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network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It

network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again

gsich 8y ago
I wouldn't say it's a "decline". Most people just don't need an upgrade. You can use a PC from ~7 years ago for most stuff today. Gamers are not the majority here. The best performance boost you get from an older machine is a SSD.
- aesthesia 8y ago
  Desktop sales were already declining 7 years ago. A lot of people just don't care to have a desktop PC any more, and when their old computers finally break or stop working, will replace them with laptops or tablets, which can't do the sorts of always-on distributed things that we might hope.
  - gsich 8y ago
    I would count Laptop to the PC category. Same year span - have a Laptop/PC from 2012 and you are good to go.
    - rspeer 8y ago
      But the key difference remains: there aren't many personal computers that we leave plugged in and turned on 24/7 anymore.
      - gsich 8y ago
        This was never the case.
        rspeer 8y ago
        Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them. If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?
        gsich 8y ago
        Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.
        rspeer 8y ago
        This has somehow turned into your opinion on energy use (yes, it's good that desktop PCs can now decrease their energy use significantly while idle, which was not the case in the 90s). But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many things in between).
        gsich 8y ago
        >when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server Yes, but again, you have used your PC for something. This has shifted to smaller (Raspberry Pis) or dedicated servers (or "cloud" stuff), so you could run this stuff there.
        r_c_a_d 8y ago
        I presume you mean "never the case for many people". As in "most people never left their PC on 24/7". That may well be true. I used to run a couple of minecraft servers for my kids. Judging by how amazing their friends thought that was... I don't think there were many other people in the town doing that. On the other hand, I still have a raspberry pi running 24/7 to this day.
- buboard 8y ago
  unfortunately people dont use them. The best replacement would be is if someone made a popular home router that permantently runs an IPFS node or sth.
mr_toad 8y ago
> It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website. But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA. It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opportunity costs) to set up and maintain an instance in the cloud, or a serverless site. And if you don’t like the big cloud providers, there are many smaller outfits that can do the basics - compute and object storage are all you really need for a small site. Consumer hardware and software are not really well suited to running publicly faceing websites.
- buboard 8y ago
  > The security and maintenance requirements thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours. I don't get why you think cloud solution is so much better. Glorified CDNs are a clumsy intermediate solution until internet connections get fast enough for everyone, that running a sharing node will have negligible impact. E.g. no cloud provider can compete with Popcorn Time in speed, despite billions of dollars of effort.
  - wslh 8y ago
    > thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours. Everyone responsability = No one responsability. If your data is lost by IPFS you don't have anyone to sue.
    - buboard 8y ago
      You could always pay a host to host your files for you and distribute them to IPFS. nobody argues that (e.g.) IPFS is replacing all the functions of the cloud. but it certainly decentralizes things, gives less power to The Man, and allows competitors to emerge.
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
carsonfarmer 8y ago
Super late to the game here, but we're (https://textile.photos/ https://textile.photos/) seeing pretty great results on mobile running a 'lite' IPFS peer. Battery consumption is not bad compared to other network-driven apps, and with intelligent swam on/off optimizations, mobile peers can share and pin files quite nicely. It helps if you have a network of 'always on' peers to back them up of course :)

gsich 8y ago

I wouldn't say it's a "decline". Most people just don't need an upgrade. You can use a PC from ~7 years ago for most stuff today. Gamers are not the majority here. The best performance boost you get from an older machine is a SSD.

aesthesia 8y ago
Desktop sales were already declining 7 years ago. A lot of people just don't care to have a desktop PC any more, and when their old computers finally break or stop working, will replace them with laptops or tablets, which can't do the sorts of always-on distributed things that we might hope.
- gsich 8y ago
  I would count Laptop to the PC category. Same year span - have a Laptop/PC from 2012 and you are good to go.
  - rspeer 8y ago
    But the key difference remains: there aren't many personal computers that we leave plugged in and turned on 24/7 anymore.
    - gsich 8y ago
      This was never the case.
      - rspeer 8y ago
        Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them. If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?
        gsich 8y ago
        Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.
        rspeer 8y ago
        This has somehow turned into your opinion on energy use (yes, it's good that desktop PCs can now decrease their energy use significantly while idle, which was not the case in the 90s). But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many things in between).
        gsich 8y ago
        >when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server Yes, but again, you have used your PC for something. This has shifted to smaller (Raspberry Pis) or dedicated servers (or "cloud" stuff), so you could run this stuff there.
      - r_c_a_d 8y ago
        I presume you mean "never the case for many people". As in "most people never left their PC on 24/7". That may well be true. I used to run a couple of minecraft servers for my kids. Judging by how amazing their friends thought that was... I don't think there were many other people in the town doing that. On the other hand, I still have a raspberry pi running 24/7 to this day.
buboard 8y ago
unfortunately people dont use them. The best replacement would be is if someone made a popular home router that permantently runs an IPFS node or sth.

mr_toad 8y ago

> It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website. But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA. It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opportunity costs) to set up and maintain an instance in the cloud, or a serverless site. And if you don’t like the big cloud providers, there are many smaller outfits that can do the basics - compute and object storage are all you really need for a small site. Consumer hardware and software are not really well suited to running publicly faceing websites.

buboard 8y ago
> The security and maintenance requirements thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours. I don't get why you think cloud solution is so much better. Glorified CDNs are a clumsy intermediate solution until internet connections get fast enough for everyone, that running a sharing node will have negligible impact. E.g. no cloud provider can compete with Popcorn Time in speed, despite billions of dollars of effort.
- wslh 8y ago
  > thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours. Everyone responsability = No one responsability. If your data is lost by IPFS you don't have anyone to sue.
  - buboard 8y ago
    You could always pay a host to host your files for you and distribute them to IPFS. nobody argues that (e.g.) IPFS is replacing all the functions of the cloud. but it certainly decentralizes things, gives less power to The Man, and allows competitors to emerge.
PinkMilkshake 8y ago

carsonfarmer 8y ago

Super late to the game here, but we're (https://textile.photos/ https://textile.photos/) seeing pretty great results on mobile running a 'lite' IPFS peer. Battery consumption is not bad compared to other network-driven apps, and with intelligent swam on/off optimizations, mobile peers can share and pin files quite nicely. It helps if you have a network of 'always on' peers to back them up of course :)