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I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as

I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and this stuff... is not. Going forward it gets even worse, they're going to be opposed at every step by corporations with more money than most nations. The internet was originally decentralized because the government wanted to make it that way, and I think the only way to get back there is going to require a gigantic, economically unattractive investment. There are at least a few governments that may have the capability but I can't name one that would have the motivation. Hopefully some billionaire's charity will decide saving the internet is a worthy legacy.

cookiecaper 8y ago
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0] An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. [0] https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures
- cwyers 8y ago
  The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage). And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.
    - zzo38computer 8y ago
      I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.) And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.
  - buovjaga 8y ago
    IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/ https://irc.com/
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical. I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
    - cwyers 8y ago
      It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.
      - Teckla 8y ago
        One way to mitigate spam on Usenet is moderated newsgroups. Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.
  - ska 8y ago
    The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.
- dasyatidprime 8y ago
  > The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”? Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell. I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.
- comex 8y ago
  Eh. I sympathize, but if you were to implement the same as a client-side app rather than a hosted service, AFAIK there's little history or legal precedent for shutting such a thing down. Well, there was the kerfuffle between Microsoft and Google over Windows Phone access to YouTube, but other than that... Admittedly, a client-side app might not be allowed into walled-garden app stores, limiting its reach if targeting mobile operating systems. Still, mobile isn't everything. I find it strange that after the long history of multi-protocol IM clients back when it was still called "IM", there are so few attempts to do the same for modern protocols. I think the barriers are partly technical – e.g. better encryption/obfuscation, more features and faster pace of changes making it harder to keep up. But even that can't explain everything: many APIs are not obfuscated at all, and many services can be boiled down to pretty simple functionality. Part of it, I think, must be social – like people aren't even aware that it's a possibility, or worth spending effort on.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zbentley 8y ago
  > The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects. An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. Perhaps it's a social one as well.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.
- nialv7 8y ago
  Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.
  - danso 8y ago
    Which was enabled in large part from their centralization of email.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else. I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit. Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.
    - siriussidus 8y ago
      I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now. It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off. Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.
13415 8y ago
The problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware. Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, iOS, Android, and browsers, and may not transport any data or chew away bandwidth without allowing total control over this by the programmer and end user. It needs to have a dead simple, almost idiot-proof API. The resulting network on top of IP needs to be searchable, not too high latency, and route to any endpoint on it. That's still the biggest hurdle for the Open Web. Everything else is secondary.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dongping 8y ago
  And don't forget to add obfuscation and deniability to the lib, like Tribler and Perfect Dark did.
- tribler 8y ago
  Does this meet your requirements almost? https://pypi.org/project/pyipv8/ https://pypi.org/project/pyipv8/

cookiecaper 8y ago

The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0] An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. [0] https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

cwyers 8y ago
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage). And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.
  - zzo38computer 8y ago
    I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.) And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.
- buovjaga 8y ago
  IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/ https://irc.com/
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical. I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.
    - Teckla 8y ago
      One way to mitigate spam on Usenet is moderated newsgroups. Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.
- ska 8y ago
  The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.
dasyatidprime 8y ago
> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”? Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell. I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.
comex 8y ago
Eh. I sympathize, but if you were to implement the same as a client-side app rather than a hosted service, AFAIK there's little history or legal precedent for shutting such a thing down. Well, there was the kerfuffle between Microsoft and Google over Windows Phone access to YouTube, but other than that... Admittedly, a client-side app might not be allowed into walled-garden app stores, limiting its reach if targeting mobile operating systems. Still, mobile isn't everything. I find it strange that after the long history of multi-protocol IM clients back when it was still called "IM", there are so few attempts to do the same for modern protocols. I think the barriers are partly technical – e.g. better encryption/obfuscation, more features and faster pace of changes making it harder to keep up. But even that can't explain everything: many APIs are not obfuscated at all, and many services can be boiled down to pretty simple functionality. Part of it, I think, must be social – like people aren't even aware that it's a possibility, or worth spending effort on.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zbentley 8y ago
> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.
stcredzero 8y ago
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects. An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. Perhaps it's a social one as well.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

nialv7 8y ago
Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.
- danso 8y ago
  Which was enabled in large part from their centralization of email.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else. I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit. Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.
  - siriussidus 8y ago
    I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now. It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off. Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.

13415 8y ago

The problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware. Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, iOS, Android, and browsers, and may not transport any data or chew away bandwidth without allowing total control over this by the programmer and end user. It needs to have a dead simple, almost idiot-proof API. The resulting network on top of IP needs to be searchable, not too high latency, and route to any endpoint on it. That's still the biggest hurdle for the Open Web. Everything else is secondary.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dongping 8y ago
And don't forget to add obfuscation and deniability to the lib, like Tribler and Perfect Dark did.
tribler 8y ago
Does this meet your requirements almost? https://pypi.org/project/pyipv8/ https://pypi.org/project/pyipv8/