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Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

• Sargos 8y ago
  Solid looks to be trying to reimplement what platforms like Ethereum are already building. The same ethos is there and this is very well written but I wonder if the Solid project just missed that when doing their research. Hopefully all of their efforts don't go to waste and they can extend some of their work to the broader decentralized web community.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    No: blockchain technologies are about reaching decentralized agreements. Solid is about everyone being able to write their own things (so no agreement) without centralized parties.
    • cslarson 8y ago
      The Ethereum project is about providing a complete decentralized web3 stack - not just a blockchain, though the database layer that provides is a critical part of it.
  • kjetilk 8y ago
    Not really, it is pretty much the other way around. :-) We're basically building the simplest thing that could possibly work, they are rebuilding a lot of infrastructure that they have to use, but we can use where it makes sense. So, they are kinda trying to implement the Web, which is a much bigger task than adding access control and identity... :-) There's also been quite a lot of overlap between people working on Solid and working on Blockchains in the past, so we know it well. But we're not really in competition, we'd be fine coexisting.
    • pnut 8y ago
      Just FYI, it is unclear from your comment, which of these organisations you associate with. Is "we" Solid or Ethereum?
      • jimsmart 8y ago
        In kjetilk's profile... > about: Hacker, community guy and project release manager at Inrupt, working on Solid. HTH
• deleted 8y ago
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• orthecreedence 8y ago
  I've read a bit about Solid in the past, but never quite understood how it will handle different data models. Does it force social data to all look the same (as in, have a predefined set of fields)? If not, how do apps built on it interoperate? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for projects like this. I think it's wonderful. I just never really got how the apps will work with the same data without being forced into a particular data model (which seems like it would limit what you could do).
  • jshen 8y ago
    I think the answer to some degree is RDF and the semantic data standards. It’s hard to explain them quickly, but it solves a portion of this problem.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    You can mix and match parts from different vocabularies on the Web. See it as a JSON object where you can add any key you want, except that some of those keys have meaning to some applications. Apps don't have to understand everything, they just access what they need.
  • kjetilk 8y ago
    Great question, because it is basically the most ignored problem in the Semantic Web community and thus the one that we are spending quite a lot of time on. So, basically, there is one data model, RDF, but RDF does not require the same set of fields, to the contrary you are free to write your own. Obviously, you wouldn't get good interoperability if you do. So, there are several things you can do: 1) Adopt what others are using 2) Map your "fields" (we're more for calling it vocabularies), to the stuff others are doing, and rely on apps to figure out interop using reasoners. 3) Don't care, your app will work fine for you. I mean, 3) is fine, it is just that you'd be missing out. 2) also works, kinda, but reasoners aren't all that easy to use, so I'd mostly like to see people go for 1). So, we need to make it really easy to find existing stuff. You could go for the big one, i.e. https://schema.org/ https://schema.org/ or you could go more in detail and look at https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/ https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/ . The former has a lot of traction, the latter is real decentralized, so I kinda prefer that. Then, we have to make it real easy to author new stuff when you can't find existing stuff, because that will happen. Then, we need to make it easy for others to find yours, so that they can start using it too for similar applications. And, I'm thinking that it will be kind of a graduation process, where you first look for existing stuff, and when failing to find anything, you just mint your own without thinking about others, just to get something that works up and running. Once your app starts gaining traction, you tighten it up, and if then something other gets popular, you can migrate to that with little disruption. So, we're not there yet, but we're thinking and working on it a lot.
• StreamBright 8y ago
  "In order to regain freedom and control over the digital aspects of our lives" Nothing proves his point more than: <script src="//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js...
  • crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    This feels like the same argument: "Al Gore claims he's an environmentalist, yet he flies using his personal gas guzzling plane." And yeah, it's an ad hominem. "Is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument" You can most definitely use centralized servers to disseminate decentralization. I'm pretty sure https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io started as a github project and on a monolithic server backed by cloudflare. That doesn't dismiss them in the least - considering they now heavily dogfood.
    • rubenverborgh 8y ago
      More specifically a Tu quoque / appeal to hypocrisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque :-)
      • Perceptes 8y ago
        Thanks for sharing this! I wasn't aware of this term and it's very relevant to another topic I often discuss. It'll be very useful to me. :}
  • naravara 8y ago
    It's like Lenin said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
  • earthboundkid 8y ago
    And Disqus comments, which are also pretty surveillance spammy.
  • 8y ago
• snazz 8y ago
  The design, typography, and diagrams in this article are wonderful. I like it when people pay this much attention to detail!
• kodablah 8y ago
  I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources. For the majority of use cases, we don't need distributed storage, compute, etc. Just start making these self-hosted "servers", "data pods", etc as easy to install as desktop software and make it clear that they are inaccessible when the computer is off. People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house. Modern societies have reasonable upload speeds and electricity/network uptime to support it. Sure, things like ISP firewall/NAT and dynamic IPs are a bit of a barrier, but you can have volunteers help with relays. For example, I can easily fire up a Tor onion service on my never-turns-off home desktop computer and reach my stuff from anywhere. Why can't I reach my friends' stuff the same way? Because, to use business-speak, there's nothing "turnkey". It's something I've been pondering and working on. Sure, the bigger players may have to be in DCs, have more stringent uptime requirements, and distribute their bandwidth/workload more. But for most of us, desktop software and web-of-trust style connections could go a long way so long as the front of the software has a FB feel (e.g. a feed, messages, etc). We can tackle discovery, searching, aggregation, offloading, etc later.
  • wmf 8y ago
    Try Sandstorm. Home servers are a very difficult sell (see $500 Helm) compared to VMs running in a data center and IMO the privacy difference is mostly illusory.
    • brachi 8y ago
      Could ellaborate why is illusory?
      • wmf 8y ago
        Data centers and (paid) cloud vendors don't look at your data and the police can get into your home as easily as your VM.
        • zozbot123 8y ago
• firefoxd 8y ago
  Decentralized web can be downloaded and backed up by one entity. Then, you can go to that centralized entity to enjoy all the content. If we still don't have decentralization, it's because it is not as easy.
• wmf 8y ago
  I can't escape the feeling that SOLID will be at best neutral but likely will make things worse. Some of the diagrams show more companies having access to your data where it will continue to be mined, sold, etc. If you control storage but not execution it seems like you control nothing.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    You control access permissions too :-)
    • yati 8y ago
      An application with access to bits in your pod can always copy that data to its own storage right? e.g., a Facebook built on Solid can still grab all the data it needs (with the requisite perms) and store it away, build a profile per WebID, continue serving "cached" copies of changed content, etc. What are your thoughts on this?
      • rubenverborgh 8y ago
        At that point, it becomes a legal matter. Not everything can be solved with technology. (There's homomorphic encryption, bet let's leave that aside for now.) The GDPR legislation in Europe sets a good precedent for demanding removal of our data. The crucial point is that Solid will bring more choice: there will be social feed viewers that will be more invasive, and those that will be less invasive. People can choose the one they like, without consequences as to whom they can interact with. Today, we do not have a choice: if we want to interact with people who use Facebook, we have to use Facebook as well.
• qznc 8y ago
  > From the above, it is clear that our primary obstacles are not technological [5]; hence Tim Berners-Lee’s call [6] to "assemble the brightest minds from business, technology, government, civil society, the arts, and academia to tackle the threats to the Web’s future". Yet at the same time, computer scientists and engineers need to deliver the technological burden of proof that decentralized personal data networks can scale globally and that they can provide people with an experience similar to that of centralized platforms. This whole article looks like "well, the obstacles are not technological, but let me write a few pages about technology anyways". If the obstacle are not technological, then we need non-technological solutions. So far I think GDPR is one such non-technological step towards taking back control of our personal data. The hardest problem in my opinion is "preventing the spread of misinformation" because we essentially need a way to distinguish between malice and stupidity. Without mind-reading I do not see how this could be possible at scale.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    Yes, I was asked specifically to write a chapter on Tim's work. What we have is the technology to make it work—it's a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.
• jshen 8y ago
  I’m all for the principles here, but one worry I have is the loss of efficiencies afforded by economies of scale which could dramatically increase the carbon footprint compared to the centralized versions.
  • wmf 8y ago
    This is why carbon needs to be priced so you could have facts about the magnitude of the problem (spoiler: probably pretty small) instead of trying to make qualitative tradeoffs (is it worth destroying society to save the environment?)
• kornork 8y ago
  Maybe I missed it somewhere, but I didn't quite follow how this is going to gain a foothold. Solid has the same problem any new social media platform has - before people want to use it, people have to be using it. Facebook and Google certainly have no incentive to promote it.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    Google might. They do more than advertising, including selling services. They might happily make Google Drive compatible with Solid—especially if this helps break the Solid monopoly. Facebook, probably not so much. Their business model is data harvesting. Regarding Solid, note that we don't want to overthrow or replace any existing social networks. We start with offering experiences they cannot offer due to their siloed nature.
  • kjetilk 8y ago
    Oh, but Solid isn't just a social network. True, social networks have really powerful network effects, so it is a key to success, but not the only key. We're separating data from apps, which enables permissionless innovation. That means a lot of people can start writing cool things that they just can't now, because they are constrained by those platform companies. We're doing that too. And once people start doing that, every useful app that comes to Solid will grow the platform, first probably as small communities here and there, and then those communities get new connections, and boom, disruption! :-)
• maxk42 8y ago
  The web cannot be decentralized without putting an end to SSL. As long as certificate-issuers are the arbiters of commerce and browsers push users to trust unsecured websites more and more, malicious governments will be able to silence people by revoking their certs. There are stronger alternatives. We need to make a push to begin using them.
  • jakelazaroff 8y ago
    I'm not sure what stronger alternatives you're referring to. Can you elaborate or share any resources?
    • sparkie 8y ago
      If, instead of identifying services by some human readable name, they are identified by their public keys, then we don't need certificates - there are several encrypted and authenticated transport protocols which only require knowledge of the destination's public key upfront. You then need an alternative name system which links a unique human readable name to a public key. This is the tricker part (see Zooko's triangle), but there are some creative solutions like Namecoin and the Blockstack Name Service.
      • jimsmart 8y ago
        > links a unique human readable name to a public key Easy: use DNS, store the PGP key ID a TXT records, and then look up the public key for that ID using a PGP key server.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    Your argument might sound stronger if you didn't use the name of a dead protocol. All use of SSL has been prohibited by RFC since 2015. I'm pretty sure there aren't better alternatives.
    • kodablah 8y ago
      People tend to use "SSL" to mean "CA-based TLS" these days, as in "SSL certificate".
• pbalau 8y ago
  This is a load of ... You can't descentralize the web for 2 reasons: DNS and SSL. And then you have the IP organisation, the name escapes me right now.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    Both DNS and TLS PKI (nothing uses SSL) are decentralized by design.
    • pbalau 8y ago
      Who decides I can or cannot get foobar.tld?
      • Tecuane 8y ago
        That would probably be ICANN[1], and most authoritative name servers follow the policies set out there as the guiding committee is part of ICANN[2]. There are alternative DNS roots, though. I participated in running one myself for a time. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_supervision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_s...
        • pbalau 8y ago
          Thanks, I was thinking about ICANN, but i'm a bit tipsy and didn't want to discredit my point by misspelling an organization. Yet, this still proves my point, the internet, as we are experiencing it today, is based on different orgs simply playing nice by some rules established by a central authority. What if they stop doing that? What if the central auth is going to have something against you?
      • amiga-workbench 8y ago
        You are perfectly free to run your own nameserver, nobody has to use it though.
• staticvar 8y ago
  Beaker Browser is a cool experiment showing how you can decentralize the web that is both easy for end user's and fun for developers because it pushes web standards. https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com *disclaimer: I help develop Bunsen Browser, the mobile companion for Beaker Browser.
  • MarsAscendant 8y ago
    Could you explain to me, a newbie, what Beaker promotes and what its advantage is against browsers that use HTTP?
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  The web is decentralized, and we already have control of our data. The problem is, people keep giving it away. I'm fairly confident that 98% of the population of the earth doesn't give a crap that their data is collected, or that they don't "control" it. This whole "decentralized web" thing is just privacy nerds trying to convince us that we need this, when really no regular consumer is asking for it.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    Technologically, yes. But centralization takes many shapes (as I explain in the article: https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web/#ashort-history-of-de-centralization-and-the-web https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web...). I encourage you to read the article, where you'll see that I'm arguing from a permissionless innovation perspective, not so much privacy.
    • peterwwillis 8y ago
      We can already do this - but it's a bad idea. Plenty of services are API compatible with Amazon S3 (e.g. anyone can run their own S3 clone) so people can modify existing sites to use S3 with OAuth. Use OAuth to allow the user to delegate access to their S3 service link. No new protocols needed, no big innovations required. But for this to work on anything other than the most rudimentary data (media files, blog posts, and serialized data) would require completely changing the way all modern applications are written. Databases would all have to change, APIs would all need to follow specific standards, and networks would need to become a hell of a lot more stable, higher bandwidth, and lower latency. Assume you're Twitter, and you want to map-reduce all of the data of all your users to find out how many people retweeted a user, and then notify those users. Now you need to connect to every user's service provider, get their data, store it temporarily on your own servers, duplicate everything, do your processing, and then write changes back to all storage services for all users. Now do this every second. If you don't, you have to store this map-reduced data on your own service's storage, which violates the principle of only using the user's storage pod. In fact, data would have to become more centralized to work in this model. Currently, application data exists across a range of services in a variety of networks, all of it being dynamically accessed in different ways before it is accessed by a user. There are dozens of different databases used just to open up the TV Guide on your cable company's set-top box. All of that would have to be centralized in one or two databases in order for the storage and processing to be disconnected. Not only that, but a lot of data is useless to anyone but the original service provider or original application. Only a Facebook clone would be able to use Facebook's data, and only data relevant to Facebook's ad sales should stay on Facebook's servers, even if it contains "Peter clicked on ad X at Y time". Should there be a separation of what kind of data gets decentralized? Do we really want to go down the rabbit hole of what is my data, and what is data about me that a company has originated and created value from? (Is a picture mine because it's a picture of something I own, or is it mine if I took the picture?) The idea that every component of every application could be completely decentralized from each other is unlikely. Now, what is more in the realm of possibility is doing a Google or Facebook, and creating features that allow exporting or importing all data. But that process is not perfect, and the procedure can take from minutes to days. And to use this data it would still all have to follow standards specific to a particular application. And again, we already have a lot of these data standards. We have standards for most of the kinds of data that exist today, such as calendar, contacts, e-mail, instant message, voip, office documents, images, and so on. We have standards to synchronize and syndicate data feeds. We have standards to federate accounts and manage permissions. But commercial sites don't natively build these features as interoperable with each other - because, why would they? Storage and processing of data are intimately connected with the specific applications that use them, and trying to decouple them will result in inefficiency and complication, with no clear advantages.
• deleted 8y ago
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• crucini 8y ago
  I skimmed this and see two big problems. First, this idealistic idea that "we" are going to take back our data. Who is this we? Only the smart, high-agency people who have time to spare. The commercial web is increasingly tuned to the normal user, who is low-agency and easily led around. Who will win a battle of user acquisition and retention? Facebook or the rebels? Facebook of course. So any solutions proposed here are just for a tiny percentage of users who will then be isolated from the real and useful social networks. Or more realistically use both. Or maybe if the infrastructure is built, a layer of savvy entrepreneurs can emerge to monetize it? I'm thinking of reaganemail, selling an anti-google email account to the AM radio crowd. Second, the idea of somehow eliminating censorship. De facto censorship will always exist, even if you sugar coat it as Twitter has tried - "your content is still there, but only if someone explicitly looks for it". Any platform without censorship will just be flooded by every marketer and political zealot, for starters. Also, I think he is conflating filter bubbles with centralization. Without centralization, wouldn't we still have filter bubbles as people self-select into their online communities?
  • gerbilly 8y ago
    Well, when I got on the internet in 1988, we were all 'smart, high-agency people who have time to spare' Supposing we manage to solve this problem, what's to say average people can't participate in 10 years or so or so when the tech has been made easier to use?
    • flixic 8y ago
      Early web was quite decentralized already. Many separate Bulletin Boards, later forums. Many people writing there had an idea how to create their own. It didn't start centralized. Centralization happened. I might be more cynical than I should be but as a designer I struggle to see the future in which we have social dynamics that favor decentralization instead of convergence into a less self-managed system (i.e. all current centralized networks).
      • repolfx 8y ago
        No it wasn't. Vast reams of content were hosted exclusively on GeoCities. In fact almost all "home pages" were on GeoCities or AOL back then. There has never really been a time in the history of the internet when a few small providers or companies didn't have outsized dominance - DARPA early on, then Netscape, AOL and GeoCities, then Microsoft, Blogger, WordPress. This sort of discussion looks often like rose tinted spectacles. The past wasn't so different to today.
• tmcw 8y ago
  It puzzles me that the linked data future is still discussed, as if we didn't already try it, and didn't already discover that developers dislike arcane RDF standards and the academic-rooted designers of the specifications have a terrible track record of solving real-world problems. And that now they're presenting linked data as some critical component of the decentralized web while skipping out on the debates that everyone else in the space is having - like whether decentralization can be fast, or how to ensure data authenticity, or whether a 'local server / pod' can be built that doesn't get hosed by hole-punching through a home Comcast connection. Instead, it's just 'what about old-fashioned websites, plus lots of xml schema and long spec documents'? It just tastes like a rehash of Berners-Lee's existing '5-star open data' schpiel ( https://5stardata.info/en/ https://5stardata.info/en/ ) but now with the billing that it'll fix the internet. 5-star open data has been around for years now, and, well, the linked data future isn't here. When's the last time you consumed RDF in an application?
  • Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    There's been a lot of effort to improve RDF ergonomics with JSON-LD, and ActivityPub is a widely used standard based on JSON-LD (though my experience with implementing it has been quite challenging).
    • hypothete 8y ago
      I feel you on implementation - every time I make an attempt to try out ActivityPub I get intimidated by the combo of JSON-LD and the verbosity of Activity Streams vocabulary: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/
      • Karrot_Kream 8y ago
        I've been working on an ActivityPub implementation and there are so many edge cases and SHOULD vs MAY recommendations, it's ridiculous. I'm planning a separate blog post on the intricacies of the standard.
• sascha_sl 8y ago
  The W3C has a proven track record to produce overengineered shit when it comes to "the semantic web". Just look at ActivityPub. It's essentially OStatus but instead of XML we slapped namespaces on JSON, wrote a bunch of overly complex preprocessing procedures so that everyone can output just the way they want[1] and still made half the spec ambiguous enough[2] that implements essentially follow the one rule that matters, maintain compatibility with Mastodon. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld-api/#algorithm-5 https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld-api/#algorithm-5 [2]: https://please-just-end.me/ap.html#block-activity-outbox https://please-just-end.me/ap.html#block-activity-outbox (domain name relevant to content)
  • zozbot123 8y ago
    The Semantic Web does not require XML these days. JSON-LD (for JSON) and GRDDL/Microdata (for HTML) are widely-acknowledged standards. For simple text use, akin to a Markdown-formatted document, you can use Turtle. If you believe that JSON-LD is genuinely ambiguous, take it to the authors of that spec and contribute to getting it fixed.
    • sascha_sl 8y ago
      Do you think a format that requires this amount of code to predictably parse is a good format? https://github.com/kazarena/json-gold/blob/master/ld/api_normalize.go https://github.com/kazarena/json-gold/blob/master/ld/api_nor...
• TheMagicHorsey 8y ago
  Somebody should make an easy to install home server with a standard API to access data. People will start decentralizing on their own when you can just buy a box and do some basic configuration, and have a secure home web server. And then developers will build on the decentralized platform because it has users.
• rickcogley 8y ago
  The problem is people. To put it charitably, not everyone is "technical" enough to figure out how to own their own data, so I think silos and walled gardens are here to stay, because they are quick and easy for people. I for one, fully support keeping my own data in (as much as possible) future-proof formats, and although I've had a blog in some form for years, I want to move away from standard social media as much as possible.
• alexashka 8y ago
  Huh... > The situation becomes problematic when we are robbed of our choice, deceived into thinking there is only one access gate to a space that, in reality, we collectively own. Robbery - the action of taking property unlawfully from a person or place by force or threat of force. [0] Deceit - The action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth [1] That's what those words mean. They also have nothing to do with anything that has happened with the internet over the last 20 years. [0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/robbery https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/robbery [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/deceit https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/deceit
  • fwip 8y ago
    I don't think quoting the dictionary here makes you look especially smart. Are you railing against the use of "rob" with an intangible noun? Would you cry foul at phrases like "robbed of their dignity?" Do you ignore alternative definitions like "to deprive of something unjustly or injuriously?"[0] Do you believe that nobody involved in centralization conceals or misrepresents the truth? Does a marketer never overstate the benefits of their hosted solution? [0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/robbed https://www.dictionary.com/browse/robbed
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• jpollock 8y ago
  Technology won't help with this, regulation will. We have parallels from other platforms - specifically the fixed and mobile phone networks. There used to be monopolies in local phone service. There were new competitors, but to change provider, you had to change phone number. Even changing cell phone provider required a number change. This obviously had strong network effects pulling you to stay with your provider. You had to tell _everyone_ in your extended network where to find you and have them update all of their business records when you changed from one carrier to another. Eventually, everyone figured out this was stupid, and Number Portability [1] was forced on carriers by regulation. This problem is completely gone now. You can take your number with you. If we allow people to take their data to new social networks, and force federation, then we will get decentralization. However, it won't happen without regulation anymore than it did with the phone companies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_number_portability#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_number_portability#Histo...
  • TylerE 8y ago
    If you have ever seen any attempt by any government to regulate software you would know this to be a Lovecraftian nightmare, and not a solution.
    • jancsika 8y ago
      If you have ever seen any attempt by any volunteer-run FLOSS team to solve nationwide social problems with technology you would know this to be a Lovecraftian nightmare, and not a solution.
      • TylerE 8y ago
        But you aren’t legally mandated to use it.
        • jancsika 8y ago
          Also-- companies that aren't legally mandated to allow third parties to reverse engineer their medical devices would otherwise use every means within their power to stop you from doing that. We know this because companies outside of the medical industry use every means within their power to stop you from doing that. And I can't see how a response of "let's get rid of the chess board so they can't play" would be an adult response to this problem.
• carlsborg 8y ago
  The specification (set of protocols) is here https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec
• skybrian 8y ago
  I'm not sure this is a coherent plan, since it doesn't talk about how privacy rules get enforced for services. Who vets the services? If a fun game that you let have access to your "personal data pod" and it turns out to be Cambridge Analytica and just copies everything it sees into its own database, how is that an improvement over Facebook apps? Choosing between service providers is no more meaningful for privacy than asking Windows users to download arbitrary apps. If smart phones are any more secure than desktops, it's because Apple and Google are constantly improving OS-level security and policing their app stores for malware. Of course app stores have well-known flaws. But if we want to do better than that, someone has to figure out a better way to choose good rules and enforce the rules better.
• mikob 8y ago
  What's to stop a service from having a pod that stores user's data in a mutated form? (Forgive me for the basic question).
  • jimsmart 8y ago
    Signature hashs of the files, (possibly/probably) with those signature hashs being further signed/verfied with the user's key, to establish trust. With further chains of trust through key signing, if needed.
• ilaksh 8y ago
  I think if you add some cryptography to Solid and use JSON-LD and pick some schemas and not expect everyone to implement OWL and then get a usable naming scheme for IPFS (or replace IPFS with something similar with names that work) and then create some P2P Solid servers then this could work pretty well.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I went to the Decentralized Web Conferece a few years ago and really liked it. In spirit, I am onboard. In practice, I am satisfied with just using my own domain for email, my web site, and self-hosted blog. For communication I like FaceTime so I can see people while I am talking with them, phone, and email. I still use social media, very occasionally, to see what people are doing and sometimes advertise my new open source projects and updates, and any books I write. Most of the problems people talk about with Facebook/Twitter don’t bother me as long as I only use the systems infrequently. I am not tempted to cancel my accounts.
• gpsx 8y ago
  Other people here have said this general idea here, the large centrealized services like Google and Facebook have succeeded in becoming so big through a lot of effort and a lot of cost, which was paid for by all the money they make. At a minimum they have to pay for their server use. From what I understand the proposal here seems to not allow for the advertising model. I don't think a services can grow and survive making people paying because people are too cheap. There might be a better chance for something like this is they allow for the economics. - Maybe the data host can provide a "advertising" profile which the user has control of. This can be exposed to the application hosts to allow for advertising. - Maybe you also throw micropayments into the mix, along with bartering for information or micropayments. Another issue is complexity. A number of comments have talked bout over-engineered solutions and protocols. This decentralizezd idea could be started with something small like an open social network standard. I think I saw something similar to this on HN not too long ago: - You have a web site, which is your profile. A provider could give you a nice editor for it. - You have a feed, where you can put pictures, short posts, long posts, whatever. This is distributed with RSS. (The host makes this all seamless for you.) - Identity is controlled with OAuth, used only to give an identity to visiting users. The owner users can manage permissions for certain remote users (his "friends") Such a service could be managed on your own web server, or there could be different cloud providers that make this arbitarily easy, with arbitrary levels of functionality on the "profile" page, the "feed" and the "friend" permission management.
• austincheney 8y ago
  I don't see any real possibility for decentralization so long as HTTP(S) is the protocol of the web.
• dabockster 8y ago
  > Since 2010, no single browser has gained more than two thirds of global market share anymore What about Google Chrome?
• LukeB42 8y ago
  Shameless plug but I designed and wrote something for doing this from 2011 to 2015 because nothing like it existed or indeed exists as far as I'm aware. It's a p2p caching proxy that also lets you edit web pages collaboratively in realtime over a LAN or the internet. It has a contacts list system and p2p chat functionality. This project effectively died due to lack of interest and I still have various security concerns about it (Should you break/reimplement Same-Origin policy or break/reimplement the TLS chain of trust?) The main security concern is that because it decentralises HTTP in-place (existing URLs can now be looked up on an arbitrary number of overlay networks if the original URL isn't providing an OK response) it puts users at risk of malicious actors spamming overlay networks with browser exploits for popular resources like "news.ycombinator.com/". I hope TBL and co converge on satisfying answers to these problems or constrain their design to not bother with decentralising existing URLs in-situ. Code lives here: https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony Feel free to shoot me any questions.
• vinay_ys 8y ago
  In 2005, I worked at a startup that attempted to solve the problem of privacy and security for personal information (photos, home videos, music, personal health/finance documents, contacts etc) while also providing ability to share and collaborate. The solution involved running a mesh network with nodes on user's laptop or desktop and a corresponding node in the cloud. These nodes would index local data and provide replication of metadata across nodes and backup of actual data to cloud node. A locally running web app acted as replacement for 'windows explorer'. It allowed the user to access all their files and folders across all their nodes, access them (open document, play music/videos, see contacts etc), create smart collections and share these files, folders or collections with other users in a secure authenticated and private manner. User got an identity - which comprised of a dedicated domain (or subdomain) and a PKI certificate tied to that domain. Each node had it's own private key and their public keys were tied together by the identity certificate. All communication between nodes (of same user or across users) where authenticated and encrypted using these identity/node keys and certificates. No central node existed in the system that could spy on these activities. The architecture separated the network discovery cloud nodes from your data cloud nodes and architecture allowed for your data cloud nodes to be hosted separately anywhere (say, in your own cloud instances). This is the only system I have seen that utilized zero knowledge protocols and made it accessible to common people to manage their data and share with others as well. But unfortunately, as a business it never took off. It got acquired by emc and merged with mozy (good old data backup company) and then this product died a silent death in 2010. Maybe it was timing, maybe after snowden, if this product had launched it would have done well. But now, I think a more urgent and a relatively less complex problem to solve is one of distributed communication. In this era of always connected powerful devices (mobile phones, home gateways), why don't we all have our own personal email/chat servers that nobody else can spy on? Why does email and chat have to get relayed via big aggregators who mine so much data as well as metadata? Not only do they violate privacy, they succumb to security breaches and cause serious damages. I feel the stage is set for this disruption: crypto protocols, always-on cheap connectivity, compute power at the edge, and sensitivity to privacy/security in general population – all of these ingredients are appropriately set right now for this to happen.
  • brabel 8y ago
• deevolution 8y ago
  The people dont care about decentralization or centralization. This is all a big generalization, but humans are lazy and when it comes to making a moral choice, they're going to pick the path of least resistance and completely ignore all moral consequences. Its looks like at the moment centralized services are what the people want and it's what they deserve.
  • repolfx 8y ago
    Why is "decentralisation" even the moral choice to begin with. A lot of projects claim to be decentralised, but when you ask "ok, who has the power in this project" it turns out that a small cabal of developers has most of the same rights and powers a corporate, centrally hosted service would have. It takes very careful analysis to discover whether a thing is really meaningfully decentralised or is just claiming to be.
• peteforde 8y ago
  This essay is in radical need of a TL;DR. If something is this important, you owe it to the subject matter not to bury the lede under a mountain of history and flowery exposition. Ask yourself: who is this for? People who are not already deeply passionate will stop reading unless they are engaged in a minute of reading. Note that a minute is being extremely generous; on a commercial consumer site, it's apparently an average of 7 seconds before someone will click away. I recommend that you check out this video and reconsider how you might reframe your message as a call to action that speaks to a better future we can create together. https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4?t=121 https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4?t=121 I even jumped you to the good part.
  • sprayk 8y ago
    I definitely scrolled around, looking for some kind of summary. I wantee to figure out if I was gonna be wasting my time reading another recap of what I lived through or if there was gonna be a proposal for some way to get back to decentralization that I could evaluate and keep in mind when designing my own apps. Couldn't figure it out from scrolling so I bailed.
• miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Great article Ruben! I've been following Solid's progress for a while, and I think your article very eloquently summarize its purpose and relevance. I'm especially interested in the ability to circumvent the middle-men, and resolve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem once and for all. Watching your TED talk in 2013 was one of the most influential moment in my life, and discovering the semantic web was perhaps my greatest epiphany. While the vision never left my mind, I never acted on it. Until now. I'm dedicating 2019 to linked data. I'm going all-in. Last week, I started to build a tool to convert unstructured input to linked data. Even after recognizing canonical literals (email, phone, url, color, gender, boolean, integer, float, date, time span, money, weight, distance, language, image, geo coordinates), I couldn't accurately infer predicates and guess classes. Before trying more complicated stuff like bayesian inference, I decided to try a simpler exercise. This time, I want to aggregate structured data from different sources and map it to some existing ontologies. For example, I want to convert some JSON about comments and links from Reddit and Hacker News to RDF using the http://schema.org http://schema.org vocabulary. - Can I feed the JSON into some ML system that automatically figures out the mapping? What if I provide some annotation or feedback? - Can I manually turn the JSON into JSON-LD and use that as the mapping information? What about complex transformations (different structures and literals)? - Should I implement the mapping manually using my favorite programming language? - Should I use R2RML or RML? What's the state of the art today for semantic data integration?
  • jimsmart 8y ago
    Maybe take a look at FRED? (Disclaimer: not used it myself) - Homepage http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/fred/ http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/fred/ - Paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280113533_FRED_From_natural_language_text_to_RDF_and_OWL_in_one_click https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280113533_FRED_From... There are likely other projects and papers, google 'text to rdf nlp' Stephen Reed (ex-Cyc engineer) also did some interesting work in this field, in his Texai project, over 10 years ago. Although there are few references to it on the web now: that part of his project is no longer open source (and I know of no known mirrors). - Paper https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8026/107de65c5a14aa8d0d47f9e20d9e24343cb3.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8026/107de65c5a14aa8d0d47f9... - Homepage http://texai.org http://texai.org
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  All of this is very academic. Regular people and businesses are always going to make the decision in front of them. 'Decentralization' unto it's own, is not something anyone directly cares about. People care about privacy, somewhat, but there are other paths to privacy, or at least, consumers may very well believe there are. Decentralization will only happen with a real impetus: a product or service that facilitates it, that people want, either for issues related to decentralization, or, more likely for some other reason that just happens to facilitate decentralization for some other, related reason.
• transpute 8y ago
  For the technically savvy, you can run a virtualized desktop: - GPU passthrough VM (gaming) - SATA passthrough (FreeNAS) - multi NIC passthrough (pfSense/OpenWRT) - app server/cloud/P2P Linux or FreeBSD VM(s) http://unraid.net http://unraid.net sells a KVM-based product. VMware ESXi and XenServer are free. Connect a Ubiquiti AC-Lite WiFi access point to a dedicated NIC on the x86 box, WAN to another NIC. Since pfSense owns the WAN NIC, it can host a VPN server for your devices, including mobile. All VMs get virtual NICs. Dell T30 with quad-core Xeon and ECC costs about $400 with 8GB RAM and 1TB disk, it can hold 4 x 3.5" drives (20 TB in RAID-1) and 2 x 2.5" SSD. Level1Techs has intro videos on home servers: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=level1+home+server https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=level1+home+ser... Advantages: - Stable and boring x86 platform - Good performance for gaming - Commercially supported hardware - Upgradeable storage and GPU - Upgradeable router software
• benlorenzetti 8y ago
  <i> He and many others were able to state their critical opinions because they had the Web as an open platform, so they did not depend on anyone’s permission to publish their words. Crucially, the Web’s hyperlinking mechanism lets blogs point to each other, again without requiring any form of permission. This allows for a decentralized value network between equals, where readers remain in active and conscious control of their next move.</i> For decentralization the root problem always existed, while pointing at another resource requires no permission, receiving and hosting that resource does. Your government has to let you receive it and your ISP has to let you host. This is a much lower level problem compared to the three challenges Berners-Lee puts forward, which seem to have little to do with decentralization. 1. taking back control of our personal data; 2. preventing the spread of misinformation; 3. realizing transparency for political advertising.
• ngcc_hk 8y ago
  Missed that about 20% humanity is under a walled national garden. If you have a protocol that are individual or home oriented, would it be allowed to work even.
• captainbland 8y ago
  The point about the decentralised web allowing the permissionless creation of centralising systems reminds me of the paradox of tolerance, where tolerant societies are thought to be taken over by intolerance if they tolerate that intolerance. Maybe this is a lesson that we need to be less tolerant towards the creation of centralised services because those with money and power will seek to bring decentralised systems under their own control.
• EGreg 8y ago
  Since 2010, no single browser has gained more than two thirds of global market share anymore Pretty sure Chrome did. Or WebKit/Blink family. This is GOOD imho.
  • rubenverborgh 8y ago
    Unfortunately, "pretty sure" is not the way sound arguments are made ;-) Evidence is: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Custom%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-01%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-12%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options... and http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-201712-201812 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20171... Such a centralization comes with the risk of websites only working with one browser, forcing people to chose a certain device, operating system, and browser vendor.
• zaro 8y ago
  This sounds like yet another technical solution to a problem that is mostly societal.