convenience, at last because of laziness).
  - imtringued 8y ago
    I wonder if it is even possible to decentralize search. An authority needs to create an index and letting the authority query that index is far faster than downloading gigabytes of data on every single machine that wants to search the decentralized internet.
  - vezycash 8y ago
    P2P File sharing services like LimeWire, kazaa, torrent... had acceptable search experience before being sued to oblivion. Even if lawsuits didn't kill p2p networks, Virus / safety concerns would have. Imo, trust is a bigger issue than discovery, hence need for curation - centralization. The reputation system of thepiratebay makes it my primary torrent site. Laziness, convenience is more of a trust than a search issue. Many uploads are viruses/adware/ransomware masquerading as movies, books, games... This necessitates multiple downloads - it's frustrating. I remember downloading several gigs of rar and encrypted .avi movies files, only to be greeted with a message asking me to fill a survey to get password. Yify - a reputable source eliminated this concern for movies. If decentralization works out, I believe specialized search engines will emerge. But note, trust is the bigger issue than search or content discovery for decentralization. If not, iTunes store, app stores and other walled gardens would have long failed.
bobm_kite9 8y ago
This seems to miss the problem completely to me. The internet essentially solved the problem of _distribution_. That meant disintermediating away from publishers, and allowed anyone to publish. The problem then moved onto being one of _curation_. Companies such as google, facebook, amazon are in the business of providing curation: i.e. taking away the leg-work of what we should attend to. A de-centralized web doesn't appear to decentralize the problem of curation at all, which means we are going to still end up with centralized curation and the same or similar monopolies on attention that we have now.
gui67gk 8y ago
The next big step? The fundamental technologies were designed with decentralization in mind Mastodon is just peered IRC all over again The ISPs have poopooed running shared services from home connections. DNS and the core protocols can run in decentralized ways no problem It’s the social order that doesn’t enable it
drasticmeasures 8y ago
This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P... ...feels, to me, like a huge mistake. How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom ends where another's begins, and hate speech, toxic content, illegal content, not being able to have what you said or did forgotten online, all these things curtail someone's freedom. And by making it decentralised, they're just making it harder for people who are the victims of these problems to hold the people responsible accountable and to stop them. These technologists want freedom of speech at the expense of everyone else's freedom.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  > How would one eliminate You simply make your own choices and don't follow/subscribe/view all that illegal, toxic, hate content. You know, the same way you do today by not visiting all those illegal, toxic, hate websites. They still exists though for those who don't share your views on policing content for other people.
  - drasticmeasures 8y ago
    Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away for the victims. The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them... You can choose to ignore this when you see it, but the victims can't, and it's for their freedom that I'm concerned for.
    - zzzcpan 8y ago
      But you are advocating exactly that - ignoring the problem by blocking content instead of dealing with people engaging in those behaviors.
deleted 8y ago
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mikebess 8y ago
Complete decentralization as a philosophical and absolute goal misses the point. There are great benefits to decentralization, for sure, just as there are benefits to centralization. Projects that aim to decentralize everything “for the sake of it” are doomed to failure. I want control over my privacy, my spending, my choice of content. But at the same time, I want a great user interface; I want curated content; I want performance. I want a service, and I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t have a fundamental problem that there are big companies out there who provide that service to me, and who make money doing so. Even, in some cases, a whole lot of money. Good for them. It boils down to: what’s the best way to provide services that I want? I’m working on a project to provide a decentralized marketplace for software and infrastructure services, competing with AWS and Azure. The marketplace itself is blockchain-based: partially decentralized, but with a permissioned blockchain that still allows governance, legal compliance, removal of bad actors, KYC compliance, etc. The kind of things that customers (corporations) need for them to use the marketplace. I think we need to be pragmatic about it and figure out where technologies like blockchains can help build better services, instead of trying to cram decentralized systems into everything whether it makes sense or not.

532 points by carsonfarmer 8y ago

Back to the future! (looking forward to the past?)

I hadn't heard of the Dweb, the term appears to have been coined by Mozilla [0]. [0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/

lgierth 8y ago
Nah, long before that, by the dweb community and the Internet Archive, leading up to the first Decentralized Web Summit / DWeb Summit in 2016 :) https://2016.decentralizedweb.net/ https://2016.decentralizedweb.net/

jotm 8y ago

How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others? This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online. Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe. Fix the users - save the Internet! :)

albertgoeswoof 8y ago
It will always be a struggle, just like the offline world. It doesn’t mean you give up, we haven’t defected to a new world order offline so why do it online?
bradgessler 8y ago
It will probably look and feel a lot like how Github has effectively centralized git repos. At least in this world if we don’t like how somebody is centralizing something it can be easily and quickly moved.
elvinyung 8y ago
I think a lot about this. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power from accumulating within any one party and "evening it out" among everyone. The applicability of D&G's ideas on the war machine to our current problem of platform power is immediately apparent. A centralized platform is exactly like a state apparatus. In our situation the collective mechanisms of inhibition might be something like stronger/more proactive antitrust laws to break up/nationalize entities that become infrastructural components of the society. But as you've mentioned, I think this problem of "uneven development" is a feature of any marketplace-like structure. In sufficiently large numbers, a power law tends to assert itself with no other checks on power. This is why blockchains by themselves won't solve the problem. The debate, then, shifts to be about whether this is a feature or a bug, which is something that I'm never sure about. To close, another quote from ATP comes to mind ("smooth space" is another term they use for nomadic spaces): > Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.
- hestefisk 8y ago
  Awesome to see others on HN loving D&G. But perhaps also power is cyclical. When the web was first popularised, it had the same potential as what DWeb has now. TCP/IP was written to be inherently distributed and provide resilient routing. Then, as soon as it starts to threaten existing power structures, forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’. It becomes part of the rhizome, the rhizomatic system of power, that the new system (in this case TCP/IP / www) set out to challenge, creating an even more complex, ever-evolving rhizome of power (surveillance, paywalls, censorship). The same thing happened with other revolutions throughout history — the power base they set out to challenge, transmorphed into a similar power structure as an unintended consequence.
  - 8y ago
golemiprague 8y ago
Fixing the users usually brings more blood and sorrow than not fixing them, equality of outcome is not practical. All we can do is find some middle path with some checks and balances.
peterwwillis 8y ago
It's not really technological or social, it's logistical. We've had all kinds of redundant network topologies that used independent networks for decades. The internet is decentralized, and it works pretty well, all things considered. The web is fairly decentralized, too: DNS is independent of a registrar is independent of a network service provider and all are independent of ISP's, and even those are independent of backbones. The only thing that isn't very decentralized is the client-server IP/TCP/HTTP model. You can provide decentralized versions of HTTP services, but those are the things that are the most costly and inconvenient to decentralize. It can be done, but it's a huge pain with very little benefit.
- hestefisk 8y ago
  HTTP is client / server (session) based, but TCP / IP certainly isn’t. I’m is act as a client / server protocol because we tell it to, but IP networking was written to be distributed / decentralised so as to provide better resilience, unlike other networking standards at that time (token ring, anyone?).
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    TCP is connection-oriented, and each connection is a session. IP is decentralized, but the way it's used now in consumer devices makes initiating connections to them difficult and dangerous. Any realistic hope of a successful new distributed web should address this problem, though probably the current solution is "have clients join a private network and route back through it", completely side-stepping firewall concerns. If you ignore the concerns, I guess these protocols aren't that big a stumbling block.
r32a_ 8y ago
Imho it comes to incentives and different factions keeping each other in check, the same way it's done in Bitcoin and in some ways in Democracy. Although it's important to note that Decentralised systems are different to Distributed systems. In decentralized systems, there exist parties with more influence than others but none of those has enough influence to overpower all of the other ones. You could see this play out every time any party has tried to take full control of Bitcoin. So far everyone has failed
matchagaucho 8y ago
And eventually a decentralized node will become the new central node for the next big thing. It's all cyclical.
zoomablemind 8y ago
The very notion of the present Internet is grounded on the network infrastructure that is formed through ISPs. Everyone needs a gateway and a 'bus' to reach the desired end-point. Most ISPs still limit the upstream bandwidth for consumers and charge a premium making it a friction point. In a way the centralization is just a logical outcome of such 'rationing'. Distributed network will even more depend on the ISPs due to self-serving nature. Perhaps the 'decentralized' web should also address the very foundation of the network - the network infrastructure and access to it. Does Internet need to depend on the ISPs?

moltar 8y ago

I thought pied piper solved it already

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

"lose your password and you lose access to everything" - I'm sorry but this UX blunder just won't fly. If we are to have decentralized web we'll need services for key recovery.

CodeWriter23 8y ago
I think you mean "services for account exploitation and warrantless search by law enforcement"
- UpshotKnothole 8y ago
  I, and I suspect many other people, often have online profiles and existences and we simply don’t care about the government seeing it. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like a high security option for some things, but most of what I do online is frankly trivial nonsense. I’d be much more upset if I lost access to it forever than I would if some jackbooted thug decided to snoop around it. Why does everything need to be the digital equivalent of a Supermax prison? I want the full range from a guy on furlough to Hannibal Lector fullly restrained, mask and all. If you’re only willing to offer me the “Lector” package, I’m going to pass.
  - CodeWriter23 8y ago
    I'm more concerned about criminals using such proposed credential recovery procedures to rob me. Thanks however for sharing your views about how we should all trust the government without question.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  If public blockchains prevail then everything is already public and traceable to a single individual. Search wouldn't even be necessary. As long as financial gateways are tied into decentralized web, AML/KYC will prevent total anonymity so there is always room for forensic services.
Hnrobert42 8y ago
Maybe a digital locker for your password that can only be decrypted by the password of 3 out of 5 friends.

empath75 8y ago

> And one of those is speed. Because of the way the DWeb works differently from the current web, it should intrinsically be faster This seems wrong to me.

naasking 8y ago
It depends what's meant by "distributed". A content-addressable network could very well be faster because of the pervasive caching and it's immune to (D)DoS attacks. Things that aren't accessed frequently by a lot of people would be much slower.
lbriner 8y ago
I think the logic is that instead of everything going via a handful of servers at the big companies, it goes through many more thousands of individual PCs but of course, that depends on the technology used. Torrents should be faster but only if lots of people seed and don't simply download and disconnect.
- na85 8y ago
  Torrents themselves are often faster but it destroys the speed of anything else on the same pipe.
  - voxadam 8y ago
    I found that configuring Smart Queue Management (SQM) on my OpenWrt router drastically improved this issue. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/... https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm-details https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/... https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechnical/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechnica...

avhwl 8y ago

There are inherent benefits to large, centralized platforms. Users, especially content creators, desire a large network of users and excellent UX, both of which have typically been properties of centralized systems or at least far easier to achieve with centralized systems. Every decentralized social network thus far has failed, and the modestly successful ones (Mastodon, for example) are in fact federated. Many of the problems alluded to in this article, in particular the privacy risk of centralized data, are more effectively solved by policy changes and iterated technology (differential privacy as well as bread-and-butter cryptography) rather than furious hand-waving about blockchain protocols.

IThoughtYouGNU 8y ago

Lol, they mention Filecoin which has no product and not Storj or Sia

orasis 8y ago

Large systems want to centralize for the sake of efficiency. I was among the first wave of P2P hackers in the 2000s and we learned the hard way that decentralization leaves a LOT to be desired.

antt 8y ago
Not to mention that back then we a performance ratio of edge to node that was order of magnitude better than the one we have today. A laptop today and one from 2010 don't have that much difference in performance, a data center from 2010 and one from today are day and night. And who will pay for it? With experience Xanadu seems like the only solution. The reason why it's in development hell is because the problem it's trying to solve is so hard.
lolive 8y ago
Remember when Audiogalaxy arrived in the P2P world. It was a (limited) form of centralization. But it made the P2P MUCH more usable.

kickscondor 8y ago

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "editable copy" of a website. It's a choice in the address bar. * Making an "editable copy" doesn't have to mean you're now editing raw HTML. An editable copy can direct how it is edited through JS. (See the recently released "dead-lite" for an example of this.) All these attempts are exciting but I'm actually starting to use Beaker because it's so useful even without adoption.

styfle 8y ago
Can you explain what you can use beaker browser for, even without adoption?
- kickscondor 8y ago
  Yeah, so in my case, I wrote a blogging thing that runs in Beaker. I can run it from any of my machines and it has no server. This is great because it is insanely portable - I can setup the software on a new machine by just going to the URL. It is just "software as a service" but there is no server. It's somewhat similar to TiddlyWiki but Beaker adds automatic synchronization. (I still manage the JS code itself in git, but the blog posts are managed by Beaker.) Thank you for the question, styfle. Look up Tara Vancil's talk on "A Web Without Servers" if you need a crystal clear explanation - don't know if I'm doing adequately. And my blog is at kickscondor.com if you're curious why I had to write my own blog warez. Also, there is a resurgence in blogging happening right now with the shakedown of social media. It's great.
  - kingnight 8y ago
    For blogging use case, I have a few questions: 1. A (current?) limitation I've noticed with Beaker is that you can only edit a site implementation (for a specific address) on a single machine. What would you do if you had multiple computers / locations that would want to make updates (JS or User Content) 2. What about errors. Don't they persist in the address's history? What if there's something undesirable that got added by accident 3. What about mobile? How could someone visit/browse on mobile without a non-distributed proxy http address

sheeshkebab 8y ago

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 8y ago
This seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.
- adventured 8y ago
  Interestingly it's the centralized network that will grow radically more powerful, while the home devices continue to stagnate. The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants. Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role. The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations. It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.

tomhallett 8y ago

I have started a project as a way to explore how web applications can become more decentralized. In the blockchain the starting point are dapps, so I’m calling mine ddapps. Would love any constructive criticism (not quite ready for ShowHN yet): ddapp.org

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I'm all for decentralized apps, but before venturing into that kind of complexity, how about getting back control over the Web? It was created as decentralized net (if not in the blockchain sense) and is the work of an entire generation.

dcposch 8y ago
That's what this is about. Current web tech is inherently centralizing. Say you want to create an experience like Instagram or Twitter, delivered via HTTP. You have to pay for bandwidth, CDNs, storage, app servers, DB servers, etc etc. At scale, it's millions a month. So only corporations can do it, and with a few exceptions (eg Craigslist, Stack Exchange) they end up monetizing and "growth hacking" in user hostile ways. The big open question is: can we create an experience as compelling as Instagram or Twitter over the P2P web? It's a hard technical challenge, and today the answer is no. But if we get there, then internet mass media can be delivered via open source projects over open protocols, with a bunch of competing clients to chose from. No central organization controls and monetizes the thing. Like BitTorrent, but for applications more complex and interactive than just file sharing. -- If you're interested, here are imo the most compelling projects in this space: - Dat - Beaker - Augur - OpenBazaar - Patchwork / Secure Scuttlebutt They are working on overlapping subsets of the same fundamental challenges, eg: - How does a node choose what to download? The BitTorrent answer is "only things the user explicitly asked for". The blockchain answer is "the entire global dataset since the start of time". For something like a decentralized Twitter, both of those are unsatisfactory, you need something in between. - How do you log in? Current systems either have no persistent identity at all (eg BitTorrent) or they just generate a local keypair, and it's your job to back it up and never lose it (eg SSB, Dat, all blockchain protocols). Both are unacceptable for wide-audience social media. Ppl lose their devices, get new devices, forget their password, etc all the time. They expect and rely on password reset, etc. So there's a lot of hard tech and UX problems left unsolved, but also a lot of recent projects making solid progress
- magila 8y ago
  The hosting cost for things like Facebook and Twitter are a pittance compared to the cost of employing all of the engineers/designers/etc who enhance and maintain those services. That IMO is the biggest economic challenge facing decentralized applications. You can make some nice proof-of-concepts with a group of volunteers, but the effort required to provide a UX comparable to centralized services is going to take more than a handful of people working evenings and weekends. Decentralized services generally do not afford the same monetization opportunities as central services. Decentralized proponents consider this a feature rather than a bug, but it leaves open the question: Who is going to pay for all of this?

antpls 8y ago

When we think about decentralization, we sometime think about uncontrolled extreme decentralization. That's the ideal : no single point of failure, with everyone hosting their data where they want, and deciding who access what about them. Practically, as pointed in the article, there are laws to comply with and those are IMHO the biggest lock to decentralization. The fair middle ground between extreme centralization à la Facebook/Twitter and total network anarchy is something based on federation, like emails and Mastodon. With federations, there are several providers for the same end-user application, with native data exchange and interoperability. The idea is to give the power to anyone with hosting capabilities to compete with the Giants, even if only a few domains will actually survive (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc because of network effects and funds, probably). What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance.

PinkMilkshake 8y ago
> What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance. I agree that this is probably the way forward. The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. It was a PITA when Lavabit went down and I lost that email address.
- synctext 8y ago
  > The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. Fully agree with this. The link to identity is not often brought up. I run a university lab focussed on re-decentralisation of the Internet as a day job. We focus on identity & p2p + trust. Beaker browser is impressive early work focussed on the raw bit transport. It re-uses DNS for global discovery, its hard to do everything decentralised at once. How to do global search on a decentralised Twitter or spam control? The hard issue we need to solve in the coming decade is the governance of such systems. Ideally it would rule itself. Definition of a self-governance system as: a distributed system in which autonomous individuals can collectively exercise all of the necessary functions of power without intervention from any authority which they cannot themselves alter.

sixdimensional 8y ago

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net". We're obviously a long way off from colonizing space and needing the Internet to spread, but we still have the physics problems here on Earth. I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run. As we saw with the recent Azure outage in South Central US, even the huge infrastructure can have problems too. Secure decentralization has seemed like a panacea for a long time - for all things that resemble a public utility. Even things like the power grid.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication. That makes for good science fiction, because Quantum Mechanics is so poorly understood by most people, but it’s in no way possible or implied by the theory. Any entangled channel of communication would appear to be random noise without a Classical channel of communication, which effectively limits entanglement to light speed. The first answer gives a nice explanation in depth. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-communication-with-quantum-entanglement https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-commu... The key point is this: Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall! Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns... That comparison is what requires the Classical channel, and we’re back to light speed. If you try to use a Quantum channel to compare you just have two things to compare and a lot of noise.

cryptozeus 8y ago

May be a bit philosophical but I feel real decentralization can only be achieved if it’s created by not human. Like air , no one controls it and its free to breathe. Blockchain started this way to be totally decentralized but as we know if someone gets control of the 51% of the mines then its game over.

dfee 8y ago

Is there anywhere we can track the growth of these platforms though? For entrepreneurs, we need to understand the opportunity, not to menation OS developers adding support to their browsers to make this mainstream.

lgierth 8y ago
Just the other day, Chrome declared their Intent-to-Implement-and-Ship for more URL schemes in registerProtocolHandler(), which is a small first step: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/29sFh4tTdcs https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink... Firefox has been supportive of the effort for some time already, working on libdweb: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

wslh 8y ago

There is an easy contrarian view about decentralization: even if a decentralized protocol wins, at the end it is all about the UI/UX/Aggregation which clearly cannot be decentralized. For example, OpenBazaar can be great but the one who develop the best UI and search engine will win.

amelius 8y ago
There is a semi-centralized solution: make search run on a handful of central machines, and check if the results of (e.g.) two of them match.
- fghtr 8y ago
  This problem is essentially solved by YaCy: http://yacy.net http://yacy.net
  - wslh 8y ago
    I don't think you both understood what I said. It does not matter if you can find a decentralized solution to a problem because at the end the user will access it through an UI/UX/App that, in you example, can choose how to rank the search results beyond what the protocol dictates. In the past people used the simple "mail" command to read emails but now they choose GMail or others because the UI/UX (or any other reason) is better or they like it more. The SMTP (federated) protocol is hidden.

cityzen 8y ago

I think the web is still so new that people will really struggle to understand a decentralized web. Even 20 years on and .com still reigns supreme as the best TLD around. I'm in tech and I'm interested in a decentralized web but I also feel that throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a great idea. The article says, "The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms." To me it sounds like we're basically saying, "ok Facebook/Google/Twitter/Instagram... you're all too big to regulate so we're going to build A WHOLE NEW INTERNET". If they're smart enough to pollute the current system, they're smart enough to pollute a new system. In fact, these corporations are so big that you'll find out eventually that they've funded quite a bit of this decentralized web. As a parent, I would feel at least a little better seeing some bankers, Pharma bros, tech execs, etc. actually go to jail and have their lives ruined for their blatant disregard of pretty much everything. I don't want to tell my kids, "well, we're too dumb to regulate the internet so we made another one.. and that one got messed up too... herp derp"

troquerre 8y ago
.com still reigns supreme but the icann only recently started letting people register new TLDs, and even then only 500 a year are registered. Handshake is helping to solve this by decentralizing DNS and letting anyone register new TLDs, so in the future .com may be way less popular than it is today. Disclosure: I founded Namebase.io which is a registrar for Handshake
- wolco 8y ago
  When you use a .com you expect the domain to just work. When you pick a random tld like .io for example you are not getting the reliability of a .com. .io had a few big issues last year (1/5 of dns queries were failing, ex-google employee bought ns-a1.io and was able to take over all .ios). As more tlds come from good and bad faith actors people will flock to .com as a known respected entity. Limiting to .com, .org, .net and country codes and slowly introducing new tlds made more sense and gave time to estiblish trust / create brand awareness. 500 a year creates noise and forces distrust of any unusual or new tld.

bushin 8y ago

Let's be realistic here, AMP is the next big step for the web :(

superkuh 8y ago
You're not wrong. But it's a step backwards and not forwards. AMP is not any faster to load than the actual site not on google's CDN. The only reason it appears faster in most situations is because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load and prioritize AMP results. AMP gives google more control and that's why they push it so hard. This plus their quest for hiding and/or getting rid of URLs so they can use AOL-style keywords within their AMP walled garden is multiple steps back. All the way to the late 90s.

troquerre 8y ago

Handshake.org is tackling this problem by decentralizing DNS and removing the need for (and vulnerabilities associated with) certificate authorities. Disclosure: I founded Namebase which is a registrar for Handshake

legionof7 8y ago
I'm using the Namebase beta right now, it's great!
- troquerre 8y ago
  Awesome, I'm glad you like it! We're shipping a mobile-first redesign soon that's much better. Lmk if you'd like more testnet HNS when we do :)

brianzelip 8y ago

A good recent podcast about the decentralized web, with a technical focus, is JS Party #42, https://changelog.com/jsparty/42 https://changelog.com/jsparty/42. Featuring Mathias Buus and Paul Frazee from the Beaker project.

kickscondor 8y ago
Thankyou for mentioning this! I hadn't seen it passed around I guess.

cyberpunk0 8y ago

No. Shit. Where the fuck have you been Guardian

briatx 8y ago

Repeat after me: The Internet is already decentralized. The web is already decentralized. Blockchains do not have a monopoly on decentralization. People who assert this are trying to redefine the term to mean some kind of extreme P2P model that fits their narrative.

hazz99 8y ago
Repeat after me: It's effectively centralised. It's effectively centralised. Almost all our traffic goes through Google, Amazon and Facebook. It's extremely centralised. Blockchain a don't claim to have a monpoloy - they're just the most recent thing that's repopularised decentralisation. If Amazon servers go down, so does a significant portion of the internet. That's centralisation at work! Blockchain tech doesn't claim to have a monopoly on the term 'decentralisation', it's just re-popularised the technology.
- briatx 8y ago
  > Repeat after me: It's effectively centralised. It's effectively centralised. So is bitcoin. Only 3 or 4 companies own the majority of mining. Companies on the internet are centralized, but not the internet itself.
  - hazz99 8y ago
    Yeah, Bitcoin-based consensus probably isn't the best choice for a project like this. I'd love to see a project that uses non-blockchain (but similarly publicly immutable) tech, like Nano or Iota. Still some issues with centralisation (since consesus is achieved through vote delegates), but that's much easier to fix than redistributing hashpower.

pankajdoharey 8y ago

Hasnt half of the decentralisation problem been already solved by the Tor network which is encrypted and already decentralised? And they still regularly identify and stop tor servers. What makes them so sure that the decentralised nodes on a bitcoin network cannot be physically identified and stopped ? A truly decentralised network cannot be built on borrowed network. A truly decentralised interruption free, government free Internet would probably be built on a satellite based network not this.

hazz99 8y ago
Important note: Tor does not encrypt your traffic Tor simply hides where your web requests originate from - it's up to you to to visit HTTPS sites and encrypt your communications. Also, Tor is quite decentralised but the existence of directory authorities undermines this, since presents a centralised component.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Sorry you are getting downvoted. This is very much correct and folks simply put a lot of faith in the proxy transport as the ends to a means. One vulnerability / bug (Tor has had many) can weaken that link. Tor is rarely installed correctly or in a secure manor. (forcing all packets through it and dropping anything that leaks from the browser, for starters)
  - hazz99 8y ago
    Do you have any links on how to install it properly, and to test that? (Maybe through Wireshark or something similar) I admit I've haven't used it in-depth (although I've studied the protocol quite a bit)
    - LinuxBender 8y ago
      I don't have one handy, though if you might find one in the documentation for Tails linux OS. At a high level, the client workstation must not be allowed to send any packets to anything other than the socks port running on the Tor host. The Workstation must have a static arp entry for it's gateway. The Workstation should use a ram-disk linux distro and not persist anything to unencrypted disk. The Tor host must not allow anything inbound other than the Tor SOCKS port. The Tor node must only speak outbound on 80 and 443 (formerly known as the fascist firewall setup). Ideally, the Tor node should be running on a cheap VPS host, ideally payed for with a burner card and accessed via a VPN so that Tor traffic from the home ISP is not evident. The VPS host should be cycled from time to time. This is of course a lot of setup work, but most of it can be automated. [Edit] Speak of the devil. Here is a zero-day published on the Tor browser [1] [1] - https://www.zdnet.com/article/exploit-vendor-drops-tor-browser-zero-day-on-twitter/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/exploit-vendor-drops-tor-brows...

imranq 8y ago

Isn’t this the premise of HBOs Silicon Valley?

mrtnmcc 8y ago

Just use WebRTC? Built in to most browsers (Chrome 28+, Firefox 22+, Edge 12+). Main hurdle is the UDP hole punching of NAT for users behind it needing a third party to help initiate the peer to peer connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching

d--b 8y ago

The web has some parts that are decentralized, and I think it’s worth noting the bad aspects of what exists today. Perhaps the most decentralized part of the internet today is BitTorrent. It’s a very efficient way of sharing files and has a lot of success. One can see how BitTorrent could become the backbone of a decentralized web. However: 1 BitTorrent “naturally” throttles popular files over anything else. Niche items which are hosted by fewer people will be slower to download => BitTorrent makes a cultural echo chamber 2 BitTorrent needs some kind of centralized search engine: it’s not possible for everyone on the network to host a copy of the entire index of files on the network. The only way is to have a search engine, much like Pirate Bay. In fact one could say that google was this in the first place. 3 decentralized social media would be much more polluted with fake accounts since no “authority” would be able to fix it. People have been excited by decentralized web for at least 5 years. The technology has existed for at least 10 years. If it was to happen, I think it would have happened already...

cecja 8y ago

Everone is talking about decentralization but everywhere you look the internet gets more centralized.

int_19h 8y ago

Can there be a truly decentralized web without decentralized physical layer? Mesh networks etc. Which, of course, will not necessarily be connected... but that's a part of decentralization and freedom. "Diamond Age" and its virtual polities come to mind.

PaveSteel 8y ago

Where can I buy coins for that?

godelmachine 8y ago

Isn’t the founding concept of the Internet & by extension, WWW - decentralization?

vezycash 8y ago

IMO, there are two key barriers to a decentralized internet (other factors are minor in comparison.) (1) IPv4 (2) Bandwidth limits IPv6 makes NAT unnecessary. With IP scarcity gone, IP addresses might become permanent like phone numbers. ISPs are currently making money off fixed IP addresses. Market forces would change that eventually.

lolive 8y ago
The need for a search engine seems, imho, to be the major argument versus (full) decentralization. Another formulation for that: there is a (valid) need for (some kind of) centralization. (and from there, you all go back to full centralization, first because of search, then because of convenience, at last because of laziness).
- imtringued 8y ago
  I wonder if it is even possible to decentralize search. An authority needs to create an index and letting the authority query that index is far faster than downloading gigabytes of data on every single machine that wants to search the decentralized internet.
- vezycash 8y ago
  P2P File sharing services like LimeWire, kazaa, torrent... had acceptable search experience before being sued to oblivion. Even if lawsuits didn't kill p2p networks, Virus / safety concerns would have. Imo, trust is a bigger issue than discovery, hence need for curation - centralization. The reputation system of thepiratebay makes it my primary torrent site. Laziness, convenience is more of a trust than a search issue. Many uploads are viruses/adware/ransomware masquerading as movies, books, games... This necessitates multiple downloads - it's frustrating. I remember downloading several gigs of rar and encrypted .avi movies files, only to be greeted with a message asking me to fill a survey to get password. Yify - a reputable source eliminated this concern for movies. If decentralization works out, I believe specialized search engines will emerge. But note, trust is the bigger issue than search or content discovery for decentralization. If not, iTunes store, app stores and other walled gardens would have long failed.

bobm_kite9 8y ago

This seems to miss the problem completely to me. The internet essentially solved the problem of _distribution_. That meant disintermediating away from publishers, and allowed anyone to publish. The problem then moved onto being one of _curation_. Companies such as google, facebook, amazon are in the business of providing curation: i.e. taking away the leg-work of what we should attend to. A de-centralized web doesn't appear to decentralize the problem of curation at all, which means we are going to still end up with centralized curation and the same or similar monopolies on attention that we have now.

gui67gk 8y ago

The next big step? The fundamental technologies were designed with decentralization in mind Mastodon is just peered IRC all over again The ISPs have poopooed running shared services from home connections. DNS and the core protocols can run in decentralized ways no problem It’s the social order that doesn’t enable it

drasticmeasures 8y ago

This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P... ...feels, to me, like a huge mistake. How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom ends where another's begins, and hate speech, toxic content, illegal content, not being able to have what you said or did forgotten online, all these things curtail someone's freedom. And by making it decentralised, they're just making it harder for people who are the victims of these problems to hold the people responsible accountable and to stop them. These technologists want freedom of speech at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

zzzcpan 8y ago
> How would one eliminate You simply make your own choices and don't follow/subscribe/view all that illegal, toxic, hate content. You know, the same way you do today by not visiting all those illegal, toxic, hate websites. They still exists though for those who don't share your views on policing content for other people.
- drasticmeasures 8y ago
  Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away for the victims. The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them... You can choose to ignore this when you see it, but the victims can't, and it's for their freedom that I'm concerned for.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    But you are advocating exactly that - ignoring the problem by blocking content instead of dealing with people engaging in those behaviors.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mikebess 8y ago

Complete decentralization as a philosophical and absolute goal misses the point. There are great benefits to decentralization, for sure, just as there are benefits to centralization. Projects that aim to decentralize everything “for the sake of it” are doomed to failure. I want control over my privacy, my spending, my choice of content. But at the same time, I want a great user interface; I want curated content; I want performance. I want a service, and I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t have a fundamental problem that there are big companies out there who provide that service to me, and who make money doing so. Even, in some cases, a whole lot of money. Good for them. It boils down to: what’s the best way to provide services that I want? I’m working on a project to provide a decentralized marketplace for software and infrastructure services, competing with AWS and Azure. The marketplace itself is blockchain-based: partially decentralized, but with a permissioned blockchain that still allows governance, legal compliance, removal of bad actors, KYC compliance, etc. The kind of things that customers (corporations) need for them to use the marketplace. I think we need to be pragmatic about it and figure out where technologies like blockchains can help build better services, instead of trying to cram decentralized systems into everything whether it makes sense or not.