9 ms·

A Revolution in Your Pocket

237 points by UkiahSmith 7y ago

jcfrei 7y ago
This is an idea that keeps coming back every 2 years or so. While it is enticing to think about, these ideas never manifest into anything. With most decentralized projects there usually hasn't been a big enough financial incentive to execute them.
- fenwick67 7y ago
  The problem is that with no VC funding and no profit model, most decentralized systems rely on volunteers to run servers, give up storage space, spend cpu cycles and/or develop it. Meanwhile Twitter could spend money like crazy for years on end because their goal was cornering the market. They can afford to operate at a loss of millions per year, whereas John Q Developer can spend a few hours a week in his free time. It's a very lopsided situation.
- abecedarius 7y ago
  I don't disagree, but... when Bitcoin came out I ignored it because of the long history of digital cash schemes that had failed. I assumed the same forces would give it the same fate. If decentralized money can finally find some traction, maybe so can other kinds of networks. Maybe the financial incentives are a part of the context that could change.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Cryptocurrencies are special in that, almost from their very inception, they could be used to make money. There are at least four ways one can make money with them: those with access to cheap electricity and enough starting capital can literally print money out of thin air; they form unregulated exchanges to gamble on; they're very useful for scamming people; they're also useful for laundering money and buying illicit goods. These four things give cryptocurrencies a lot of interest and participants.
- kristianc 7y ago
  It's more about "What's in it for the user?" when you define user as "the majority of people from whom a device being 'decentralized' is not in and of itself attractive". If there was the demand for this, the VC money would come along soon enough.
8bitsrule 7y ago
A phone is good for talking to people. Don't need a computer for that. Much better audio (analog) would be a plus. I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a keyboard) and HDMI (monitor). Putting both in one package? just asking for troubles.
- theamk 7y ago
  > I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a keyboard) and HDMI (monitor). sounds exactly like Raspberry PI? (or any of the 100's of other cheap SBCs)
- rjsw 7y ago
  I have a Nokia 130 feature phone that has really good audio, and a 10" convertable tablet running Windows 10. Also have a 11" Pinebook.
fenwick67 7y ago
The author should check out Scuttlebutt if they haven't already. There's a compatible mobile app called Manyverse which will sync your social feed over WLAN or Bluetooth with peers while it's open, and also over the DHT and via public forwarding servers.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Nice write up. I am straying off topic, but I am interested in local decentralized data, machine learning, and apps. I switched to iOS several years ago for privacy reasons, but at least a few years ago it was a nuisance to permanently install one’s own apps on your iPhone. My iOS developer account expired a few years ago so maybe this has changed. It seems important to be able to build apps from source code and install them on your own device. Android is probably a better story for this but my Samsung phones had a ton of crap ware on them, taking hours to clean up (as much as possible). What do people use? De-Googlized Androids? Easier way to install one’s own iOS apps just on your device?
- 29083011397778 7y ago
  I've been using a de-Googled Blackberry KeyOne. I adore the keyboard, and Blackberry is pretty low on apps with undisclosed and/or non-standard permissions[1]. Root's unavailable, but disabling everything down to, and including, Play Services, is good enough until the Librem 5 is available. At this point I'm down to a minimum of apps from the yalP store (Firefox, Whatsapp, Signal, Wire, VLC), with everything else on F-Droid. AndOSM is more than good enough for me; either it's right there within a search, or I find a website with an address, and add what was missing at my earliest convenience. It's not perfect, but data seems to be added faster than the world changes, suggesting Google will have to innovate or lose their lead in accuracy/completeness. [1] http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-installed_Android_Software_2019_EN.pdf http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-...
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Is there any hope we can have something like a "Linux phone" someday and not have to cater to anyone or any privacy infringement at all?
- 0815test 7y ago
  A Linux phone (running open, non-custom software in both the kernel and user space) is in fact comparatively easy - we sort of know how to get there, it's just a matter of work. But that, while quite desirable indeed (in that it would mean true "convergence" between desktop and mobile platforms, at least for power users) is only a small part of what the article talks about.
- louib 7y ago
  I'd say our main hope at the moment is the Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- robomc 7y ago
  What would this accomplish? I use Linux for my computers but I still log into to numerous cloud services.
tanzbaer 7y ago
A summary at the beginning would be nice.
- rschulman 7y ago
  Author here... thanks for the feedback. I'll give some thought to how to better introduce the thesis up front.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  The paragraph after "The Vision" seems reasonably clear on this: > There is the potential today to reclaim control of our digital lives from monopolist platforms and unnecessary rent-seeking. There is a world within reach where always-on, always-connected pocket computers become personal data stores. All your photos, documents, messages, and other data live with you, not on a faceless server belonging to a random corporation. The only machine learning done is done for you. Data only leaves your device because you want to send it somewhere.
  - Zanni 7y ago
    But they're not stored on central servers because we don't have room on our phones but because we want to share them with others. This whole article feels like an attack on Facebook and similar services without actually naming them. And, as a consequence, without actually addressing how they succeeded or how to supplant them.
    - JadeNB 7y ago
      I wasn't making an argument, just repeating the author's summary that was requested.
- joncp 7y ago
  They do have a concise conclusion. I usually scroll to the bottom for the conclusion anyway.
tomxor 7y ago
> Many, if not most, of us already own a hand-sized computer with a persistent network connection that we take pretty much everywhere and which lives in our pockets or bags. The top of the line Android and Apple personal computing devices [...] run at upwards of 2 Ghz, have around 4GB of RAM, and on-board storage ranging between 64 and 512 GB. Who is "many of us" really? If this is supposed to be a promising new avenue for decentralising the internet it seems a little premature... I feel like there are too many wide eyed rich people with $1k phones living in a bubble sometimes - the vast majority of the world cannot afford the expensive toys you take for granted. > honestly, does anyone use their “phone” primarily as a voice communication device anymore? Most of the world... (The internet does exist outside san francisco, but hey you can decentralise _your_ internet I guess)
- rschulman 7y ago
  I live in Washington, DC, actually... But I appreciate the feedback. I think you're right that I'm being a bit optimistic here, but the whole vision is a work in progress. I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here.
  - tomxor 7y ago
    > I live in Washington, DC, actually... Yes, SF was just a euphemism for "rich people city", oh great now you made me say it! > I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here. Smartphone technology has already created lots of nice side-effects like the super cheap single board computer craze... I honestly think this is currently the closest device that is of a practical cost and performance for almost "everyone" as a personal server. But the main issue with all these decentralised ideas is not really if your personal server is fast enough, but whether it has enough pipe (this is still a problem even in a mesh network). Dare something be slightly popular (especially video), your personal pipe will never be large enough, this is where centralisation rules unless P2P serving technology is pushed more (there are already some nice working examples out there for video and even entire static sites).
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
I'm definitely sympathetic to the ideas described in this article. I strongly feel that software should be designed to serve the interests of users, and running locally is structurally necessary to accomplish this. For some applications, it seems plausible that mesh networking and cooperative routing could potentially replace centralized communications infrastructure. It's probably OK if an email takes half an hour or more to wind its way through intermittently connected machines to get to a recipient, and for things like maps and restaurant menus you can take advantage of physical locality. Most of the time, though, the decentralized approach means information propagates slower, less reliably, and with greater need for redundancy (and thus overhead), so anything that's already challenging current infrastructure, like livestreaming video, is right off the table. And then there's the part where if you aren't living in an urban center there may well not be any other machines for miles to mesh with. I'm also doubtful about the assertion that mobile devices are up to the task of "machine learning". Cell phones have severely limited power and thermal dissipation capacity. The tensor units that have started to show up on mobile devices are exclusively designed to _evaluate_ pre-trained networks; training is far more expensive and practical today only because of the economies of scale in a datacenter: train once, run many times. But to train fancy NNs, you need big heaps of data, too, and not always the sort of data you can source in an... entirely above-board manner. Perhaps the answer is simply that some of these things aren't done anymore, or at least not for free?
- rschulman 7y ago
  I appreciate the thoughtful feedback and I admit that I'm less confident about some parts of the vision than others. Some things, you're probably right, are much less amenable to a distributed network model. With that said, there have been demos of streaming video over IPFS.
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  >so anything that's already challenging current infrastructure, like livestreaming video, is right off the table For a wireless mesh... yeah, probably. But if you relax the requirements to include things like small home servers (still using the internet), things that challenge centralized infrastructure can be very doable. With good network connectivity, there are things that decentralized services already do better than centralized ones. Distributing files to a large group of people is much easier with BitTorrent than hosting the files directly would be; the bandwidth requirements are themselves less centralized in a peer-to-peer system.
judge2020 7y ago
Would like to note that the idea of mesh decentralized networks is a big plot point (later) in the Silicon Valley HBO show - https://play.hbonow.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GVU2WugfAylFvjSoJATvA?camp=Search&play=true https://play.hbonow.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GVU2WugfAylFvj...
mwcampbell 7y ago
I noticed that the word "battery" doesn't appear anywhere in this post. Isn't conserving battery power one reason why we delegate so much to central services? That said, I think the wireless routers that a lot of us have in our homes could play an important role in this kind of decentralized Internet. They'd need to have more computing power than many wireless routers do, but that's OK because they're already plugged into the wall all the time.
- sequoia 7y ago
  > They'd need to have more computing power than many wireless routers do It seems like at this point we're describing "running a server at your house." I've been playing with this with a Raspberry Pi for a Plex server (could have gone cloud but why not just tape a Pi to the wall next to my router?), I think the idea has a lot of merit.
- awinder 7y ago
  That vision is definitely being explored, not necessarily built into the router but usually as network attached appliances for some kind of “local cloud” (idk marketing). Syncloud & antsle are some Ive seen on the device side, and usually they run owncloud or nextcloud plus other “apps” The problem is from a reliability standpoint running stuff at home can be not great. Home network quality / reliability is not going to be datacenter quality, you’re going to have to deal with this thing running all the time & power costs, and you’re probably going to have to be tech-inclined enough to admin these apps at some point. These things have real costs, I think there’s a place for an honest discussion about what things cost for sure, but I don’t think people are getting fleeced on apps in the cloud by and large
  - lucasverra 7y ago
    there was a proposal ~10years ago on that https://fon.com/ https://fon.com/
genpfault 7y ago
Keeping all those radios powered on and transmitting/receiving for mesh network servicing/upkeep is going to burn through battery pretty quick :(
- rschulman 7y ago
  Author here.... I'm actually really interested in what we can do about the battery situation. The vision I laid out is clearly more battery intensive than your average phone is today. I do have some ideas about breaking apart the compute and display components, allowing the compute (and wireless) to go in a bag (or something) and connect up to a hefty battery while the human interface components are lighter weight.
  - theamk 7y ago
    Carrieng extra weight in my backpack and remembering to charge it all the time sounds pretty annoying. Why would someone do this, compared to using a remote computer? Maybe a home server, if they really hate cloud?
  - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
    Maybe if solutions to dock a phone and use it as a workstation (along the lines of Samsung's DeX or some other open source projects which exist today) were more commonplace, it would be more convenient to recharge continuously over the course of the day. Extra charge cycles mean the batteries themselves would wear out faster, of course, as would the additional thermal load of using the device all day for various compute-intensive tasks. I have certainly noticed that USB charging ports have become commonplace in the past few years. Maybe it could become equally common to see wireless charging pads ubiquitously in public spaces? They aren't as energy-efficient as a wired charging solution, but you don't need to remember to bring a cable, and they can be neatly hidden in various kinds of furniture. The hardware isn't inherently that expensive, especially if it is standardized. Portable "repeater" units with storage, compute, and larger (swappable?) batteries than fit in a phone might be another alternative. It could fit the same kind of use case that cellular tethers for laptops do today, except with a different purpose. Downside here is needing to bring an extra device with you for long excursions.
stickfigure 7y ago
This is just... weird. We have centralized services for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they're more reliable than decentralized systems. Phones get lost, stolen, drowned, and crushed. People drive through tunnels or into mountains without cell signal. Batteries die. It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale.
- narag 7y ago
  It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale. Have you noticed that each and every piece of the web has its antiparticle? The original web was the browser with links and simple graphical presentation, some server scripts and SQL databases. Then we've had single page applications in which links lead nowhere, nosql, serverless. This is like extreme serverless or webless. If you can think of another basic web element, you can invent some new anti-paradigm that will be loved, hated and discussed endlessly over here.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  I was sufficiently annoyed by this article that I actually shouted "BATTERIES, YOU IDIOT". Google said in 2011 that a single Google search uses about 0.3Wh of power. A typical mobile phone battery has a capacity of about 12Wh. Peer-to-peer systems are almost always less efficient than client-server systems, often by a large factor. You do the math as to whether a peer-to-peer internet based on mobile phones is even remotely viable. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details...
- rschulman 7y ago
  There are lots of places where we have trained ourselves to think that timeliness is the most important quality when it absolutely isn't. If I drive into a tunnel and my family has to wait an hour before they see the new photo of my son, that is not an epic tragedy. There are also maturing p2p ways to help solve this problem. If my sister gets my update with the new photo before I hit the tunnel, she can share it with my mom whenever they manage to connect.
ggreer 7y ago
I don't know where to begin so I'll just quote chunks and respond to them. > Our data will stay on our mobile computers and be backed up (encrypted of course) in the cloud If one's phone is stolen or destroyed, how does one restore from the cloud backup? What prevents me from buying a 2nd phone and attempting to "restore" it from my friend's backup? Do I just have to guess his password? I'm imagining something like Apple's iCloud backups but that service involves a lot of details that need to be right to ensure its security. That costs money, which means users either have to pay in cash or by having their data mined (or both). I predict that the most popular backup service in this hypothetical world would be a free service that leaves user data unencrypted and sells it to 3rd parties. > We will carry with us the fundamental representation of our identity, backed and verified by advanced encryption, instead of cumbersome passwords or logins associated with the same large platforms that control our social lives That's great until the battery dies or there's a hardware failure or the phone is lost or stolen. Then you have to restore from a backup and that means verifying your identity in some other manner. At some point, identity reduces to a combination of: 1. A password or secret. (Something you know.) 2. A token issued by some trusted entity declaring you are who you claim to be. (Something you have.) 3. A biometric. (Something you are.) Assuming your phone is dead, only option 1 can be used without a 3rd party storing identifying information about you. > Sharing of data, either broadly with a large group or directly person to person, will happen directly between mobile computers, skipping the intermediaries like Facebook or Twitter we’re used to today People's phones aren't always online at the same time. Sometimes they're in a tunnel or on a plane or away from civilization. Given that constraint, who is storing and transmitting the data between the two people? Who runs the service that lets phones say, "I'm Bob's phone. I want to talk to Alice's phone. What is her IP? Oh she's offline? OK send her this data when she's back." Are they compensated for doing so? If not, why would they run such a service? > Artificial assistance will be local first – for example, searches for the best nearby coffee shop will turn to the nearby network for responses before asking the entire planet I seriously doubt the local network would give better recommendations and results than Yelp or Google Maps, as both entities would sync the local info to their own databases and run their own algorithms on the data. Their results would be a superset of the local data with better algorithms. Who curates the local network's results for spam or fake reviews? Why would they have an incentive to do so? > Machine learning will provide personalized intelligent assistance that runs on your own mobile computer I don't think that could work. The latest phones have hardware to run ML algorithms efficiently, but they don't have the hardware to train them. That requires TPUs and a lot of power. Also you need large data sets to train models. That means aggregating lots of people's data. Most people either don't understand or don't care about the implications of Facebook/Google/Amazon slurping up information about them. If anything, people prefer it because they get a better experience. Their news feed has more interesting content. Their Amazon recommendations more closely match what they want. Their search results are more relevant. For these people, the current situation is a win-win. I'm not against this idea, I just don't think it has a chance of working. For something new to succeed, it needs to be more compelling than existing products. More importantly, it needs to offer advantages that existing products can't copy. If at the end of the day you build something that's slightly less convenient to use than Facebook, it doesn't matter how privacy-centric it is. You'll only attract a few idealists.
ggm 7y ago
This feels like a superset of the problem medical records management is in a digital age. There are the bits you need public. your anaphylaxis status. your advanced health directive with 'do not rescucitate' and your organ donation status. There are the bits you need semi public. You need a trained health professional in sexual health to know you have chlamydia, but its not relevant to a physio doing upper body work. There are the bits you need private. your mental health status adversely affects your employer insurance, and your employment. You do not wish this revealed randomly. Some health models empower some health professionals with magic override keys to see almost all of it. Some models empower statisticians to see all of it in 100 years after your death. Some models you carry it in a smart card. Some models you carry keys, and its in a central DB.
- Kiro 7y ago
  > your mental health status adversely affects your employer insurance This statement makes no sense in 99% of the countries in the world.
  - mxuribe 7y ago
    In the U.S., any condition that you have CAN BE AND WILL BE used against you - either by insurance firms, employers, etc. Even if in some cases it is illegal to be used against you, the U.S.' environment is such that those with power over you will use such info against you...so you can unfortunately consider the U.S. in the 1% of the countries that you cited. </sigh>
    - privong 7y ago
      I think you and @Kiro are in agreement. My interpretation of @Kiro's comment is that most of the world doesn't do employer-provided insurance, so that aspect of @ggm's comment would essentially only apply to the US.
      - ggm 7y ago
        An awful lot of the oecd economies with FinTech, mining and the like do have employer funded health benefits. It's a tool to attract high-performance staff, by offering fringe benefits which bypass taxation. If you are working for a trans national in a developing or emerging economy you will have these benefits. So sure, normal health internationally is not the us model. This is packaged perks
sorrowfulgeek 7y ago
This is not a new idea. Apple already emphasises that they do all the machine learning on your own device and no data is sent to the cloud. But this approach only works well for a small class of problems. For other types of problems you need to look at data wholistically at a large scale in order to see patterns and you need a cloud service. But more importantly we know that complex services break once in a while. If such services run on entirely on your personal device then the complexity of your device goes up exponentially. That’s not good. We learned in the 90’s that a better model is to centralize complexity, and make end devices as simple as possible. (Look up Larry Ellison’s 90’s speeches about Network Computing.) So, no, moving the center of computing to personal devices is not a good idea!
- atomical 7y ago
  Brave browser also does machine learning locally. It's definitely a value add for Apple users and something Tim Cook relishes throwing in Zuckerberg's face. Other companies don't seem to care so much. I think a good compromise is having more data in the cloud that can only be decrypted by the user.
- sorryforthethro 7y ago
  Federated Learning[1] you can train across multiple customer data by sending the in-training model to every device, then exfiltrating only the backprop adjustments you get back. In-theory, user data never leaves the device. In-practice, the backprop data has the information encoded within it to an extent, it's very difficult to secure. [1] https://medium.com/syncedreview/federated-learning-the-future-of-distributed-machine-learning-eec95242d897 https://medium.com/syncedreview/federated-learning-the-futur...
- simonh 7y ago
  I agree it looks like Apple is the only mobile vendor who's business seems to align well with a vision like this. They're already taking steps in that direction, which are hard for rivals to take because this approach closes off revenue opportunities for them. Every now and then I see a suggestion we should move towards federated services and mesh networks because it would give people more control and freedom, but the cost of that is complexity. It's like the classic reply on HN when Dropbox was announced, along the lines of why would anyone ever want this when they can 'just' run rsync against an SVN repository? Any solution that expects average users to become sysadmins is DOA. It was true when people were pushing for it in the 90s and it's still true now.
ekianjo 7y ago
Sharing data directly from mobile sounds like a poor idea since data caps and data volume pricing is rampant in many countries. Plus it is likely to make a poor battery life even worse. I would rather folks upload data on their home or shared servers for sharing purposes.
Causality1 7y ago
Assuming I'm an average user, this revolution would require my phone to double the time spent transmitting and receiving data, and block off a large chunk of its internal storage for information I don't care about. I cannot imagine as a consumer thinking these losses if battery life and data capacity ever being worth it.
verdverm 7y ago
What about the potential for malware propagation? Why should I trust the mesh network?
fit2rule 7y ago
I really wish the OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel on this one, or otherwise being distracted by the effort to just 'move everything to the cloud'. Imagine if we had an OS that solved the usability problems of IPFS and made it immensely easy to publish content on ones own named segment of an IPFS network - instead of having things like Dropbox glom themselves around a paltry excuse for file-sharing system services that exist in most modern OS's today? Wouldn't it be grand if someone write an email client - yes, EMAIL - that integrated with a smart contact system, allowing one to run and operate ones own social network without requiring any further infrastructure beyond local, private email services. Everything I do on Facebook, I was once able to do just as easily on Email - the interface is the only difference. I want social networking back under my control again, and a return to email, wrapped in a better local tool for providing the services, is the way to do it. I also want to be able to turn myself off the Internet - having the ability to turn my phone off and be unavailable to the Internet at large - not just as a consumer, but also as a provider of information - should be a basic, inarguable right. If the OS vendors weren't chasing the cloud bucks, this would be a reality. I believe an opportunity for a smart team exists: build a Linux distribution which incorporates a few basic ideological rules: * The user owns their data * The user controls their data * No new services or protocols are needed to provide better services: Use OSI properly or GTFO * The UI is the final frontier for freedom * If the user wants to fully disappear: OFF SWITCH * If the user wants to engage in public discourse: ON SWITCH * De-centralize all the things, bring control back to the local user always As the years go by, I feel more and more inclined to start a test-bed Linux distro which uses these rules to build out a user-controlled OS designed for widespread content distribution on the basis of such things as IPFS, albeit with a much, much better UI for maintaining ones assets than currently exists. If anyone else is interested in such an experiment, I am all ears ..
- theamk 7y ago
  Btw, "OFF SWITCH" is fundamentally incompatible with IPFS. If you serve your website from IPFS, the first visitor will get the full copy and start serving it. You can toggle your switch as much as you want, this won't have any effect. It's funny that Facebook is much better at giving control to user than email. At least in Facebook, you can delete post. And once you send email, there is no way to retract it.
ilaksh 7y ago
I like a lot of these ideas. And eventually it seems like mobile devices is where it could go. But before we are entirely reliant on mobile, we may be able to do a lot of it on our home computers over the regular internet using decentralized protocols. But back to mobile, does anyone know of any open decentralized identity solutions that will run on a smartphone?
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
A decentralised internet running on mobile devices? Richard Hendricks would like a word.
FerretFred 7y ago
This article really resonated with me. I rarely use my Android phone for talking to people, and the apps and setup are geared to getting work done securely and with as much privacy as possible. I seem to spend a lot of time tweaking settings to stop Google trying to run my life and monitoring me. Overall, I have a good experience but I really wish I didn't have to keep fighting my phone! What would really make a difference (to me at least) would be a libre phone/OS. Yes, I know these are available but I can't afford them. What we need is a freedom-minded philanthropist to step in and Save The World. Once we have a more private phone then surely privacy-designed systems could flourish, as the author describes. If that happened I'd be there like a bear!
- kasbah 7y ago
  I would suggest installing LineageOS on a supported phone and not installing any of the proprietary Google apps (play services, maps etc). I have been doing that for a number of years. https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/
  - paulcarroty 7y ago
    LineageOS still use Google services, even without preinstalled google apps.
    - kasbah 7y ago
      Which ones, do you have a link where I can read more about it?
      - paulcarroty 7y ago
        DNS, connectivity checks, etc
shtack 7y ago
We've been working on a very similar idea to this for the past few months: https://pocketweb.io https://pocketweb.io There is a very early iOS beta available, and Android is coming within the month. We've thought a lot about battery and data and have gotten really good results by leveraging existing radio wakeups, batching requests, and doing all sorts of optimizations to the sites themselves. Right now we're focused entirely on personal websites, because we believe the majority of those can actually easily be hosted on a phone (eg. How many people actually view your LinkedIn page every day? A single Facebook page doesn't require a datacenter. Etc). We're limited to single static pages with images right now but better support for multiple pages and server code with SQLite is coming. More template types, for example stores, are coming as well. Let us know what you think!
- rschulman 7y ago
  Awesome! I will check it out.
- BMorearty 7y ago
  Congrats, your site is 100x more comprehensible than the wall of text on the original link. :-)
- baggachipz 7y ago
  > "When you are ready, turn your PocketWeb site on and you'll a URL that you can share." I think you accidentally a word. Love the project though.
  - shtack 7y ago
    Thanks! We'll get that fixed tonight.
- mikenew 7y ago
  Love the idea. Couple first impressions from the iOS app though: 1. Most of the icons and images are really low-res. You should include @2x, @3x assets or just have higher res images and let them downscale on older devices. 2. A lot of the "Latest Active Sites" won't load, and the spinner just spins forever. I know the whole point is that it's a site hosted on someone's phone and may or may not be available, but there definitely needs to be a more graceful way to fail. The spinner blocks the UI and doesn't go away. I know it's isn't part of the core service you're trying to offer, but seeing blurry buttons and having the app get into a broken state after clicking some links is not a good first impression. There's a lot of signalling involved in the first 30 seconds or so when a user (like me) is trying to decide if they want to invest time and brainpower into exploring your service, and it's worth smoothing those things out.
jamesgeck0 7y ago
I keep waiting for someone to port Beaker Browser[1] or Dat to mobile. 1. https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
nanomonkey 7y ago
Anyone interested in this sort of revolution should look into Dweb Camp (https://dwebcamp.org/about/ https://dwebcamp.org/about/) put on by the Internet Archive crew. Folks from Mastodon, Gun, Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Beaker Browser (DAT), etc. will likely be there. If not, look into these names, download Manyverse for your Android phone (Scuttlebutt client) and start playing around.
ohiovr 7y ago
reminds me of beartooth https://beartooth.com https://beartooth.com

237 points by UkiahSmith 7y ago

This is an idea that keeps coming back every 2 years or so. While it is enticing to think about, these ideas never manifest into anything. With most decentralized projects there usually hasn't been a big enough financial incentive to execute them.

fenwick67 7y ago
The problem is that with no VC funding and no profit model, most decentralized systems rely on volunteers to run servers, give up storage space, spend cpu cycles and/or develop it. Meanwhile Twitter could spend money like crazy for years on end because their goal was cornering the market. They can afford to operate at a loss of millions per year, whereas John Q Developer can spend a few hours a week in his free time. It's a very lopsided situation.
abecedarius 7y ago
I don't disagree, but... when Bitcoin came out I ignored it because of the long history of digital cash schemes that had failed. I assumed the same forces would give it the same fate. If decentralized money can finally find some traction, maybe so can other kinds of networks. Maybe the financial incentives are a part of the context that could change.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Cryptocurrencies are special in that, almost from their very inception, they could be used to make money. There are at least four ways one can make money with them: those with access to cheap electricity and enough starting capital can literally print money out of thin air; they form unregulated exchanges to gamble on; they're very useful for scamming people; they're also useful for laundering money and buying illicit goods. These four things give cryptocurrencies a lot of interest and participants.
kristianc 7y ago
It's more about "What's in it for the user?" when you define user as "the majority of people from whom a device being 'decentralized' is not in and of itself attractive". If there was the demand for this, the VC money would come along soon enough.

8bitsrule 7y ago

A phone is good for talking to people. Don't need a computer for that. Much better audio (analog) would be a plus. I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a keyboard) and HDMI (monitor). Putting both in one package? just asking for troubles.

theamk 7y ago
> I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a keyboard) and HDMI (monitor). sounds exactly like Raspberry PI? (or any of the 100's of other cheap SBCs)
rjsw 7y ago
I have a Nokia 130 feature phone that has really good audio, and a 10" convertable tablet running Windows 10. Also have a 11" Pinebook.

fenwick67 7y ago

The author should check out Scuttlebutt if they haven't already. There's a compatible mobile app called Manyverse which will sync your social feed over WLAN or Bluetooth with peers while it's open, and also over the DHT and via public forwarding servers.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Nice write up. I am straying off topic, but I am interested in local decentralized data, machine learning, and apps. I switched to iOS several years ago for privacy reasons, but at least a few years ago it was a nuisance to permanently install one’s own apps on your iPhone. My iOS developer account expired a few years ago so maybe this has changed. It seems important to be able to build apps from source code and install them on your own device. Android is probably a better story for this but my Samsung phones had a ton of crap ware on them, taking hours to clean up (as much as possible). What do people use? De-Googlized Androids? Easier way to install one’s own iOS apps just on your device?

29083011397778 7y ago
I've been using a de-Googled Blackberry KeyOne. I adore the keyboard, and Blackberry is pretty low on apps with undisclosed and/or non-standard permissions[1]. Root's unavailable, but disabling everything down to, and including, Play Services, is good enough until the Librem 5 is available. At this point I'm down to a minimum of apps from the yalP store (Firefox, Whatsapp, Signal, Wire, VLC), with everything else on F-Droid. AndOSM is more than good enough for me; either it's right there within a search, or I find a website with an address, and add what was missing at my earliest convenience. It's not perfect, but data seems to be added faster than the world changes, suggesting Google will have to innovate or lose their lead in accuracy/completeness. [1] http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-installed_Android_Software_2019_EN.pdf http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-...

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Is there any hope we can have something like a "Linux phone" someday and not have to cater to anyone or any privacy infringement at all?

0815test 7y ago
A Linux phone (running open, non-custom software in both the kernel and user space) is in fact comparatively easy - we sort of know how to get there, it's just a matter of work. But that, while quite desirable indeed (in that it would mean true "convergence" between desktop and mobile platforms, at least for power users) is only a small part of what the article talks about.
louib 7y ago
I'd say our main hope at the moment is the Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
robomc 7y ago
What would this accomplish? I use Linux for my computers but I still log into to numerous cloud services.

tanzbaer 7y ago

A summary at the beginning would be nice.

rschulman 7y ago
Author here... thanks for the feedback. I'll give some thought to how to better introduce the thesis up front.
JadeNB 7y ago
The paragraph after "The Vision" seems reasonably clear on this: > There is the potential today to reclaim control of our digital lives from monopolist platforms and unnecessary rent-seeking. There is a world within reach where always-on, always-connected pocket computers become personal data stores. All your photos, documents, messages, and other data live with you, not on a faceless server belonging to a random corporation. The only machine learning done is done for you. Data only leaves your device because you want to send it somewhere.
- Zanni 7y ago
  But they're not stored on central servers because we don't have room on our phones but because we want to share them with others. This whole article feels like an attack on Facebook and similar services without actually naming them. And, as a consequence, without actually addressing how they succeeded or how to supplant them.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    I wasn't making an argument, just repeating the author's summary that was requested.
joncp 7y ago
They do have a concise conclusion. I usually scroll to the bottom for the conclusion anyway.

tomxor 7y ago

> Many, if not most, of us already own a hand-sized computer with a persistent network connection that we take pretty much everywhere and which lives in our pockets or bags. The top of the line Android and Apple personal computing devices [...] run at upwards of 2 Ghz, have around 4GB of RAM, and on-board storage ranging between 64 and 512 GB. Who is "many of us" really? If this is supposed to be a promising new avenue for decentralising the internet it seems a little premature... I feel like there are too many wide eyed rich people with $1k phones living in a bubble sometimes - the vast majority of the world cannot afford the expensive toys you take for granted. > honestly, does anyone use their “phone” primarily as a voice communication device anymore? Most of the world... (The internet does exist outside san francisco, but hey you can decentralise _your_ internet I guess)

rschulman 7y ago
I live in Washington, DC, actually... But I appreciate the feedback. I think you're right that I'm being a bit optimistic here, but the whole vision is a work in progress. I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here.
- tomxor 7y ago
  > I live in Washington, DC, actually... Yes, SF was just a euphemism for "rich people city", oh great now you made me say it! > I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here. Smartphone technology has already created lots of nice side-effects like the super cheap single board computer craze... I honestly think this is currently the closest device that is of a practical cost and performance for almost "everyone" as a personal server. But the main issue with all these decentralised ideas is not really if your personal server is fast enough, but whether it has enough pipe (this is still a problem even in a mesh network). Dare something be slightly popular (especially video), your personal pipe will never be large enough, this is where centralisation rules unless P2P serving technology is pushed more (there are already some nice working examples out there for video and even entire static sites).

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

I'm definitely sympathetic to the ideas described in this article. I strongly feel that software should be designed to serve the interests of users, and running locally is structurally necessary to accomplish this. For some applications, it seems plausible that mesh networking and cooperative routing could potentially replace centralized communications infrastructure. It's probably OK if an email takes half an hour or more to wind its way through intermittently connected machines to get to a recipient, and for things like maps and restaurant menus you can take advantage of physical locality. Most of the time, though, the decentralized approach means information propagates slower, less reliably, and with greater need for redundancy (and thus overhead), so anything that's already challenging current infrastructure, like livestreaming video, is right off the table. And then there's the part where if you aren't living in an urban center there may well not be any other machines for miles to mesh with. I'm also doubtful about the assertion that mobile devices are up to the task of "machine learning". Cell phones have severely limited power and thermal dissipation capacity. The tensor units that have started to show up on mobile devices are exclusively designed to _evaluate_ pre-trained networks; training is far more expensive and practical today only because of the economies of scale in a datacenter: train once, run many times. But to train fancy NNs, you need big heaps of data, too, and not always the sort of data you can source in an... entirely above-board manner. Perhaps the answer is simply that some of these things aren't done anymore, or at least not for free?

rschulman 7y ago
I appreciate the thoughtful feedback and I admit that I'm less confident about some parts of the vision than others. Some things, you're probably right, are much less amenable to a distributed network model. With that said, there have been demos of streaming video over IPFS.
ryukafalz 7y ago
>so anything that's already challenging current infrastructure, like livestreaming video, is right off the table For a wireless mesh... yeah, probably. But if you relax the requirements to include things like small home servers (still using the internet), things that challenge centralized infrastructure can be very doable. With good network connectivity, there are things that decentralized services already do better than centralized ones. Distributing files to a large group of people is much easier with BitTorrent than hosting the files directly would be; the bandwidth requirements are themselves less centralized in a peer-to-peer system.

judge2020 7y ago

Would like to note that the idea of mesh decentralized networks is a big plot point (later) in the Silicon Valley HBO show - https://play.hbonow.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GVU2WugfAylFvjSoJATvA?camp=Search&play=true https://play.hbonow.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GVU2WugfAylFvj...

mwcampbell 7y ago

I noticed that the word "battery" doesn't appear anywhere in this post. Isn't conserving battery power one reason why we delegate so much to central services? That said, I think the wireless routers that a lot of us have in our homes could play an important role in this kind of decentralized Internet. They'd need to have more computing power than many wireless routers do, but that's OK because they're already plugged into the wall all the time.

sequoia 7y ago
> They'd need to have more computing power than many wireless routers do It seems like at this point we're describing "running a server at your house." I've been playing with this with a Raspberry Pi for a Plex server (could have gone cloud but why not just tape a Pi to the wall next to my router?), I think the idea has a lot of merit.
awinder 7y ago
That vision is definitely being explored, not necessarily built into the router but usually as network attached appliances for some kind of “local cloud” (idk marketing). Syncloud & antsle are some Ive seen on the device side, and usually they run owncloud or nextcloud plus other “apps” The problem is from a reliability standpoint running stuff at home can be not great. Home network quality / reliability is not going to be datacenter quality, you’re going to have to deal with this thing running all the time & power costs, and you’re probably going to have to be tech-inclined enough to admin these apps at some point. These things have real costs, I think there’s a place for an honest discussion about what things cost for sure, but I don’t think people are getting fleeced on apps in the cloud by and large
- lucasverra 7y ago
  there was a proposal ~10years ago on that https://fon.com/ https://fon.com/

genpfault 7y ago

Keeping all those radios powered on and transmitting/receiving for mesh network servicing/upkeep is going to burn through battery pretty quick :(

rschulman 7y ago
Author here.... I'm actually really interested in what we can do about the battery situation. The vision I laid out is clearly more battery intensive than your average phone is today. I do have some ideas about breaking apart the compute and display components, allowing the compute (and wireless) to go in a bag (or something) and connect up to a hefty battery while the human interface components are lighter weight.
- theamk 7y ago
  Carrieng extra weight in my backpack and remembering to charge it all the time sounds pretty annoying. Why would someone do this, compared to using a remote computer? Maybe a home server, if they really hate cloud?
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  Maybe if solutions to dock a phone and use it as a workstation (along the lines of Samsung's DeX or some other open source projects which exist today) were more commonplace, it would be more convenient to recharge continuously over the course of the day. Extra charge cycles mean the batteries themselves would wear out faster, of course, as would the additional thermal load of using the device all day for various compute-intensive tasks. I have certainly noticed that USB charging ports have become commonplace in the past few years. Maybe it could become equally common to see wireless charging pads ubiquitously in public spaces? They aren't as energy-efficient as a wired charging solution, but you don't need to remember to bring a cable, and they can be neatly hidden in various kinds of furniture. The hardware isn't inherently that expensive, especially if it is standardized. Portable "repeater" units with storage, compute, and larger (swappable?) batteries than fit in a phone might be another alternative. It could fit the same kind of use case that cellular tethers for laptops do today, except with a different purpose. Downside here is needing to bring an extra device with you for long excursions.

stickfigure 7y ago

This is just... weird. We have centralized services for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they're more reliable than decentralized systems. Phones get lost, stolen, drowned, and crushed. People drive through tunnels or into mountains without cell signal. Batteries die. It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale.

narag 7y ago
It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale. Have you noticed that each and every piece of the web has its antiparticle? The original web was the browser with links and simple graphical presentation, some server scripts and SQL databases. Then we've had single page applications in which links lead nowhere, nosql, serverless. This is like extreme serverless or webless. If you can think of another basic web element, you can invent some new anti-paradigm that will be loved, hated and discussed endlessly over here.
jdietrich 7y ago
I was sufficiently annoyed by this article that I actually shouted "BATTERIES, YOU IDIOT". Google said in 2011 that a single Google search uses about 0.3Wh of power. A typical mobile phone battery has a capacity of about 12Wh. Peer-to-peer systems are almost always less efficient than client-server systems, often by a large factor. You do the math as to whether a peer-to-peer internet based on mobile phones is even remotely viable. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details...
rschulman 7y ago
There are lots of places where we have trained ourselves to think that timeliness is the most important quality when it absolutely isn't. If I drive into a tunnel and my family has to wait an hour before they see the new photo of my son, that is not an epic tragedy. There are also maturing p2p ways to help solve this problem. If my sister gets my update with the new photo before I hit the tunnel, she can share it with my mom whenever they manage to connect.

ggreer 7y ago

I don't know where to begin so I'll just quote chunks and respond to them. > Our data will stay on our mobile computers and be backed up (encrypted of course) in the cloud If one's phone is stolen or destroyed, how does one restore from the cloud backup? What prevents me from buying a 2nd phone and attempting to "restore" it from my friend's backup? Do I just have to guess his password? I'm imagining something like Apple's iCloud backups but that service involves a lot of details that need to be right to ensure its security. That costs money, which means users either have to pay in cash or by having their data mined (or both). I predict that the most popular backup service in this hypothetical world would be a free service that leaves user data unencrypted and sells it to 3rd parties. > We will carry with us the fundamental representation of our identity, backed and verified by advanced encryption, instead of cumbersome passwords or logins associated with the same large platforms that control our social lives That's great until the battery dies or there's a hardware failure or the phone is lost or stolen. Then you have to restore from a backup and that means verifying your identity in some other manner. At some point, identity reduces to a combination of: 1. A password or secret. (Something you know.) 2. A token issued by some trusted entity declaring you are who you claim to be. (Something you have.) 3. A biometric. (Something you are.) Assuming your phone is dead, only option 1 can be used without a 3rd party storing identifying information about you. > Sharing of data, either broadly with a large group or directly person to person, will happen directly between mobile computers, skipping the intermediaries like Facebook or Twitter we’re used to today People's phones aren't always online at the same time. Sometimes they're in a tunnel or on a plane or away from civilization. Given that constraint, who is storing and transmitting the data between the two people? Who runs the service that lets phones say, "I'm Bob's phone. I want to talk to Alice's phone. What is her IP? Oh she's offline? OK send her this data when she's back." Are they compensated for doing so? If not, why would they run such a service? > Artificial assistance will be local first – for example, searches for the best nearby coffee shop will turn to the nearby network for responses before asking the entire planet I seriously doubt the local network would give better recommendations and results than Yelp or Google Maps, as both entities would sync the local info to their own databases and run their own algorithms on the data. Their results would be a superset of the local data with better algorithms. Who curates the local network's results for spam or fake reviews? Why would they have an incentive to do so? > Machine learning will provide personalized intelligent assistance that runs on your own mobile computer I don't think that could work. The latest phones have hardware to run ML algorithms efficiently, but they don't have the hardware to train them. That requires TPUs and a lot of power. Also you need large data sets to train models. That means aggregating lots of people's data. Most people either don't understand or don't care about the implications of Facebook/Google/Amazon slurping up information about them. If anything, people prefer it because they get a better experience. Their news feed has more interesting content. Their Amazon recommendations more closely match what they want. Their search results are more relevant. For these people, the current situation is a win-win. I'm not against this idea, I just don't think it has a chance of working. For something new to succeed, it needs to be more compelling than existing products. More importantly, it needs to offer advantages that existing products can't copy. If at the end of the day you build something that's slightly less convenient to use than Facebook, it doesn't matter how privacy-centric it is. You'll only attract a few idealists.

ggm 7y ago

This feels like a superset of the problem medical records management is in a digital age. There are the bits you need public. your anaphylaxis status. your advanced health directive with 'do not rescucitate' and your organ donation status. There are the bits you need semi public. You need a trained health professional in sexual health to know you have chlamydia, but its not relevant to a physio doing upper body work. There are the bits you need private. your mental health status adversely affects your employer insurance, and your employment. You do not wish this revealed randomly. Some health models empower some health professionals with magic override keys to see almost all of it. Some models empower statisticians to see all of it in 100 years after your death. Some models you carry it in a smart card. Some models you carry keys, and its in a central DB.

Kiro 7y ago
> your mental health status adversely affects your employer insurance This statement makes no sense in 99% of the countries in the world.
- mxuribe 7y ago
  In the U.S., any condition that you have CAN BE AND WILL BE used against you - either by insurance firms, employers, etc. Even if in some cases it is illegal to be used against you, the U.S.' environment is such that those with power over you will use such info against you...so you can unfortunately consider the U.S. in the 1% of the countries that you cited. </sigh>
  - privong 7y ago
    I think you and @Kiro are in agreement. My interpretation of @Kiro's comment is that most of the world doesn't do employer-provided insurance, so that aspect of @ggm's comment would essentially only apply to the US.
    - ggm 7y ago
      An awful lot of the oecd economies with FinTech, mining and the like do have employer funded health benefits. It's a tool to attract high-performance staff, by offering fringe benefits which bypass taxation. If you are working for a trans national in a developing or emerging economy you will have these benefits. So sure, normal health internationally is not the us model. This is packaged perks

sorrowfulgeek 7y ago

This is not a new idea. Apple already emphasises that they do all the machine learning on your own device and no data is sent to the cloud. But this approach only works well for a small class of problems. For other types of problems you need to look at data wholistically at a large scale in order to see patterns and you need a cloud service. But more importantly we know that complex services break once in a while. If such services run on entirely on your personal device then the complexity of your device goes up exponentially. That’s not good. We learned in the 90’s that a better model is to centralize complexity, and make end devices as simple as possible. (Look up Larry Ellison’s 90’s speeches about Network Computing.) So, no, moving the center of computing to personal devices is not a good idea!

atomical 7y ago
Brave browser also does machine learning locally. It's definitely a value add for Apple users and something Tim Cook relishes throwing in Zuckerberg's face. Other companies don't seem to care so much. I think a good compromise is having more data in the cloud that can only be decrypted by the user.
sorryforthethro 7y ago
Federated Learning[1] you can train across multiple customer data by sending the in-training model to every device, then exfiltrating only the backprop adjustments you get back. In-theory, user data never leaves the device. In-practice, the backprop data has the information encoded within it to an extent, it's very difficult to secure. [1] https://medium.com/syncedreview/federated-learning-the-future-of-distributed-machine-learning-eec95242d897 https://medium.com/syncedreview/federated-learning-the-futur...
simonh 7y ago
I agree it looks like Apple is the only mobile vendor who's business seems to align well with a vision like this. They're already taking steps in that direction, which are hard for rivals to take because this approach closes off revenue opportunities for them. Every now and then I see a suggestion we should move towards federated services and mesh networks because it would give people more control and freedom, but the cost of that is complexity. It's like the classic reply on HN when Dropbox was announced, along the lines of why would anyone ever want this when they can 'just' run rsync against an SVN repository? Any solution that expects average users to become sysadmins is DOA. It was true when people were pushing for it in the 90s and it's still true now.

ekianjo 7y ago

Sharing data directly from mobile sounds like a poor idea since data caps and data volume pricing is rampant in many countries. Plus it is likely to make a poor battery life even worse. I would rather folks upload data on their home or shared servers for sharing purposes.

Causality1 7y ago

Assuming I'm an average user, this revolution would require my phone to double the time spent transmitting and receiving data, and block off a large chunk of its internal storage for information I don't care about. I cannot imagine as a consumer thinking these losses if battery life and data capacity ever being worth it.

verdverm 7y ago

What about the potential for malware propagation? Why should I trust the mesh network?

fit2rule 7y ago

I really wish the OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel on this one, or otherwise being distracted by the effort to just 'move everything to the cloud'. Imagine if we had an OS that solved the usability problems of IPFS and made it immensely easy to publish content on ones own named segment of an IPFS network - instead of having things like Dropbox glom themselves around a paltry excuse for file-sharing system services that exist in most modern OS's today? Wouldn't it be grand if someone write an email client - yes, EMAIL - that integrated with a smart contact system, allowing one to run and operate ones own social network without requiring any further infrastructure beyond local, private email services. Everything I do on Facebook, I was once able to do just as easily on Email - the interface is the only difference. I want social networking back under my control again, and a return to email, wrapped in a better local tool for providing the services, is the way to do it. I also want to be able to turn myself off the Internet - having the ability to turn my phone off and be unavailable to the Internet at large - not just as a consumer, but also as a provider of information - should be a basic, inarguable right. If the OS vendors weren't chasing the cloud bucks, this would be a reality. I believe an opportunity for a smart team exists: build a Linux distribution which incorporates a few basic ideological rules: * The user owns their data * The user controls their data * No new services or protocols are needed to provide better services: Use OSI properly or GTFO * The UI is the final frontier for freedom * If the user wants to fully disappear: OFF SWITCH * If the user wants to engage in public discourse: ON SWITCH * De-centralize all the things, bring control back to the local user always As the years go by, I feel more and more inclined to start a test-bed Linux distro which uses these rules to build out a user-controlled OS designed for widespread content distribution on the basis of such things as IPFS, albeit with a much, much better UI for maintaining ones assets than currently exists. If anyone else is interested in such an experiment, I am all ears ..

theamk 7y ago
Btw, "OFF SWITCH" is fundamentally incompatible with IPFS. If you serve your website from IPFS, the first visitor will get the full copy and start serving it. You can toggle your switch as much as you want, this won't have any effect. It's funny that Facebook is much better at giving control to user than email. At least in Facebook, you can delete post. And once you send email, there is no way to retract it.

ilaksh 7y ago

I like a lot of these ideas. And eventually it seems like mobile devices is where it could go. But before we are entirely reliant on mobile, we may be able to do a lot of it on our home computers over the regular internet using decentralized protocols. But back to mobile, does anyone know of any open decentralized identity solutions that will run on a smartphone?

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago

A decentralised internet running on mobile devices? Richard Hendricks would like a word.

FerretFred 7y ago

This article really resonated with me. I rarely use my Android phone for talking to people, and the apps and setup are geared to getting work done securely and with as much privacy as possible. I seem to spend a lot of time tweaking settings to stop Google trying to run my life and monitoring me. Overall, I have a good experience but I really wish I didn't have to keep fighting my phone! What would really make a difference (to me at least) would be a libre phone/OS. Yes, I know these are available but I can't afford them. What we need is a freedom-minded philanthropist to step in and Save The World. Once we have a more private phone then surely privacy-designed systems could flourish, as the author describes. If that happened I'd be there like a bear!

kasbah 7y ago
I would suggest installing LineageOS on a supported phone and not installing any of the proprietary Google apps (play services, maps etc). I have been doing that for a number of years. https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/
- paulcarroty 7y ago
  LineageOS still use Google services, even without preinstalled google apps.
  - kasbah 7y ago
    Which ones, do you have a link where I can read more about it?
    - paulcarroty 7y ago
      DNS, connectivity checks, etc

shtack 7y ago

We've been working on a very similar idea to this for the past few months: https://pocketweb.io https://pocketweb.io There is a very early iOS beta available, and Android is coming within the month. We've thought a lot about battery and data and have gotten really good results by leveraging existing radio wakeups, batching requests, and doing all sorts of optimizations to the sites themselves. Right now we're focused entirely on personal websites, because we believe the majority of those can actually easily be hosted on a phone (eg. How many people actually view your LinkedIn page every day? A single Facebook page doesn't require a datacenter. Etc). We're limited to single static pages with images right now but better support for multiple pages and server code with SQLite is coming. More template types, for example stores, are coming as well. Let us know what you think!

rschulman 7y ago
Awesome! I will check it out.
BMorearty 7y ago
Congrats, your site is 100x more comprehensible than the wall of text on the original link. :-)
baggachipz 7y ago
> "When you are ready, turn your PocketWeb site on and you'll a URL that you can share." I think you accidentally a word. Love the project though.
- shtack 7y ago
  Thanks! We'll get that fixed tonight.
mikenew 7y ago
Love the idea. Couple first impressions from the iOS app though: 1. Most of the icons and images are really low-res. You should include @2x, @3x assets or just have higher res images and let them downscale on older devices. 2. A lot of the "Latest Active Sites" won't load, and the spinner just spins forever. I know the whole point is that it's a site hosted on someone's phone and may or may not be available, but there definitely needs to be a more graceful way to fail. The spinner blocks the UI and doesn't go away. I know it's isn't part of the core service you're trying to offer, but seeing blurry buttons and having the app get into a broken state after clicking some links is not a good first impression. There's a lot of signalling involved in the first 30 seconds or so when a user (like me) is trying to decide if they want to invest time and brainpower into exploring your service, and it's worth smoothing those things out.

jamesgeck0 7y ago

I keep waiting for someone to port Beaker Browser[1] or Dat to mobile. 1. https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/

nanomonkey 7y ago

Anyone interested in this sort of revolution should look into Dweb Camp (https://dwebcamp.org/about/ https://dwebcamp.org/about/) put on by the Internet Archive crew. Folks from Mastodon, Gun, Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Beaker Browser (DAT), etc. will likely be there. If not, look into these names, download Manyverse for your Android phone (Scuttlebutt client) and start playing around.

ohiovr 7y ago

reminds me of beartooth https://beartooth.com https://beartooth.com