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Society Needs an Alternative Web

aditya3438 8y ago
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Mirioron 8y ago
I agree with the title - we do need an alternative web, but not the kind the author wants. We need an alternative web that has less censorship and regulation. The current internet is turning more and more into TV.
- iliketosleep 8y ago
  The author refers to a decentralized web, which cannot be controlled by any individual, state, or corporation. I think this implies less censorship and regulation.
  - asutekku 8y ago
    I’d love to be as idealistic, but when “free and uncensored” service has ever been ended up being something else than a cesspool for alt-right?
    - leereeves 8y ago
      Any free and uncensored service is bound to contain opinions you don't agree with. That's kinda the point.
      - andy_ppp 8y ago
        How about free decentralised and self-policing - opinions are fine but creating a place where illegal activity can’t be stopped will lead to any platform (even with good intentions) being marginalised.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        leereeves 8y ago
        People commit far more serious crimes in public parks than could ever be committed on a website. Is that a reason to close or marginalize public parks? Why not enforce the law on websites in a similar way: by arresting those responsible for illegal activity instead of attacking the venue?
        andy_ppp 8y ago
        Well if you squint and look closely I don’t think I said anything other than it’s better to make these platforms self policing as a way to stop illegal content from appearing. Personally, the only thing I would ban is child pornography, and probably insightment to terrorism from right wing and islamists as well.
        naasking 8y ago
        I don't even know why you would qualify "incitement to terrorism" with right wing. Have you never heard of left wing terrorists? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism
        ModernMech 8y ago
        From your link: "Incidents of left-wing terrorism dropped off at the end of the Cold War (circa 1989), partly due to the loss of support for communism.[14]" Conversely, there was an incident of right wing terrorism just last week. This follows a trend of increasing right-wing terrorist activity: https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsOfTerrorismInUS_Nov2017.pdf https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsO... Yes, left wing terrorism exists, but today people are increasingly associating terrorism with right-wing ideologies because it's in our face and happening with increasing frequency. It's the same reason one might associate terrorism with Islam in 2001.
    - Yetanfou 8y ago
      Before the term 'alt-right' was even coined there were AFA/Antifa plus a myriad of other leftist 'revolutionary' groups calling for the destruction of whatever happened to be in their way, islamists of every plumage vying for the position of the most vile representative of their ideology, a multitude of incarnations of Nazi-fetishism, etcetera. In other words, no need to point at a specific ideology to personify the tragedy of the commons. When there is no censorship there will be places where things are said you'd rather not hear. The best advice I can give is to avoid those places, that way you won't hear what they're saying. Even without censorship there are laws which limit what can be said so a censorship-free 'net does not necessarily equate a cesspool.
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      Not just Nazi scum, but also piracy, child porn and gore/terror videos... turns out whenever you have a service that these four groups can use to spread their content they will flood it. I personally have no big problem with piracy as these days most of it is self-defense against "copy protections" that actually hinder legitimate buyers, but I'd be happy if the other three groups would disappear from the planet rather sooner than later.
    - throwmeback 8y ago
      ...or alt-left...
      - stronglikedan 8y ago
        Very valid point, but you're not supposed to point it out here.
    - iliketosleep 8y ago
      A decade or two ago it was the left which was vying for free and uncensored. Political fortunes have changed and now it's the right. Censorship is not free of political bias, and those on the wrong side of the current trend will flood platforms where the censorship does not exist. Those who are in favour of censorship must consider that political trends change over time, and one day they might be the ones being censored.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - smadge 8y ago
      The only example I can think of is Gab, which became a “cesspool for the alt-right” because it specifically marketed itself to that demographic. There have also been internet communities for the far left where members could post opinions that didn’t have purchase in mainstream outlets since the beginning of the web.
      - asutekku 8y ago
        8chan, jodel (local anonymous based message board popular in some parts of europe, similar to yikyak) to say few. I’m not trying to claim the others don’t exist.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      That happens because these placed only attract extremes and let them stay among themselves. The key to a platform that does not become a cesspool is to disallow isolation and bubble building for extreme oppinions. Yet, this bubble building is what people desire and the only way to create a successful social online service is to cater to that group building. Real life rarely provides similar comforting bubbles of likeminded and reaffirming people. You still need to interact with other people even if you disagree with their views. In front of your computer screen, the right forum for sharing your views is just a few button pressed away. It is too easy to avoid the rest. To play devil's advocate and take an extreme position for the sake of discussion: we don't more free speech. Instead, we need a to introduce a duty to listen that goes both ways: if you want to express your opinions, you must also listen to what others have to say and especially, how others respond to what you say. And you do not get to pick and choose who you listen to. In essence, nobody must ever have full and exclusive control over the shape of the community they are part of.
    - EamonnMR 8y ago
      All of them before, what, 2014? That seemed to be the turning point.
    - ataturk 8y ago
      That's just ridiculous. The Web was supposed to be a marketplace of ideas. If you don't like the ideas, you're free to come up with your own. Censorship is not the answer. And alt-right is a reaction to the total beat down that less extreme reform movements such as the TEA Party and to a lesser extent, libertarians, tried to offer. The IRS was used to kill the TEA Party and now we find out John McCain was a major factor in why those targeted audits took place. Republicans just wanted their party back from the RINO assholes. I watched what happened with my own eyes--the RINO/GOPe played very dirty pool because they love big government, Big Brother, huge "defense" spending waste, pollution, misery, and total domination. In short, they're assholes and they doubled down when challenged. So now you get "alt-right" and you're fucking complaining about it!
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Systems which establish reputation, but don't ground it in strong and strictly unitary identity.
    - nabnob 8y ago
      Why should a billion dollar corporation get to decide which opinions are acceptable and which views don't get a platform? I'm as far to the left as you can get. I used to support stricter moderation on social media platforms, but I'm putting my foot in my mouth now. In practice, these corporations are just as likely to censor leftist views as they are to censor right-wing views. Even people who study history and politics don't agree on definitions of racism, sexism, etc. There's a lot of nuance that a $10/hr contractor who sat through a one-day training on offensive content at Facebook won't understand. This type of censorship doesn't help progressives, it just lets corporations determine the window of acceptable discourse.
  - Proven 8y ago
    Why not get rid of state (or at least as many laws as possible) rather than create a new “Dark” Internet on which most users would technically be criminals as all the ludicrous laws and regulations equally apply to Dark Internet
- aiyodev 8y ago
  You’re absolutely right. This is where someone usually says we need a decentralized web. But I wonder if we’re wasting time waiting for some new technology to save us. I’ve been waiting at least a decade and have seen project after project fail. Maybe instead we should focus on building a network of alternative, pro-liberty sites and apps using existing technology.
  - apatters 8y ago
    It's really just another manifestation of the tendency techies have to get overexcited about novel tech. Which is hardly the worst vice in the world, but when you want to build something that will reliably make an impact at scale, you don't really want to use novel tech outside of very rare cases. You want to use stuff that is dependable and gets the job done. I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough. You can still start a website anywhere on the planet in 5 minutes. The big distribution/promotion channels were always centralized long since before the web existed. A lot of these arguments seem to really boil down to "if the government passes a law I don't like, I can't evade it." Governments have been passing some bad laws lately, but they've done that for basically all of human history... I'm not at all against technology which resists bad or unjust laws, but we are never going to get to tech that is 100% effective at evading the law and probably shouldn't since the outcome would be anarchy. My money is on the web becoming choked with monopoly-entrenching, innovation-crushing regulations, and then people flocking to something surprisingly mundane, imperfect, and not heavily based on novel technology -- simply because that thing is less regulated.
    - ldubost 8y ago
      > I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough. This is because it's not a technological problem. The path to an actual decentralized web is clean technologically. We just need to take what already exists which is currently massively used in a centralized way, and build the services UI on top of it. Of course there are still crypto to add and so on, but if the investment where going that way it would come fast. The real problem is a business problem. Decentralized services don't pay unless there is something centralized. We cannot expect that (big) private companies will pay for something that's not in their interest. I've been running an open source company for 15 years. I've see so many times in the voice or in the eyes of entrepreneurs that they saw us as philanthropists. If we want de centralization, competition and control of our data and software we either or a combination of: - need individuals or comapnies to pay for it (pay your software provider + hosted fairly) - public funding - laws restriction the oligopoly approach - gdpr++++ - forcing standard based for big companies - forbidding centralization - forcing open-source Some are voluntary extreme and have little chance to ever happen.
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  there are pockets of humanity still, you just have to look a little harder
- bsder 8y ago
  > We need an alternative web that has less censorship and regulation. This is absolutely not an obviously true statement, and we have, in fact, quite a bit of situations to the contrary. For example, if someone is following my persona online and harassing me, I very much want to be able to enforce an "internet restraining order". That almost certainly cannot be done without some level of regulation.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Offline restraining orders can't really be enforced either. In fact, according to a public health study, all the value came from asking for the order (basically scaring the perpetrator) - actually being granted one was not found to provide additional benefits.
    - bsder 8y ago
      > In fact, according to a public health study, all the value came from asking for the order (basically scaring the perpetrator) - actually being granted one was not found to provide additional benefits. That is a completely different statement from "can't really be enforced". The fact that something "self-enforces" because it might turn into a "legal enforces" is possibly the most effective enforcement.
  - Phenix88be 8y ago
    Your online persona can just block anyone who harassing him. In real life, you can't "block" people...That why I don't get how harassment on internet can be a thing. Just block them !
    - ModernMech 8y ago
      Block them how? If you block someone they can just create a new persona to harass you with. Edit: For everyone downvoting, can you please express how you think clicking a block button stops harassment? Have you actually ever been the victim of online harassment? Did simply clicking a button solve your problem?
- krapp 8y ago
  >The current internet is turning more and more into TV. That's what most people want - a curated and moderated (censored) platform from which they can passively consume content. Any future web is going to have to account for that or else not be useful to most of society.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > The current internet is turning more and more into TV. You can build a working webserver using a $50 Raspberry Pi kit, to host whatever you want as long as it complies with the law. I would think that the "free speech" people would put their money where their mouth is and learn how to do some of this stuff instead of making Youtube videos about how they're being held back by political correctness.
  - chmln 8y ago
    Yeah, it's not like you can lose your domains, get kicked off of the vast majority of web hosts and demoted in google search just for having the wrong opinions
    - rchaud 8y ago
      This sort of victim mentality isn't helpful for you or your "cause". The only people it helps are the shysters who'll tell you these problems are created by the cultural marxist global elite or whatever, while shaking their e-tip jar. Isn't it usually the "free speech" crew telling others that they don't know what 'real oppression' is? Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you. The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line. Neither of those are necessary to run a functioning website. As a recent meme put it, 'learn to code'.
      - chmln 8y ago
        I don't have a "cause". Are you trying to argue that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are apolitical? > Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you Someone has it worse, so we shouldn't try to be better? ISIS throws gay people off of rooftops. Does that make jailing them in the US okay, because it's not as bad? > The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line. Allowing domain registrars and hosting providers to arbitrarily take down websites based on political viewpoints is a horrific overreach. Don't act shocked when tomorrow it will be your opinion that's deemed "incorrect" and you're booted off the web for your perfectly legal libertarian blog
dpq 8y ago
As much as I like to consider myself a pro-freedom, anti-censorship type of person, articles such as this one rarely fail to amuse me. As long as the system of payoffs stays unchanged, the end result is inevitably going to be the same, and if the decentralized web does change the system of payoffs, there might be no incentives to motivate development and adoption of such a d-web beyond a small number of technically adept people. How many times have there been calls and widespread memes to abandon Facebook [remember Diaspora?], and yet it's still there. It's all not doom and gloom, but what society desperately needs is to stop producing/consuming pointless articles such as this one or idiocy like "We should break up Google and Amazon" [Oh yeah? Go ahead and break them up them, I'll watch. Will you be selling tickets?], and to start performing _real_ economic and game-theoretic analysis of possible alternatives.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Get ready for more of it. All twenty Democrat presidential hopefuls just watched Warren talk about splitting tech companies and are currently looking for someone to hold their beer. It’s going to be a long electional cycle :/ I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    Politicians promise all kinds of things in stump speeches that they know they cannot realistically deliver. Remember Bush I's "no new taxes?" Obama's public option healthcare plan? Trump's wall? All gone by the wayside. What you say doesn't matter if you can't guarantee the right number of votes in the legislature.
  - chmln 8y ago
    > I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more. Why do you think something will happen? All three platforms have a 'pro-leftwing' and 'anti-rightwing' bias, which also aligns with most of the mainstream media. As a result, their censorship is supported by a good majority of the population
marknadal 8y ago
A key quote from the article: > Adoption of a decentralized web cannot play by the old rules. New experiences and interactions that are outside of current norms needs to appeal to individual values, that enable trust and ease of adoption. Pulling users away from convention is not an easy task. They seem to suggest Decentralization is at odds with "conventional" consumer experiences. It doesn't have to be that way. For instance: - D.Tube (decentralized YouTube) - notabug.io (P2P Reddit) Both look, feel, and act very much like their "conventional" versions. Yet both of these are fully decentralized using GUN (my project: https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ). Most users would not even know there is a difference. So it is certainly possible to both appeal to the masses/convention, while being private/secure and free/open-source and decentralized. Although I do think we do need NEW and DIFFERENT experiences, things that are "fresh" and fun. Facebook basically looks corporate now. We need to build new UI/UX experiences that define a new "era" of the web, in the same way people look back and remember the 80s or 90s. This doesn't have to be something we look back to, it is something we can engineer from the start. :)
- wilsonrocks 8y ago
  > Most users would not even know there is a difference. I fear that the difference they would see is that other people aren't using it and they would go back to where their friends are:(
- gitgud 8y ago
  I wouldn't really say fully decentralised they require DNS and a webserver to point to for the website. Although the content may be decentralised, is inaccurate to claim its fully decentralised. Decentralising domain names is not an easy task, as IPFS is discovering...
  - marknadal 8y ago
    We've successfully done local multicast, Bluetooth, discovery. DNS is not necessary, IPv4 works, and with IPv6 there are even people hosting P2P reddit from their desktop - so no, servers not needed either. And we have Identifi/Iris for naming, by Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin. The future is here, yesterday!
jaabe 8y ago
I’ve done some proof of concepts with IoT in the Danish public sector, and to do it, we’ve had to build our own wireless internet because the current ISP controlled one is just terrible, and it’s mobile/wireless version is frankly too unreliable. So now we operate a miniplacity wide internet. Setting it up was fairly easy, because we own a lot of network infrastructure and a lot of locations that are spread out over our entire county (might be the wrong word, sorry if it is), and it just works. Unfortunately we have laws protecting ISPs in Denmark, so we can’t exceed certain speeds without violating these. It’s made me wonder though, and this is my personal opinion, if we shouldn’t rethink the way we do internet infrastructure to be much more democratic and citizen owned.
- anderspitman 8y ago
  This sounds like a really cool project. Do you have any more information somewhere by chance?
Spearchucker 8y ago
Can't be hard. I run my own personal web site and don't use Facebook or Google. Not because I'm trying to go all distributed or something, but because I think the products just aren't as good as the ones I happen to use. I realize my profession and skillset put me into a minority that can even do this. And I realize this last statement is in contradiction to the first sentence of my post. Oh and if there was a site that did a version of Facebook like it was in 2007, I'd sign up to that for sure.
Proven 8y ago
Is this a joke? The intro reads like The Communist Manifesto! The author lumps together the effects of state capitalism (fascism) and economies of scale that apply to the partially free markets in the West. Excessive regulations actually help G-MAFIA, so more of the same is unlikely to help. The society doesn’t need anything. Individuals - some individuals - desire a different Internet or services, but are they willing and able to pay for it? 99% of them are not. So maybe they don’t really need it, after all. A tiny minority of geeks use various niche decentralized Web projects. Those work, are free, etc but 99.999% of people don’t want to use them. They do not need them.
martindale 8y ago
Cool: https://web.fabric.pub https://web.fabric.pub
- nosuchthing 8y ago
  Cooler, and free: https://www.datprotocol.com/ https://www.datprotocol.com/
pjmlp 8y ago
Yep it should have stayed straight HTML + CSS, leaving all the rest for Internet protocols, but here we are.
cromwellian 8y ago
Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale. Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet) For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again. Even cryptocurrencies fail this. They have terrible efficiency, but at least they were supposed to be relatively flat, instead of centralized and hierarchical, but instead, a majority of the hashing power is owned by a few large entities, so in effect, back to large financial players controlling much of the power. I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won't be able to rubber-hose-cryptanalyze you, is a dangerous belief that diverts us away from demanding the government and society agree to the goals of freedom. If everyone wants unfreedom, underground internet usage is a slim consolation.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  The way to decentralise without the risk of inherent centralisation is to go p2p. If everyone installing an app runs their own instance and doesn’t need to pick a server, then the efficiency gains of a server drop off massively. This is why we’re hoping to steer Matrix from being decentralised-at-the-servers to being decentralised-at-the-clients.
  - antocv 8y ago
    Cryptocurrencies are p2p yet centralized, bittorrent is p2p, yet a few search-engines and trackers compared to clients.
austincheney 8y ago
Is the web (all its corresponding data) public or private? Answering that question determines how data flows and thus what's currently wrong. Answering that question also predicts why an alternative web would equally fail to achieve separate merits.
m0nty 8y ago
> Tim Berners Lee had this Pollyannaish view once upon a time that went like this: What if we could develop a web that was free to use for everyone and that would fuel creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism across the globe? It's wrong to describe that as "polyannaish", since much of it has come to pass. Despite its shortcomings and abuses, could anyone say the web has not fuelled "creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism"? Berners-Lee is an optimist, but he is not blind to the downside of his creation. What happens next is another question.
- aestetix 8y ago
  I stopped reading when I got to this point, because it is clearly an opinion piece masked as news. Regardless of whether I agree with the opinion, because it is classed improperly I can't take anything else in it seriously.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    There's no masking, this is simply an op-ed. It's fairly clear even from the title (news are usually titled as "this happened" rather than "this should happen").
mschuster91 8y ago
While I agree with FAANG being way too powerful (and that they are all US-controlled with no viable European competitor in sight!), there is one elephant in the room that no one has been able to solve at all: the potential of abuse for non-centralized sites that cannot afford (or technically support!) any kind of moderation. The TOR network is a prime example - markets dealing in anything from cannabis to war-grade weapons, huge child porn dumps, malware coordination servers. Or the same stuff in the "clearnet", where as an addition there are huge problems with absolutely vile Nazi propaganda (e.g. Stormfront), Russian propaganda disrupting Western elections, "anti vaxxers" that literally kill people and other conspiracy bullshit. Society doesn't just need an "alternative web", society needs an alternative society that doesn't make anything devolve into dumpster fires.
- axilmar 8y ago
  Exactly this. Any sort of decentralization will result in dumpster fires, because a significant portion of people are into doing bad/evil things for profit. No technology can solve that problem.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Agreed. It's less about the possibility that the system can be exploited it always can), and more about the fact there are people out there actively wanting to exploit the system to serve their own ends.
  - hessiejones 8y ago
    So what I'm hearing is that opportunism will always exist regardless of structure
mhd 8y ago
One of the worst mistakes that the original web made was getting rid of the editing component in the early stages, probably once corporate entities and their cut-up picture sites got big (yet note that the reference web implementation "Amaya" was also an editor). And in a similar note, a distributed web needs ubiquitous editing and publishing. Right now I think that both are better served by something really lightweight. A distributed web publisher should be able to run on an ESP32. The editing and display component should run on old laptops or mobile phones. That probably means good riddance to JS everywhere... Distributed WAP?
- nostrademons 8y ago
  The editing component died out well before that. The original WWW browser was bi-directional: it was as easy to publish or edit sites as it was to view them (much like Wikis are today, but with a WYSIWYG editor). Even up through about 1998 Netscape shipped with Composer, which made it relatively easy to generate & publish HTML without knowing much about technology. I think the problem was just development effort and the pace of development in the early web (and particularly during the browser wars). Shipping an editor with the browser meant that every new feature available to websites needed both an easy implementation (in the browser) and a difficult implementation (in the editor). The editor implementation would often require a lot of uncertain design work as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look like. It forbade the browser vendors from shelling this hard task out to external programs. If you wanted to embed a photograph on a webpage, Photoshop had already spent decades solving that problem; was the browser vendor supposed to duplicate all that work? If you wanted to embed a Java applet, Sun and Borland and IBM had invested thousands of man-years on development tools; would you ship an IDE in the browser? Some content types are just now getting decent editing software, 20 years later. When you have 150M users browsing and maybe 1.5M users creating content, the economics are pretty clear. There's no sense putting 80% of your development effort into tools that 1% of the population uses. Interestingly, even after user-generated content became a huge thing and easy WYSIWYG editors became just a JS embed away, the 1:10:100:1000 ratio still roughly holds: for every person creating content daily, 10 people create content *occasionally, 100 register for the site, and 1000 people might view it as lurkers. That indicates that the problem might not be in the tools, and that creating content is just more difficult than consuming it.
al_form2000 8y ago
Tl;dr: The world and the web suck; Tim Berner-Lee was a clueless Pollyanna; We're gonna solve everything with DECENTRALISATION that will come to pass by (makes vague hand gestures, draws ballon shaped objects). What a bunch of useless drivel.
- hessiejones 8y ago
  It's only Pollyanna if you do nothing about it. Decentralization is more than an idea. There are many technologies developing privacy as an integrated feature on their platform. There is enough of an appetite to support it more widely than it has been.
axilmar 8y ago
A decentralized web would not mean a safer web. Those two concepts are irrelevant to each other. In fact, a decentralized web would be more dangerous than the centralized web, from the perspective of bringing closer together people with the same ideas and reenforcing them through the echo chamber effect. A decentralized web would mean that there would physically be no opportunity to come in contact with the opposite view, which will enhance the problems that we now have with the spreading of false ideas. The dichotomies that would be created would be so enormous that the opposing view would loet any humanity status. The opponents would be aliens, and exterminating aliens would not sound as bad as exterminating other people.
buboard 8y ago
IIRC this current web technologies are already decentralized, we dont need an alternative. We need more nodes, so it can live up to its potentials. Perhaps start by buying a fixed computer, something that can be up 24/7 and then add services on top of it. But when 80% of the chatter even among developers is about how to use the latest centralizing cloud service, this is not going to happen.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  The problem is individually I’m better off using an edge cdn, and optimising seo for google than self hosting and ignoring google. Unless it’s a pure hobby site. Maybe then a raspberry pi server on my home “broadband” with 1Mb/s would suffice.
- anderspitman 8y ago
  Once you factor in ISPs blocking port 80, the need to configure port forwarding, and server maintenance, it's a hard sell for the average Joe. I think we need something like sandstorm.io if we're ever going to take self-hosted to the masses.
jasonvorhe 8y ago
Nerds need a new web because "their space" was taken over and they feel left out. That's basically the gist of all this talk about decentralization. Even the difficulty of getting rid of certain videos like the mosque shooting shows that censorship isn't as easy as it's being portrayed. Big decentralized networks would be /b/ and /thedonald, 8chan, Alex Jones and other shitholes of the internet, but on steroids, without anyone being able to at least make it more difficult for these people to get an audience.
- dustindiamond 8y ago
  The difficulty of getting rid of the video proved to me that these companies are not in control of their own platform.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Correct, it isn't easy to censor because the web is decentralized. So it seems to me that "nerds" had more sophisticated views on the subject at hand. You don't have to consume uncensored sources, but in most (all) parts of the world, that is a serious blessing. If there are some people that cannot stomach the existence of Alex Jones, that is their problem. I think he exploits his audience, but that problem isn't to be solved with China tactics.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pfraze 8y ago
  Heh, not totally wrong. I'd also mention that there's an ideological connection to free software. Centralization on the Web means using closed and proprietary software. The decentralization crowd is fairly motivated by that. It's also motivated by searching for new business opportunities.
lazyjones 8y ago
Pipe dreams of a generation that would happily live in free apartments with hidden cameras and microphones in every room. They even put their Alexas everwhere for just a little convenience now. Free (as in beer) trumps convenience trumps any sort of rational idealism. It's a materialistic world. Incidentally, it also provides all the tools to "opt out" at a low price. But if you want everyone to opt out (which is what the author seems to want), you'll have to pay for them too.
Causality1 8y ago
Lot of orphan statistics in that article. For example, there's been an 11 percent increase in cyber bullying between 2006 and 2016,but what was the percentage increase in how much time an average teen spends online? Bet it's bigger than 11 percent. Every other statistic is similarly without companion data. There's also no concrete support for the central premise that big tech companies are to blame. One could just as easily make a case that the massive increase in time parents spend online instead of with their kids is entirely to blame.
auslander 8y ago
> Business needs to change its mindset We are past this. Business today is a faceless online giant, nothing human, no mindset at all. Only goal is share price. I think major driver for this is financial markets, a.k.a legalized gambling.
deleted 8y ago
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gioscarab 8y ago
I have worked 10 years in this direction, see PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON
ataturk 8y ago
I want to point out that I think everything went sideways with Facebook and Twitter. Google is another bad actor, but their zeitgeist felt more accidental. Maybe not, though. But yes, we have them all tampering with our reality in order to push their political agendas. It feels pretty sinister. What really opened my eyes was a year ago I decided I was going to retire from tech and go find a job doing something else and every job was ~$15/hr. It didn't matter where I looked, it seems that every job out there that doesn't require years of training (i.e. medicine--and even that has low wage roles for the most part) is just shit wages. I would go from $150/hr to $15/hr and that's just a waste of my time. If it weren't for the unknown future costs of health insurance, I'd do it anyways.
ashleyn 8y ago
My view on this: 1) Technology makes bad people as efficient as good people. Let's define "good people" as honest, productive workers who value universal virtues like freedom, well-accepted scientific findings, and necessary progress. Now let's define "bad people" as selfish, dysfunctional news-site commenters who think Hillary Clinton is producing vaccines in a pizza shop on the moon, and demand that you equate their ignorance with your well-reasoned opinions. 2) Perhaps my most controversial assumption, the "everyman" that deranged populism appeals to tends to be more of the "bad person" than the "good person". 3) From 1991 to present, the proportion of "everymen" to "professionals" using the Web has steadily increased, empowering more "bad people" than "good people". So is it any surprise then, that we're at where we're at? The problem isn't the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the problem is that we don't seem to have the courage to admit that the vast majority of people we hoped would use it constructively have chosen to misuse it, empowering them even more to demand ignorance and fear be elevated back to the position of a movement demanding political power. The problem is our so-called neighbours, and their jubilant disregard for everything that free society once stood for.
miki123211 8y ago
IMO the only way to decentralize the web is to rovide tech that has better uX than centralized solutions and that's hard. Centralization didn't arise because companies are evil, it did because decentralization is inherently complex. Preventing decentralization is another story, though. IMO technology is not enough here, we need the law too. I don't mean regulation, god forbid, that will only make it worse. I mean something like inter-server agreements saying that a server may not lock users in etc. with the appropriate legalese. Those could be enforced i.e. by only federating with servers that send an "agrees-to: <list of sha xxx license hashes>" header. Getting people to adopt it is another story, though.
anderber 8y ago
This is why I really like what Beaker Browser is doing. It feels like when I first discovered the Internet in the 90's. I highly recommend you check it out, if you're into decentralized and easy to use web: https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
jdworrells 8y ago
I see this come up time and time again in technical circles and I just do not understand the issue. My first exposure to the Internet was in 1993, when it was dominated by usenet and hobby websites. It was a happy place, full of independent thoughts, discussion, and cooperation. As time went on, people started to establish businesses and make profit on the Internet. That was the turning point. Do you want an Alternative Web? We have it. The infrastructure is there. Go back to the good old days. Run your own webserver, your own email server. Turn it back into a hobby, like it used to be. Establish "web rings" with your buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for techies to establish communities of their own. Leave the terrible modern Internet to the masses. We have endless frontiers to homestead. All this hand-wringing about the loss of innocence and the ravaging hordes of anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists is just silly. Edit: The way I see it, once the Internet becomes your job, you have lost. When the web was a hobby, it was a great place. Profit motive drove the loss of innocence and was the beginning of the end of the hobby web.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Agreed. The indie web exists, but discovery is a problem since FAANG utterly dominates the consumer web landscape and makes it hard to find sites that aren't just badly disguised content marketing pieces. At the end of the day, you can do all the decentralized node stuff you want to, but as soon as someone builds a sizable community independent of FAANG (I like G-MAFIA too), it will start to do whatever it can to protect that moat and with it, their monetization options. And then we're right back to square one.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  People who hobby blog and don't expect to make money, nevertheless want to have some audience. They might be creating content for the benefit of a community. However, discoverability has plunged because of changes in the way Google works, as I have found with blogs based on some of my special interests. Even when one searches for the exact words that appear in posts, Google might not show them at all! (DDG is often not much better.) So, when people create detailed, useful content and find they are getting no visits at all, this is discouraging.
ohiovr 8y ago
I am curious what widespread 5G adoption could mean if it was used generally as the last mile solution. Why wouldn't the high speed of the network allow for people to do significant self publishing? 1000 megabit internet could support 200 live hd streams even from the same server. Getting that many live viewers is pretty tough. So for most people, it could make self hosting at home more meaningful. People could even form collectives of synced nginx backends if they had really large audiences.
- thomasahle 8y ago
  Sending the same message 200 times seems like a waste. Can't you just use udp broadcasting?
  - ohiovr 8y ago
    Well certainly I'm no expert on internet broadcasting. I have experimented a little with nginx's rtmp server for hosting a live stream. Does nginx have the udp broadcasting ability? How many clients could it support? Pretty exciting if the 200 figure can be breached.
- everdrive 8y ago
  Bandwidth availability is not currently a limitation for people self-publishing. It's the cost of that bandwidth, and then the difficulty involved in hosting a web server.
cerealbad 8y ago
A basic internet where people are taught and then tested on logic and bias. Take nations as an example. Nations survive economic hardships by inducing in the population a sense of insular self-defense and struggle for existence (of the nation). When a nation is economically prosperous suddenly it's borders are not so well defined and people naturally develop a cosmopolitan outward and international view based around common union and empire with weaker nations which become absorbed or vassals. Nationalism is neither bad or good, it's a system wide response to mostly economic signals in a given population or subgroup. If the average internet user understood this, public discourse would be more civil and solutions oriented. Since the issue is not clearly addressed because the political and intellectual class have been purchased by the business elite which engage in transnational profit, the entire concept of the nation state is being undermined from first principles in order to prop up new exploitative economic zones. This will lead to popular uprising and revolutionary war, as it has in the past. You can of course replace the nation with something better for the individual. America did this in the 1960s by replacing the nation as a people (race) with the nation as an idea (free markets, individualism, equality), this influenced many other nations and won the cold war. And we are probably in a similar replacement phase now, as an Anglo -American -European identity emerges in order to face the challenges of central and east Asia, Africa and South America. The intellectual framework for this new union is not there yet since it is unclear why nations and world zones are in constant competition- far left is offering freedom far right is offering tradition both are struggling to sell the middle who simply want stability.
stagas 8y ago
"I see a society that is crumbling" - texts that begin with a conclusion, are propaganda, because they are designed to intimidate and that shapes the reader's view before even laying out the problem. Of course you can expect a politically biased solution after every scare. The pattern in a loop is: SCARE->OFFER SOLUTION. Every sentence in that article is designed, not to let you think, not to offer some insight, but to tell you _how_ to think instead. Maybe there is a case to be made but it does not seem to be the author's intention to search for the truth in the matter, but rather to influence an already established position.
nnq 8y ago
It would be great if more research would be made into un-centralizable systems and technologies instead of just "distributed systems". If we could build technology out of building blocks for which dis-economies-of-scale ("the larger the more expensive", or "the more you own, the more expensive it's to buy more") would apply, and for which any kind of centralization would increase cost the world would be a much more interesting place, and I mean in general, not juts IT, but food production and architecture too... I guess we'll have it when we'll have self-replicable autonomous drones too but that will be the dusk of humanity so there won't be much time for us dinosaurs to enjoy its benefits :(
burtonator 8y ago
We're never going to have a decentralized and alternative web until we figure out the economic model behind it.
- hessiejones 8y ago
  Agree it has to make money. Tech giants stifle innovation and competition by buying companies they see as threatening. We need a consortium. And we need a model that can't be easily penetrated by big tech. Money is a true motivator -- and doing the right thing doesn't fall on the same plane when people are enticed with this kind of incentive.
hessiejones 8y ago
Hi everyone, this is Hessie Jones. I wrote the piece on Forbes. I'll go through your comments today! Love that this is sparking discussion. Cheers!
- gfody 8y ago
  love the analogy to pollution - if you see someone dropping litter you would call them out, but people litter the web with poorly researched or otherwise ill-formed opinions constantly, not to mention giant corporations doing the equivalent of pumping high volumes of toxic waste into the air we breathe in the form of manipulative advertising. we need internet environmentalism
  - hessiejones 8y ago
    I like the term internet envirionmentalism -- what's good for me is good for the internet. But like climate change, unless it impacts the individual directly, few are likely to buy in. I met an environmental activist last week and she told me that people in Japan is a culture of cleanliness -- it's instilled in the child from a young age. And it perpetuates into society. For Singapore, that has translated into stricter laws. In North America, people have to care otherwise it's likely no real strong regulation will ever happen.
hessiejones 8y ago
Thanks everyone for your comments. My name is Hessie Jones and I have written this article on Forbes. I will weigh in on these thoughtful comments as I go through them. Thank you again!
grumpy-cowboy 8y ago
100% decentralization is an utopia. But with the Fediverse, we have the best of the both worlds: most people will register to a "centralized" instance like mastodon.social and people who want will be able to run their own instances/nodes with their rules, their policies, ... and federate it. Pretty much like any email server.

sdfd

I agree with the title - we do need an alternative web, but not the kind the author wants. We need an alternative web that has less censorship and regulation. The current internet is turning more and more into TV.

iliketosleep 8y ago
The author refers to a decentralized web, which cannot be controlled by any individual, state, or corporation. I think this implies less censorship and regulation.
- asutekku 8y ago
  I’d love to be as idealistic, but when “free and uncensored” service has ever been ended up being something else than a cesspool for alt-right?
  - leereeves 8y ago
    Any free and uncensored service is bound to contain opinions you don't agree with. That's kinda the point.
    - andy_ppp 8y ago
      How about free decentralised and self-policing - opinions are fine but creating a place where illegal activity can’t be stopped will lead to any platform (even with good intentions) being marginalised.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - leereeves 8y ago
        People commit far more serious crimes in public parks than could ever be committed on a website. Is that a reason to close or marginalize public parks? Why not enforce the law on websites in a similar way: by arresting those responsible for illegal activity instead of attacking the venue?
        andy_ppp 8y ago
        Well if you squint and look closely I don’t think I said anything other than it’s better to make these platforms self policing as a way to stop illegal content from appearing. Personally, the only thing I would ban is child pornography, and probably insightment to terrorism from right wing and islamists as well.
        naasking 8y ago
        I don't even know why you would qualify "incitement to terrorism" with right wing. Have you never heard of left wing terrorists? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism
        ModernMech 8y ago
        From your link: "Incidents of left-wing terrorism dropped off at the end of the Cold War (circa 1989), partly due to the loss of support for communism.[14]" Conversely, there was an incident of right wing terrorism just last week. This follows a trend of increasing right-wing terrorist activity: https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsOfTerrorismInUS_Nov2017.pdf https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsO... Yes, left wing terrorism exists, but today people are increasingly associating terrorism with right-wing ideologies because it's in our face and happening with increasing frequency. It's the same reason one might associate terrorism with Islam in 2001.
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    Before the term 'alt-right' was even coined there were AFA/Antifa plus a myriad of other leftist 'revolutionary' groups calling for the destruction of whatever happened to be in their way, islamists of every plumage vying for the position of the most vile representative of their ideology, a multitude of incarnations of Nazi-fetishism, etcetera. In other words, no need to point at a specific ideology to personify the tragedy of the commons. When there is no censorship there will be places where things are said you'd rather not hear. The best advice I can give is to avoid those places, that way you won't hear what they're saying. Even without censorship there are laws which limit what can be said so a censorship-free 'net does not necessarily equate a cesspool.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    Not just Nazi scum, but also piracy, child porn and gore/terror videos... turns out whenever you have a service that these four groups can use to spread their content they will flood it. I personally have no big problem with piracy as these days most of it is self-defense against "copy protections" that actually hinder legitimate buyers, but I'd be happy if the other three groups would disappear from the planet rather sooner than later.
  - throwmeback 8y ago
    ...or alt-left...
    - stronglikedan 8y ago
      Very valid point, but you're not supposed to point it out here.
  - iliketosleep 8y ago
    A decade or two ago it was the left which was vying for free and uncensored. Political fortunes have changed and now it's the right. Censorship is not free of political bias, and those on the wrong side of the current trend will flood platforms where the censorship does not exist. Those who are in favour of censorship must consider that political trends change over time, and one day they might be the ones being censored.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - smadge 8y ago
    The only example I can think of is Gab, which became a “cesspool for the alt-right” because it specifically marketed itself to that demographic. There have also been internet communities for the far left where members could post opinions that didn’t have purchase in mainstream outlets since the beginning of the web.
    - asutekku 8y ago
      8chan, jodel (local anonymous based message board popular in some parts of europe, similar to yikyak) to say few. I’m not trying to claim the others don’t exist.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    That happens because these placed only attract extremes and let them stay among themselves. The key to a platform that does not become a cesspool is to disallow isolation and bubble building for extreme oppinions. Yet, this bubble building is what people desire and the only way to create a successful social online service is to cater to that group building. Real life rarely provides similar comforting bubbles of likeminded and reaffirming people. You still need to interact with other people even if you disagree with their views. In front of your computer screen, the right forum for sharing your views is just a few button pressed away. It is too easy to avoid the rest. To play devil's advocate and take an extreme position for the sake of discussion: we don't more free speech. Instead, we need a to introduce a duty to listen that goes both ways: if you want to express your opinions, you must also listen to what others have to say and especially, how others respond to what you say. And you do not get to pick and choose who you listen to. In essence, nobody must ever have full and exclusive control over the shape of the community they are part of.
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    All of them before, what, 2014? That seemed to be the turning point.
  - ataturk 8y ago
    That's just ridiculous. The Web was supposed to be a marketplace of ideas. If you don't like the ideas, you're free to come up with your own. Censorship is not the answer. And alt-right is a reaction to the total beat down that less extreme reform movements such as the TEA Party and to a lesser extent, libertarians, tried to offer. The IRS was used to kill the TEA Party and now we find out John McCain was a major factor in why those targeted audits took place. Republicans just wanted their party back from the RINO assholes. I watched what happened with my own eyes--the RINO/GOPe played very dirty pool because they love big government, Big Brother, huge "defense" spending waste, pollution, misery, and total domination. In short, they're assholes and they doubled down when challenged. So now you get "alt-right" and you're fucking complaining about it!
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Systems which establish reputation, but don't ground it in strong and strictly unitary identity.
  - nabnob 8y ago
    Why should a billion dollar corporation get to decide which opinions are acceptable and which views don't get a platform? I'm as far to the left as you can get. I used to support stricter moderation on social media platforms, but I'm putting my foot in my mouth now. In practice, these corporations are just as likely to censor leftist views as they are to censor right-wing views. Even people who study history and politics don't agree on definitions of racism, sexism, etc. There's a lot of nuance that a $10/hr contractor who sat through a one-day training on offensive content at Facebook won't understand. This type of censorship doesn't help progressives, it just lets corporations determine the window of acceptable discourse.
- Proven 8y ago
  Why not get rid of state (or at least as many laws as possible) rather than create a new “Dark” Internet on which most users would technically be criminals as all the ludicrous laws and regulations equally apply to Dark Internet
aiyodev 8y ago
You’re absolutely right. This is where someone usually says we need a decentralized web. But I wonder if we’re wasting time waiting for some new technology to save us. I’ve been waiting at least a decade and have seen project after project fail. Maybe instead we should focus on building a network of alternative, pro-liberty sites and apps using existing technology.
- apatters 8y ago
  It's really just another manifestation of the tendency techies have to get overexcited about novel tech. Which is hardly the worst vice in the world, but when you want to build something that will reliably make an impact at scale, you don't really want to use novel tech outside of very rare cases. You want to use stuff that is dependable and gets the job done. I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough. You can still start a website anywhere on the planet in 5 minutes. The big distribution/promotion channels were always centralized long since before the web existed. A lot of these arguments seem to really boil down to "if the government passes a law I don't like, I can't evade it." Governments have been passing some bad laws lately, but they've done that for basically all of human history... I'm not at all against technology which resists bad or unjust laws, but we are never going to get to tech that is 100% effective at evading the law and probably shouldn't since the outcome would be anarchy. My money is on the web becoming choked with monopoly-entrenching, innovation-crushing regulations, and then people flocking to something surprisingly mundane, imperfect, and not heavily based on novel technology -- simply because that thing is less regulated.
  - ldubost 8y ago
    > I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough. This is because it's not a technological problem. The path to an actual decentralized web is clean technologically. We just need to take what already exists which is currently massively used in a centralized way, and build the services UI on top of it. Of course there are still crypto to add and so on, but if the investment where going that way it would come fast. The real problem is a business problem. Decentralized services don't pay unless there is something centralized. We cannot expect that (big) private companies will pay for something that's not in their interest. I've been running an open source company for 15 years. I've see so many times in the voice or in the eyes of entrepreneurs that they saw us as philanthropists. If we want de centralization, competition and control of our data and software we either or a combination of: - need individuals or comapnies to pay for it (pay your software provider + hosted fairly) - public funding - laws restriction the oligopoly approach - gdpr++++ - forcing standard based for big companies - forbidding centralization - forcing open-source Some are voluntary extreme and have little chance to ever happen.
femiagbabiaka 8y ago
there are pockets of humanity still, you just have to look a little harder
bsder 8y ago
> We need an alternative web that has less censorship and regulation. This is absolutely not an obviously true statement, and we have, in fact, quite a bit of situations to the contrary. For example, if someone is following my persona online and harassing me, I very much want to be able to enforce an "internet restraining order". That almost certainly cannot be done without some level of regulation.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Offline restraining orders can't really be enforced either. In fact, according to a public health study, all the value came from asking for the order (basically scaring the perpetrator) - actually being granted one was not found to provide additional benefits.
  - bsder 8y ago
    > In fact, according to a public health study, all the value came from asking for the order (basically scaring the perpetrator) - actually being granted one was not found to provide additional benefits. That is a completely different statement from "can't really be enforced". The fact that something "self-enforces" because it might turn into a "legal enforces" is possibly the most effective enforcement.
- Phenix88be 8y ago
  Your online persona can just block anyone who harassing him. In real life, you can't "block" people...That why I don't get how harassment on internet can be a thing. Just block them !
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    Block them how? If you block someone they can just create a new persona to harass you with. Edit: For everyone downvoting, can you please express how you think clicking a block button stops harassment? Have you actually ever been the victim of online harassment? Did simply clicking a button solve your problem?
krapp 8y ago
>The current internet is turning more and more into TV. That's what most people want - a curated and moderated (censored) platform from which they can passively consume content. Any future web is going to have to account for that or else not be useful to most of society.
rchaud 8y ago
> The current internet is turning more and more into TV. You can build a working webserver using a $50 Raspberry Pi kit, to host whatever you want as long as it complies with the law. I would think that the "free speech" people would put their money where their mouth is and learn how to do some of this stuff instead of making Youtube videos about how they're being held back by political correctness.
- chmln 8y ago
  Yeah, it's not like you can lose your domains, get kicked off of the vast majority of web hosts and demoted in google search just for having the wrong opinions
  - rchaud 8y ago
    This sort of victim mentality isn't helpful for you or your "cause". The only people it helps are the shysters who'll tell you these problems are created by the cultural marxist global elite or whatever, while shaking their e-tip jar. Isn't it usually the "free speech" crew telling others that they don't know what 'real oppression' is? Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you. The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line. Neither of those are necessary to run a functioning website. As a recent meme put it, 'learn to code'.
    - chmln 8y ago
      I don't have a "cause". Are you trying to argue that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are apolitical? > Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you Someone has it worse, so we shouldn't try to be better? ISIS throws gay people off of rooftops. Does that make jailing them in the US okay, because it's not as bad? > The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line. Allowing domain registrars and hosting providers to arbitrarily take down websites based on political viewpoints is a horrific overreach. Don't act shocked when tomorrow it will be your opinion that's deemed "incorrect" and you're booted off the web for your perfectly legal libertarian blog

dpq 8y ago

As much as I like to consider myself a pro-freedom, anti-censorship type of person, articles such as this one rarely fail to amuse me. As long as the system of payoffs stays unchanged, the end result is inevitably going to be the same, and if the decentralized web does change the system of payoffs, there might be no incentives to motivate development and adoption of such a d-web beyond a small number of technically adept people. How many times have there been calls and widespread memes to abandon Facebook [remember Diaspora?], and yet it's still there. It's all not doom and gloom, but what society desperately needs is to stop producing/consuming pointless articles such as this one or idiocy like "We should break up Google and Amazon" [Oh yeah? Go ahead and break them up them, I'll watch. Will you be selling tickets?], and to start performing _real_ economic and game-theoretic analysis of possible alternatives.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Get ready for more of it. All twenty Democrat presidential hopefuls just watched Warren talk about splitting tech companies and are currently looking for someone to hold their beer. It’s going to be a long electional cycle :/ I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Politicians promise all kinds of things in stump speeches that they know they cannot realistically deliver. Remember Bush I's "no new taxes?" Obama's public option healthcare plan? Trump's wall? All gone by the wayside. What you say doesn't matter if you can't guarantee the right number of votes in the legislature.
- chmln 8y ago
  > I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more. Why do you think something will happen? All three platforms have a 'pro-leftwing' and 'anti-rightwing' bias, which also aligns with most of the mainstream media. As a result, their censorship is supported by a good majority of the population

marknadal 8y ago

A key quote from the article: > Adoption of a decentralized web cannot play by the old rules. New experiences and interactions that are outside of current norms needs to appeal to individual values, that enable trust and ease of adoption. Pulling users away from convention is not an easy task. They seem to suggest Decentralization is at odds with "conventional" consumer experiences. It doesn't have to be that way. For instance: - D.Tube (decentralized YouTube) - notabug.io (P2P Reddit) Both look, feel, and act very much like their "conventional" versions. Yet both of these are fully decentralized using GUN (my project: https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ). Most users would not even know there is a difference. So it is certainly possible to both appeal to the masses/convention, while being private/secure and free/open-source and decentralized. Although I do think we do need NEW and DIFFERENT experiences, things that are "fresh" and fun. Facebook basically looks corporate now. We need to build new UI/UX experiences that define a new "era" of the web, in the same way people look back and remember the 80s or 90s. This doesn't have to be something we look back to, it is something we can engineer from the start. :)

wilsonrocks 8y ago
> Most users would not even know there is a difference. I fear that the difference they would see is that other people aren't using it and they would go back to where their friends are:(
gitgud 8y ago
I wouldn't really say fully decentralised they require DNS and a webserver to point to for the website. Although the content may be decentralised, is inaccurate to claim its fully decentralised. Decentralising domain names is not an easy task, as IPFS is discovering...
- marknadal 8y ago
  We've successfully done local multicast, Bluetooth, discovery. DNS is not necessary, IPv4 works, and with IPv6 there are even people hosting P2P reddit from their desktop - so no, servers not needed either. And we have Identifi/Iris for naming, by Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin. The future is here, yesterday!

jaabe 8y ago

I’ve done some proof of concepts with IoT in the Danish public sector, and to do it, we’ve had to build our own wireless internet because the current ISP controlled one is just terrible, and it’s mobile/wireless version is frankly too unreliable. So now we operate a miniplacity wide internet. Setting it up was fairly easy, because we own a lot of network infrastructure and a lot of locations that are spread out over our entire county (might be the wrong word, sorry if it is), and it just works. Unfortunately we have laws protecting ISPs in Denmark, so we can’t exceed certain speeds without violating these. It’s made me wonder though, and this is my personal opinion, if we shouldn’t rethink the way we do internet infrastructure to be much more democratic and citizen owned.

anderspitman 8y ago
This sounds like a really cool project. Do you have any more information somewhere by chance?

Spearchucker 8y ago

Can't be hard. I run my own personal web site and don't use Facebook or Google. Not because I'm trying to go all distributed or something, but because I think the products just aren't as good as the ones I happen to use. I realize my profession and skillset put me into a minority that can even do this. And I realize this last statement is in contradiction to the first sentence of my post. Oh and if there was a site that did a version of Facebook like it was in 2007, I'd sign up to that for sure.

Proven 8y ago

Is this a joke? The intro reads like The Communist Manifesto! The author lumps together the effects of state capitalism (fascism) and economies of scale that apply to the partially free markets in the West. Excessive regulations actually help G-MAFIA, so more of the same is unlikely to help. The society doesn’t need anything. Individuals - some individuals - desire a different Internet or services, but are they willing and able to pay for it? 99% of them are not. So maybe they don’t really need it, after all. A tiny minority of geeks use various niche decentralized Web projects. Those work, are free, etc but 99.999% of people don’t want to use them. They do not need them.

martindale 8y ago

Cool: https://web.fabric.pub https://web.fabric.pub

nosuchthing 8y ago
Cooler, and free: https://www.datprotocol.com/ https://www.datprotocol.com/

pjmlp 8y ago

Yep it should have stayed straight HTML + CSS, leaving all the rest for Internet protocols, but here we are.

cromwellian 8y ago

Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale. Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet) For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again. Even cryptocurrencies fail this. They have terrible efficiency, but at least they were supposed to be relatively flat, instead of centralized and hierarchical, but instead, a majority of the hashing power is owned by a few large entities, so in effect, back to large financial players controlling much of the power. I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won't be able to rubber-hose-cryptanalyze you, is a dangerous belief that diverts us away from demanding the government and society agree to the goals of freedom. If everyone wants unfreedom, underground internet usage is a slim consolation.

Arathorn 8y ago
The way to decentralise without the risk of inherent centralisation is to go p2p. If everyone installing an app runs their own instance and doesn’t need to pick a server, then the efficiency gains of a server drop off massively. This is why we’re hoping to steer Matrix from being decentralised-at-the-servers to being decentralised-at-the-clients.
- antocv 8y ago
  Cryptocurrencies are p2p yet centralized, bittorrent is p2p, yet a few search-engines and trackers compared to clients.

austincheney 8y ago

Is the web (all its corresponding data) public or private? Answering that question determines how data flows and thus what's currently wrong. Answering that question also predicts why an alternative web would equally fail to achieve separate merits.

m0nty 8y ago

> Tim Berners Lee had this Pollyannaish view once upon a time that went like this: What if we could develop a web that was free to use for everyone and that would fuel creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism across the globe? It's wrong to describe that as "polyannaish", since much of it has come to pass. Despite its shortcomings and abuses, could anyone say the web has not fuelled "creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism"? Berners-Lee is an optimist, but he is not blind to the downside of his creation. What happens next is another question.

aestetix 8y ago
I stopped reading when I got to this point, because it is clearly an opinion piece masked as news. Regardless of whether I agree with the opinion, because it is classed improperly I can't take anything else in it seriously.
- icebraining 8y ago
  There's no masking, this is simply an op-ed. It's fairly clear even from the title (news are usually titled as "this happened" rather than "this should happen").

mschuster91 8y ago

While I agree with FAANG being way too powerful (and that they are all US-controlled with no viable European competitor in sight!), there is one elephant in the room that no one has been able to solve at all: the potential of abuse for non-centralized sites that cannot afford (or technically support!) any kind of moderation. The TOR network is a prime example - markets dealing in anything from cannabis to war-grade weapons, huge child porn dumps, malware coordination servers. Or the same stuff in the "clearnet", where as an addition there are huge problems with absolutely vile Nazi propaganda (e.g. Stormfront), Russian propaganda disrupting Western elections, "anti vaxxers" that literally kill people and other conspiracy bullshit. Society doesn't just need an "alternative web", society needs an alternative society that doesn't make anything devolve into dumpster fires.

axilmar 8y ago
Exactly this. Any sort of decentralization will result in dumpster fires, because a significant portion of people are into doing bad/evil things for profit. No technology can solve that problem.
rchaud 8y ago
Agreed. It's less about the possibility that the system can be exploited it always can), and more about the fact there are people out there actively wanting to exploit the system to serve their own ends.
- hessiejones 8y ago
  So what I'm hearing is that opportunism will always exist regardless of structure

mhd 8y ago

One of the worst mistakes that the original web made was getting rid of the editing component in the early stages, probably once corporate entities and their cut-up picture sites got big (yet note that the reference web implementation "Amaya" was also an editor). And in a similar note, a distributed web needs ubiquitous editing and publishing. Right now I think that both are better served by something really lightweight. A distributed web publisher should be able to run on an ESP32. The editing and display component should run on old laptops or mobile phones. That probably means good riddance to JS everywhere... Distributed WAP?

nostrademons 8y ago
The editing component died out well before that. The original WWW browser was bi-directional: it was as easy to publish or edit sites as it was to view them (much like Wikis are today, but with a WYSIWYG editor). Even up through about 1998 Netscape shipped with Composer, which made it relatively easy to generate & publish HTML without knowing much about technology. I think the problem was just development effort and the pace of development in the early web (and particularly during the browser wars). Shipping an editor with the browser meant that every new feature available to websites needed both an easy implementation (in the browser) and a difficult implementation (in the editor). The editor implementation would often require a lot of uncertain design work as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look like. It forbade the browser vendors from shelling this hard task out to external programs. If you wanted to embed a photograph on a webpage, Photoshop had already spent decades solving that problem; was the browser vendor supposed to duplicate all that work? If you wanted to embed a Java applet, Sun and Borland and IBM had invested thousands of man-years on development tools; would you ship an IDE in the browser? Some content types are just now getting decent editing software, 20 years later. When you have 150M users browsing and maybe 1.5M users creating content, the economics are pretty clear. There's no sense putting 80% of your development effort into tools that 1% of the population uses. Interestingly, even after user-generated content became a huge thing and easy WYSIWYG editors became just a JS embed away, the 1:10:100:1000 ratio still roughly holds: for every person creating content daily, 10 people create content *occasionally, 100 register for the site, and 1000 people might view it as lurkers. That indicates that the problem might not be in the tools, and that creating content is just more difficult than consuming it.

al_form2000 8y ago

Tl;dr: The world and the web suck; Tim Berner-Lee was a clueless Pollyanna; We're gonna solve everything with DECENTRALISATION that will come to pass by (makes vague hand gestures, draws ballon shaped objects). What a bunch of useless drivel.

hessiejones 8y ago
It's only Pollyanna if you do nothing about it. Decentralization is more than an idea. There are many technologies developing privacy as an integrated feature on their platform. There is enough of an appetite to support it more widely than it has been.

axilmar 8y ago

A decentralized web would not mean a safer web. Those two concepts are irrelevant to each other. In fact, a decentralized web would be more dangerous than the centralized web, from the perspective of bringing closer together people with the same ideas and reenforcing them through the echo chamber effect. A decentralized web would mean that there would physically be no opportunity to come in contact with the opposite view, which will enhance the problems that we now have with the spreading of false ideas. The dichotomies that would be created would be so enormous that the opposing view would loet any humanity status. The opponents would be aliens, and exterminating aliens would not sound as bad as exterminating other people.

buboard 8y ago

IIRC this current web technologies are already decentralized, we dont need an alternative. We need more nodes, so it can live up to its potentials. Perhaps start by buying a fixed computer, something that can be up 24/7 and then add services on top of it. But when 80% of the chatter even among developers is about how to use the latest centralizing cloud service, this is not going to happen.

quickthrower2 8y ago
The problem is individually I’m better off using an edge cdn, and optimising seo for google than self hosting and ignoring google. Unless it’s a pure hobby site. Maybe then a raspberry pi server on my home “broadband” with 1Mb/s would suffice.
anderspitman 8y ago
Once you factor in ISPs blocking port 80, the need to configure port forwarding, and server maintenance, it's a hard sell for the average Joe. I think we need something like sandstorm.io if we're ever going to take self-hosted to the masses.

jasonvorhe 8y ago

Nerds need a new web because "their space" was taken over and they feel left out. That's basically the gist of all this talk about decentralization. Even the difficulty of getting rid of certain videos like the mosque shooting shows that censorship isn't as easy as it's being portrayed. Big decentralized networks would be /b/ and /thedonald, 8chan, Alex Jones and other shitholes of the internet, but on steroids, without anyone being able to at least make it more difficult for these people to get an audience.

dustindiamond 8y ago
The difficulty of getting rid of the video proved to me that these companies are not in control of their own platform.
raxxorrax 8y ago
Correct, it isn't easy to censor because the web is decentralized. So it seems to me that "nerds" had more sophisticated views on the subject at hand. You don't have to consume uncensored sources, but in most (all) parts of the world, that is a serious blessing. If there are some people that cannot stomach the existence of Alex Jones, that is their problem. I think he exploits his audience, but that problem isn't to be solved with China tactics.
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pfraze 8y ago
Heh, not totally wrong. I'd also mention that there's an ideological connection to free software. Centralization on the Web means using closed and proprietary software. The decentralization crowd is fairly motivated by that. It's also motivated by searching for new business opportunities.

lazyjones 8y ago

Pipe dreams of a generation that would happily live in free apartments with hidden cameras and microphones in every room. They even put their Alexas everwhere for just a little convenience now. Free (as in beer) trumps convenience trumps any sort of rational idealism. It's a materialistic world. Incidentally, it also provides all the tools to "opt out" at a low price. But if you want everyone to opt out (which is what the author seems to want), you'll have to pay for them too.

Causality1 8y ago

Lot of orphan statistics in that article. For example, there's been an 11 percent increase in cyber bullying between 2006 and 2016,but what was the percentage increase in how much time an average teen spends online? Bet it's bigger than 11 percent. Every other statistic is similarly without companion data. There's also no concrete support for the central premise that big tech companies are to blame. One could just as easily make a case that the massive increase in time parents spend online instead of with their kids is entirely to blame.

auslander 8y ago

> Business needs to change its mindset We are past this. Business today is a faceless online giant, nothing human, no mindset at all. Only goal is share price. I think major driver for this is financial markets, a.k.a legalized gambling.

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gioscarab 8y ago

I have worked 10 years in this direction, see PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON

ataturk 8y ago

I want to point out that I think everything went sideways with Facebook and Twitter. Google is another bad actor, but their zeitgeist felt more accidental. Maybe not, though. But yes, we have them all tampering with our reality in order to push their political agendas. It feels pretty sinister. What really opened my eyes was a year ago I decided I was going to retire from tech and go find a job doing something else and every job was ~$15/hr. It didn't matter where I looked, it seems that every job out there that doesn't require years of training (i.e. medicine--and even that has low wage roles for the most part) is just shit wages. I would go from $150/hr to $15/hr and that's just a waste of my time. If it weren't for the unknown future costs of health insurance, I'd do it anyways.

ashleyn 8y ago

My view on this: 1) Technology makes bad people as efficient as good people. Let's define "good people" as honest, productive workers who value universal virtues like freedom, well-accepted scientific findings, and necessary progress. Now let's define "bad people" as selfish, dysfunctional news-site commenters who think Hillary Clinton is producing vaccines in a pizza shop on the moon, and demand that you equate their ignorance with your well-reasoned opinions. 2) Perhaps my most controversial assumption, the "everyman" that deranged populism appeals to tends to be more of the "bad person" than the "good person". 3) From 1991 to present, the proportion of "everymen" to "professionals" using the Web has steadily increased, empowering more "bad people" than "good people". So is it any surprise then, that we're at where we're at? The problem isn't the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the problem is that we don't seem to have the courage to admit that the vast majority of people we hoped would use it constructively have chosen to misuse it, empowering them even more to demand ignorance and fear be elevated back to the position of a movement demanding political power. The problem is our so-called neighbours, and their jubilant disregard for everything that free society once stood for.

miki123211 8y ago

IMO the only way to decentralize the web is to rovide tech that has better uX than centralized solutions and that's hard. Centralization didn't arise because companies are evil, it did because decentralization is inherently complex. Preventing decentralization is another story, though. IMO technology is not enough here, we need the law too. I don't mean regulation, god forbid, that will only make it worse. I mean something like inter-server agreements saying that a server may not lock users in etc. with the appropriate legalese. Those could be enforced i.e. by only federating with servers that send an "agrees-to: <list of sha xxx license hashes>" header. Getting people to adopt it is another story, though.

anderber 8y ago

This is why I really like what Beaker Browser is doing. It feels like when I first discovered the Internet in the 90's. I highly recommend you check it out, if you're into decentralized and easy to use web: https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/

jdworrells 8y ago

I see this come up time and time again in technical circles and I just do not understand the issue. My first exposure to the Internet was in 1993, when it was dominated by usenet and hobby websites. It was a happy place, full of independent thoughts, discussion, and cooperation. As time went on, people started to establish businesses and make profit on the Internet. That was the turning point. Do you want an Alternative Web? We have it. The infrastructure is there. Go back to the good old days. Run your own webserver, your own email server. Turn it back into a hobby, like it used to be. Establish "web rings" with your buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for techies to establish communities of their own. Leave the terrible modern Internet to the masses. We have endless frontiers to homestead. All this hand-wringing about the loss of innocence and the ravaging hordes of anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists is just silly. Edit: The way I see it, once the Internet becomes your job, you have lost. When the web was a hobby, it was a great place. Profit motive drove the loss of innocence and was the beginning of the end of the hobby web.

rchaud 8y ago
Agreed. The indie web exists, but discovery is a problem since FAANG utterly dominates the consumer web landscape and makes it hard to find sites that aren't just badly disguised content marketing pieces. At the end of the day, you can do all the decentralized node stuff you want to, but as soon as someone builds a sizable community independent of FAANG (I like G-MAFIA too), it will start to do whatever it can to protect that moat and with it, their monetization options. And then we're right back to square one.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
People who hobby blog and don't expect to make money, nevertheless want to have some audience. They might be creating content for the benefit of a community. However, discoverability has plunged because of changes in the way Google works, as I have found with blogs based on some of my special interests. Even when one searches for the exact words that appear in posts, Google might not show them at all! (DDG is often not much better.) So, when people create detailed, useful content and find they are getting no visits at all, this is discouraging.

ohiovr 8y ago

I am curious what widespread 5G adoption could mean if it was used generally as the last mile solution. Why wouldn't the high speed of the network allow for people to do significant self publishing? 1000 megabit internet could support 200 live hd streams even from the same server. Getting that many live viewers is pretty tough. So for most people, it could make self hosting at home more meaningful. People could even form collectives of synced nginx backends if they had really large audiences.

thomasahle 8y ago
Sending the same message 200 times seems like a waste. Can't you just use udp broadcasting?
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Well certainly I'm no expert on internet broadcasting. I have experimented a little with nginx's rtmp server for hosting a live stream. Does nginx have the udp broadcasting ability? How many clients could it support? Pretty exciting if the 200 figure can be breached.
everdrive 8y ago
Bandwidth availability is not currently a limitation for people self-publishing. It's the cost of that bandwidth, and then the difficulty involved in hosting a web server.

cerealbad 8y ago

A basic internet where people are taught and then tested on logic and bias. Take nations as an example. Nations survive economic hardships by inducing in the population a sense of insular self-defense and struggle for existence (of the nation). When a nation is economically prosperous suddenly it's borders are not so well defined and people naturally develop a cosmopolitan outward and international view based around common union and empire with weaker nations which become absorbed or vassals. Nationalism is neither bad or good, it's a system wide response to mostly economic signals in a given population or subgroup. If the average internet user understood this, public discourse would be more civil and solutions oriented. Since the issue is not clearly addressed because the political and intellectual class have been purchased by the business elite which engage in transnational profit, the entire concept of the nation state is being undermined from first principles in order to prop up new exploitative economic zones. This will lead to popular uprising and revolutionary war, as it has in the past. You can of course replace the nation with something better for the individual. America did this in the 1960s by replacing the nation as a people (race) with the nation as an idea (free markets, individualism, equality), this influenced many other nations and won the cold war. And we are probably in a similar replacement phase now, as an Anglo -American -European identity emerges in order to face the challenges of central and east Asia, Africa and South America. The intellectual framework for this new union is not there yet since it is unclear why nations and world zones are in constant competition- far left is offering freedom far right is offering tradition both are struggling to sell the middle who simply want stability.

stagas 8y ago

"I see a society that is crumbling" - texts that begin with a conclusion, are propaganda, because they are designed to intimidate and that shapes the reader's view before even laying out the problem. Of course you can expect a politically biased solution after every scare. The pattern in a loop is: SCARE->OFFER SOLUTION. Every sentence in that article is designed, not to let you think, not to offer some insight, but to tell you _how_ to think instead. Maybe there is a case to be made but it does not seem to be the author's intention to search for the truth in the matter, but rather to influence an already established position.

nnq 8y ago

It would be great if more research would be made into un-centralizable systems and technologies instead of just "distributed systems". If we could build technology out of building blocks for which dis-economies-of-scale ("the larger the more expensive", or "the more you own, the more expensive it's to buy more") would apply, and for which any kind of centralization would increase cost the world would be a much more interesting place, and I mean in general, not juts IT, but food production and architecture too... I guess we'll have it when we'll have self-replicable autonomous drones too but that will be the dusk of humanity so there won't be much time for us dinosaurs to enjoy its benefits :(

burtonator 8y ago

We're never going to have a decentralized and alternative web until we figure out the economic model behind it.

hessiejones 8y ago
Agree it has to make money. Tech giants stifle innovation and competition by buying companies they see as threatening. We need a consortium. And we need a model that can't be easily penetrated by big tech. Money is a true motivator -- and doing the right thing doesn't fall on the same plane when people are enticed with this kind of incentive.

hessiejones 8y ago

Hi everyone, this is Hessie Jones. I wrote the piece on Forbes. I'll go through your comments today! Love that this is sparking discussion. Cheers!

gfody 8y ago
love the analogy to pollution - if you see someone dropping litter you would call them out, but people litter the web with poorly researched or otherwise ill-formed opinions constantly, not to mention giant corporations doing the equivalent of pumping high volumes of toxic waste into the air we breathe in the form of manipulative advertising. we need internet environmentalism
- hessiejones 8y ago
  I like the term internet envirionmentalism -- what's good for me is good for the internet. But like climate change, unless it impacts the individual directly, few are likely to buy in. I met an environmental activist last week and she told me that people in Japan is a culture of cleanliness -- it's instilled in the child from a young age. And it perpetuates into society. For Singapore, that has translated into stricter laws. In North America, people have to care otherwise it's likely no real strong regulation will ever happen.

hessiejones 8y ago

Thanks everyone for your comments. My name is Hessie Jones and I have written this article on Forbes. I will weigh in on these thoughtful comments as I go through them. Thank you again!

grumpy-cowboy 8y ago

100% decentralization is an utopia. But with the Fediverse, we have the best of the both worlds: most people will register to a "centralized" instance like mastodon.social and people who want will be able to run their own instances/nodes with their rules, their policies, ... and federate it. Pretty much like any email server.