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Well, the author is talking about the "mainstream internet" that most people think of: we used to have to point out that the internet wasn't the same thing as t

• joshspankit 6y ago
  Indeed. There are dozens if not hundreds of people consistently working on decentralized tools that fit the current laws/social climate. Not even China can fully centralize the actual internet, so what hope does anyone else?
  • q3k 6y ago
    China doesn't have to control/centralize all of the internet - just enough that the vast majority of people cannot access content that cannot be policed. VPNs still very much work and are used by tech savvy there - but they are effectively useless for most people, thereby just making them not attractive.
    • konjin 6y ago
      VPNs are the dumb persons idea of a secure internet. You've just sold all your secrets to a third party. Tor is a slightly better solution, but again, not by much. You're hoping that a randomly chosen VPN will not have an interest in what you're looking at and that the two VPNs behind it are owned by someone else so they can't correlate the metadata.
      • q3k 6y ago
        I know. I've never advocated for using VPN providers as a valid way to get Internet privacy.
        • konjin 6y ago
          All good, it's just that I've heard too many people suggest VPN as this magic bullet that solve all our problems.
    • prewett 6y ago
      In my experience VPNs are used by everyone I’ve interacted with, including very tech unsavvy users.
• gwright 6y ago
  It isn't clear to me that we've got a good technical, never mind social solution, to the problem of anonymous actors. I suspect that "be careful what you wish for" is applicable to the idea of a communication medium that "nobody can ever control or censor". We already have numerous problems caused by anonymity with our existing infrastructure (DDOS, ransomware, threats, defamation, etc.). I think neither extreme, a completely anonymous infrastructure or a completely non-anonymous infrastructure, is desirable.
  • fossuser 6y ago
    I think Urbit's approach here is actually pretty good. Pseudonymous IDs that have a small, but non-zero cost. Your reputation is tied to the ID and the economics don't allow spinning up millions of them to spam people. They're building a from the feet up first principles approach to really solving the centralization incentive issues of the modern web and operating systems. It's super ambitious, but I think it's pretty cool (and it's not vaporware, the current stuff actually works - it's just early on). A lot of the other attempts at decentralized systems can't fix the server/client model or the spam problem - all which push users back to centralized services. https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/ https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/
    • Teever 6y ago
      Email spam could be almost totally eliminated if you had to send someone a 1-24c micro transaction for them to receive your mail. Over the course of a year the costs to send would be balanced by the profit from receiving for your average person but for spammers it would be untenable.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • ghaff 6y ago
        Is email SPAM really a serious problem today? (Unless by SPAM you refer to marketing emails of various sorts that you agreed to in some manner and that provide an unsubscribe link.) Sure. Charging for emails would cut down on the volume some--and would eliminate the email that's occasionally interesting but I don't routinely read--but would also marginalize the use of non-commercial email for those with little money.
• fsflover 6y ago
  >my pipe dream of someday seeing a truly decentralized mesh network that nobody can ever control or censor Sounds like i2p: https://geti2p.net https://geti2p.net, except it's done on top of the Internet (but would also work on a mesh network).
  • commandlinefan 6y ago
    That, or Freenet. Or Tor. None of which ever really took off - mostly due to user apathy rather than technical feasibility. Sadly.
    • throwaway316943 6y ago
      Apathy is a symptom of lack of immediate value. Torrents and p2p went mainstream when dinosaur content distributors failed to provide service that people wanted. That turned into streaming services which made bank because they addressed the need for on demand entertainment. Centralized media publishers like Facebook and Twitter are now the dinosaurs. Create a news service that fulfills the need for unfiltered on demand reporting and you can be it. Look at the streamers that are beginning to do this. Give them a platform that can’t be censored and allows people to subscribe and donate to them. Figure out the video storage and delivery problem. The world needs you.
  • bergstromm466 6y ago
    Have you heard of Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun's project Ceptr/Holographic-chain? They have developed a distributed p2p data integrity engine that enables agents to bootstrap new distributed apps as fast as the Ruby on Rails framework: "Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications. Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip."
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  Essentially, the tradeoffs don't make it worthwhile for the average user: having to do more work to interoperate with fewer people? "Sign me up," says almost nobody.
  • mundo 6y ago
    And specifically, few people want to join services that are mostly populated by people who got kicked off of other services.
    • api 6y ago
      Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North. Look at BitChute and other small video sites now that YouTube has been deplatforming trolls and crazies. They are full of toxic waste. BitChute now gets called “poopchute.”
      • krapp 6y ago
        >Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North. In many cases these smaller sites were created specifically to cater to those "obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers" as a "free speech/censorship resistant" alternative to the mainstream. BitChute's selling point is serving content which would be banned on YouTube - obviously that's what they get. If they or similar sites are victims of anything, it's their own success.
        • BobbyJo 6y ago
          That doesn't invalidate the point though. You can be entirely ethical in the goals of your platform, as well as have a legitimately ethical audience you hope to cater to and still run into the problem pointed out. The only argument you need to make for a competitor to make sense is "<Platform X> isn't perfect." That's accurate for all of them. A good competitor will have all the same challenges a 'bad' competitor would.
• rellekio 6y ago
  You can't just replace. You need to make a better game than what is provided. The most difficult aspect of this is it is hard to compete against free.
• morceauxdebois 6y ago
  Given that the internet relies on physical medium to travel you will sadly require actual anarchism before you can achieve digital anarchism.
  • scollet 6y ago
    Or, more likely, cooperatives. Apply the same anarchist logic to power and it breeds lethality, but I know local power coops work pretty well IME.
• cdancette 6y ago
  Torrents seem to match your definition pretty well. And it's a quite successfull technology.
• treis 6y ago
  >nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day Any communication medium that isn't controlled or censored will break under a deluge of spam.
  • chmod600 6y ago
    We see that a lot in practice, but it's not clear that there aren't solutions. For example, if it costs someone $0.00001 to send you a packet, that could still be decentralized but the economics change a lot. Maybe for the better.
    • krapp 6y ago
      There is no solution which isn't equivalent to censorship, because "spam" is just a category of speech.
    • dexterdog 6y ago
      But then spammers just send like they usually do, by exploiting somebody's insecure setup and using their resources.
      • petertodd 6y ago
        If being exploited in that way was more expensive, it might happen less often.
  • TimJRobinson 6y ago
    Not true. I've been thinking about this problem for a while and there is a solution: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderation-system-for-the-decentralized-web/ https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...
    • Defenestresque 6y ago
      Thank you for this fascinating write-up. It's given me a lot to think about. I'm quite curious as to why no existing social networks have tried to implement your ideas in a meaningful way, and to a lesser extent why no new start-ups have. Perhaps when I have a few hundred million to invest in a better platform I'll reach out! (One can dream).
• readme 6y ago
  What it would take is for us all to set up nodes. I'd do it, if anyone else would: tragedy of the commons. At least ham radio guys are doing it. Set this up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-a-longdistance-data-network-using-ham-radio https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-a-longdis... I'm game.
  • Ziggy_Zaggy 6y ago
    You are a hero. Thanks for the link.
  • aww_dang 6y ago
    This domain always returns HTTP status code 418 in my locale...
• LeonB 6y ago
  i used to be part of a decentralized mesh network. I see that part as less likely each year. Things centralize, then when the central node gets corrupted, everything is perturbed for a while and somewhat decentralized, until the next centralization begins. Same as disruption theory. Network effects apply to centralized networks moreso than to decentralized effects. Cost to add a new node to a decentralized network generally remains higher than onboarding a new customer to a centralized network. And that kills it over time. (Consider for example that the "new node" may be malicious... a decentralized network needs a lot of duplication of effort to fight malicious actors, a central network can do this cheaper over time.) Even git, built on the very idea of decentralization, centralizes onto github and gets a lot of value out of that.
• rblion 6y ago
  What if there was a simpler way? Is the Internet itself leading to more freedom or less? Or is it human nature spilling into bits and functions that is?
  • krapp 6y ago
    >Is the Internet itself leading to more freedom or less? Or is it human nature spilling into bits and functions that is? The funny thing is, the internet is big enough and complex enough that all of these are true. Even the relatively restricted freedom of social media, itself just a part of the greater internet, is greater than the freedom people had to broadcast their views and communicate with a worldwide audience prior to the internet, which is almost zero.
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  Even if you had a mesh network, global low-latency communication requires undersea cables, and regional high-bandwidth hubs. Besides the undersea cables, local hub-and-spoke networks are needed to provide low-latency regional communication. Centralization of network infrastructure is shaped by the physics and capital costs of communication technology.
• TimJRobinson 6y ago
  Scuttlebutt [1] is the Decentralized Mesh you're looking for. Still early stages but will only improve over time. Has a few thousand users (approx, it's a mesh after all), and is developed completely in the open with clients written in multiple languages. It can't be censored or shut down because all communication spreads through peers, with few central points that can be blocked. 1. https://scuttlebutt.nz https://scuttlebutt.nz
• markvdb 6y ago
  As a schoolboy, I had friends whose parents consciously didn't bring broadcast TV into their house. They did have a vcr. They didn't want TV. You won't reach Carol Couchpotato, but there will always be a core of people willing to living outside the FAANG coral. If you care about the decentral internet, set yourself realistic expectations. Work with the coalition of the willing. Make it as welcoming as you can. It'll be fun times!
  • mgreenleaf 6y ago
    I really like this point. What really matters is your experience, your connections, and your contributions. What everyone else has done has usually been a herd mentality, now is no different, but being able to carve out a little space of your own with those who want that as well--- that is more possible today than it ever has been. In a way, we are in a golden age of being able to do it. Be the change you want to see in the internet.
• ponker 6y ago
  Almost all Internet users have an organization between them and the people they would communicate with. Hell, your registrar can punt you for your content, which means that it's a vanishingly small number of people, those on the dark web and a few other places, who have access to a truly decentralized internet.
• zxcb1 6y ago
  The phase transition takes place when open infrastructure, bandwidth and compute capacity together reach a critical threshold; new ICs will emerge through virtual infrastructure and resource sharing.
• deepstack 6y ago
  If you read Tim Woo's master switch you will get everything is designed to be centralised. Internet is designed to be centralised. The bottom line is that the infrastructure (the cable and the cell towers are centralised). Until we can legally encrypt over Ham radio and quality peer reviewed open sourced post-quantum encryption algorithm Internet is centralised!
• FerretFred 6y ago
  Your pipe dream is thought of and echoed by many, but the problem I see on an all-too regular basis is that many/most worthy projects never seem to reach critical mass. It's not as if we don't have enough people to make it grow and achieve liftoff - we just seem to lack the impetus to all push at the same time. One possible parallel is that we have many roads/highways all essentially built and controlled by centralised authorities and this is used not only by law-abiding citizens but also by criminals. By criminals you could also include people that don't have the same ideology as the State.
• type0 6y ago
  Depending on the country laws you can or can't do something like FreiFunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk
  • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Even if countries laws permit it, your Landlord can say no. Because gathering of youth, disturbing residents, and/or businesses. Happened to me. edit: Funny thing is, landlord/housing society is rolling out their own public wifi access points across their properties now in cooperation with the regional ISP.