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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet (2017)

131 points by freediver 5y ago

thelandofrandom 5y ago
I think we have a lot of potential with this in Web 3.0 - the trick - of course is adoption.
- meiraleal 5y ago
  Ironically, the "get rich fast" frenzy with crypto is making a lot of people join the distributed web without thinking about it.
dsego 5y ago
2017
arcturus17 5y ago
This is cool but it doesn’t address the elephant in the room: regular folk don’t care about any of this, they don’t care about the web being more closed and privative or even having some of their rights trampled. So how do you get them to care? Or how do you offer enough value that they migrate to new systems and protocols?
- SimeVidas 5y ago
  Ad blockers are on the rise. DuckDucGo searches are on the rise. All browsers except Chrome are continuously getting better at protecting the user’s privacy. Global Privacy Control (GPC) is gaining traction. I think privacy on the web is already heading in a good direction.
  - donkarma 5y ago
    They only care because it's very visible to them
  - userbinator 5y ago
    All browsers except Chrome You mean Firefox? That's another problem, the lack of any real browser diversity.
    - SimeVidas 5y ago
      Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Samsung Internet are all quite popular.
      - sli 5y ago
        Edge and Samsung Internet are both still Chrome.
        SimeVidas 5y ago
        Yes, but Microsoft and Samsung are adding privacy features to their browsers. Specifically, tracking protection. I can’t imagine Google adding tracking protection to Chrome. That’s the difference.
  - shaoonb 5y ago
    All browsers except Chrome are continuously losing market share too.
    - SimeVidas 5y ago
      True, a few percent per year. Still, the combined effect of tracking protection in non-Chrome browsers is changing the web for the better, I think. For example, websites must deal with Safari’s tracking prevention because there’s no alternative on iOS, so Apple does have some control.
- rektide 5y ago
  worrying about everyone else is a losers game. worry about yourself & building the healthiest "local" community you can first. there's a lot of neat little networks that are active, that have a community. even if you are just connecting with other p2p, decentralized, whatever folk, & the whole world hasn't adopted your platform, so what? open source doesn't have to scale. start with what beautiful ideas you have.
- pictur 5y ago
  What will save the internet will probably be a project like the internet that millions of people can flock to at once. I love these kind of romantic articles, but I think they look at it from a romantic point of view.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    Millions didn’t flock to the internet at once. People were trash talking Kirk vs Picard in 1987, they were be moaning Eternal September from 1993, in 1996 there was AOL for a few bleeding edge people, but the Internet was useful even with just 30 million people worldwide. even in 2000 the Internet was something Al Gore was waffling on about for the majority of even the western world. You don’t need to reach a billion people to be useful. Wikipedia didn’t have a billion users when it was first useful, nor did OSM, or slashdot, or alt.Wesley.crusher.die.die.die
- enriquto 5y ago
  Millions of people do already care. Why do you want most people to care? Honest question. It is a really serious concern, even if a majority does not directly think about it. Just like water pollution or fertilizer runoff. Essential stuff, that affects everybody, but there's no real need for everybody to care about it. I don't understand why you paint this as a an elephant in the room to address. Not all battles are won by swinging public opinion.
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    Because what are ideas in technology without adoption? To your point, arguably not enough people have cared about climate issues for too long… It is only now that pressure is piling up on governments and corporations to change, and arguably it’s late and much remains to be done. Similarly, the trends towards a gated web described in the article continue to grow. I want more people to care because my rights and those of my loved ones are better protected if enough people care. I also want people to care because I prefer to develop open web products and services, and the more demand there is for them, the easier designers and developers in the space can make a living. Why would anyone not want more people to care?
  - totetsu 5y ago
    because people don't even give out their phone number or email address anymore. And if your the person trying to tell them all the apps they use are bad and to install an app they've never heard of, then thats a big barrier to all kinds of social participation.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  > regular folk don’t care about any of this Regular people don't care about operating systems, yet many of us are able to have a superior desktop experience by using Linux. Regular people don't care about fine music, but we're still able to listen to Mussorgsky and are not forced to listen to Ariane Grande. Regular people don't care enough about technology to sit around discussing it in their spare time, and yet here we are. There's a lot of things that regular people don't care about. Let's concentrate on making something good, that enough people will use, rather than winning a popularity contest.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    I very much agree with this sentiment. But given that, I don’t care about social platforms anymore. I don’t use FB since years, I use Signal with those who care, I visit reddit very irregularly since a while and twitter only if I get a link from someone outside of it. What I’m trying to say to say is that I find the whole model just not very compelling anymore, maybe even harmful. There are some subreddits that are more like forums (like this one) but the general experience is just not something I think is worth striving for, whether it is decentralized or not. What I do care about very much is communicating with interesting people and to read or watch interesting content. The signal to noise ratio is typically disappointing on these platforms.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    I agree. Fuck the regular folks! They are a cross upon our backs
  - lioeters 5y ago
    That's the spirit! I'm glad someone is able to express this clearly. We need more people to be innovators and early adopters, to guide and consciously participate in the technology adoption life cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
  - semitones 5y ago
    For the desktop experience, or listening to music, that logic works well. But the network effect (winning the "popularity contest") is crucial for services that are much more network-dependent, i.e. what's being described in the article, or even hackernews (if there were only 100 people on this site we'd have much lower quality links/discussions)
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Regular folks are AOL users of the past. We never really wanted them on our sites because they were 'lame' and we were 'elite'. Why do we want them? They can't even edit an html page. That was the general feeling way back then. Fast forward 95% of the internet is made up of AOL users who primary use their phone and a few walled garden apps. Why would we want them to be part of the systems we are building that serve our needs? Not everyone needs to be part of a techie enclave on the internet. The barrier of walled garden can help us create an identity outside. Those ready to make the jump should be welcomed and onboarded. The difference from before and now is money. Everyone wants everyone together because it means more money. If you can live without the money a lot of cool projects and unique communities are possible.
  - rektide 5y ago
    Part of me agrees but this is pretty vulgar & anti-populist. Perhaps thinking of the situation as an Overton window, a range of "normal" stances to tech, is more what this about than enclaves. I have another reply to parent despising a similar "do for ourselves" attitude, and I think that's capital, but there is a "follow the alpha geeks" aspect to tech too, for the good stuff hopefully does come down, does propogate, does spread. the Overton window of tech shifts, slowly, if new good self replicating practicing communities of tech are visibly doing better. right now I don't think anyone cares because there's so little apparent difference. but there's low visibility because it's so early, we're so new with our different social approaches, and few alternate approaches are radically compelling, few offer radically better features or better experience. I continue to think protocol based systems, as we stay getting good at them, will offer radical creativity& empowerment that classic big social can't it won't. and that's when we start changing hearts and minds, stay being highly visible, when we are empowered& leveraging it, when we are making our self determinism count. we are not there but we are getting better. what I want to underscore is, right now tech is a secret. there's all sorts of amazing people who would do amazing things of they were involved here. unlike Eternal September where Usenet got swamped with low nettiquette text, this is a chance to involve people: our designs are fast more egalitarian than fairly top-down Usenet. this is an onroad to upgrading yourself, a repersonalization of computing, to make it real & in front of you, rather than floating around on Zuck's servers. for sure a lot of people will go about, unchanged. and would bring semi questionable value to these alternative ecosystems. they one should still be served. two, we will have failed entirely if we don't lift some people up, open their eyes & excited their hearts, by properly prove them in touch with the communications engines of their lives.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
(2017) Wrt decentralized/p2p networks mentioned in TFA I guess we're a bit more informed (disillusioned) today, seeing as even devs happily flock to github where they get shafted (copilot) and looking at the lack of beaker/hypercore (née dat) and ipfs adoption. And also lack of any initiative to make HTML fit for non-js/doc-only delivery on protocols other than http. To the contrary, http/3 is even eating TCP/IP (DoH).
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
It's hard to pinpoint a cohesive thesis in this long, winding article. It's a mix of explanations about how the internet works (IP addresses, undersea cables) and talking about the scale of Facebook, Instagram, and other big tech companies. The author is concerned that too many internet users choose to use big tech websites, which he suggests is a threat to the open internet: > Those are large enough numbers to admit that the open Web is already rather irrelevant to Zuckerberg’s products. But this claim doesn't make any sense, because with few exceptions people still need the open internet to access Facebook. Is Facebook really stopping any of us from using other parts of the internet? Sure, we can point to Facebook's initiatives to provide free internet access in some countries as a sign that they want to control some of the internet, but it's irrelevant for 99%+ of the population. As much as I love mesh networks, the idea that we're going to replace the internet with regional mesh networks is a pipe dream. Mesh networks could be fun as a relatively low-bandwidth alternative network, but there is zero incentive for the average consumer or even a tech person to give up their high speed internet access that already does everything they need. I'm getting tired of these articles that neglect to consider that maybe people who voluntarily choose to use products like Facebook do so because they actually want to. It's becoming a common theme to talk about the general public like sheep who are under the control of evil tech companies, and to pretend that us enlightened tech people need to use our hardware and software skills to stop people from choosing to use websites they enjoy. There are some legitimate concerns around things like privacy and tracking, but the solution isn't to create an alternate internet universe and hope that everyone decides to give up the main internet for this alternate, Facebook-free version of the internet.
- EGreg 5y ago
  Do you want a practical approach? Something that will actually APPEAL to people and has a chance of working? https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
- waterproof 5y ago
  +1, I also found it hard to follow the thread here. For instance, they spend a lot of time on IP address scarcity, and then imply - without explaining why - that it has something to do with Facebook or Google's dominance. Is a lack of IP addresses really preventing folks from competing with the giants? No, FB and Google are huge because they provide more value and people want to use them, not because Ello or Ask Jeeves were starved for IP addresses.
root_axis 5y ago
I am skeptical of arguments based on MAUs. Just because someone opened up Facebook a few times in the month doesn't mean FB is an important part of their life. People point to these big numbers as if they represent an exhaustive measurement of the internet rather than a minuscule fraction of how the typical individual spends their time online.
mrkramer 5y ago
>While Facebook was growing on the Web, Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and the world was revolutionized by smartphones after that. Zuckerberg saw the mobile megatrend before many others did, and as early as 2009 there was a Facebook mobile app with explosive growth. That's not true; Zuckerberg spent a lot of time and resources pursuing HTML5 Facebook app which was meant for all smartphone devices. When he realized HTML5 web app it's not going to work [0] Instagram already emerged and started growing rapidly. That's when he figured out he needs to make native mobile Facebook app and purchase Instagram in order to gain foot in mobile space and in order to eliminate possible competition in social photo industry. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-bigges...
- bredren 5y ago
  Ya, I’m not sure why Zuck is getting praise for foresight in mobile. He fought mobile, and left their mobile czar position open for years. I believe he’s even explicitly stated he missed mobile.
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    GP ultimately says exactly the opposite - Zuckerberg may have had different plans for mobile to start with but he reacted swiftly. How can anyone say he “missed mobile” when he led the biggest mobile play of any software company in the world, leading to a dominant position today? Top analysts like Ben Thomson widely give him credit for it. If he says he “missed mobile” it’s possibly false humility and actual hubris, or he means something completely different.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      I think the OP refers to Facebook waiting really long to offer a mobile app. Many others jumped into the gap (I personally used an app called "Friendly for Facebook"). They were indeed really slow to recognise mobile as a worthwhile platform. So long that it would have jeopardised their position if it hadn't already been pretty much invincible.
rektide 5y ago
the phrasing & core idea is epic. head over heels in love with the idea that the medium, pages made out of resources, is great, but that the transport system is bollocks. a very astute OSI Network Layer observation that i quite like. it has it's limitations but personally i believe servers generating signed bundles of content that we can transit as we like to each other ameliorates almost all the downside of the current web transport stack. That's happening under the WebPackage work: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web-packaging.html https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web...
u8mybrownies 5y ago
The big missing piece in this article is the economics perspective. Aka FB could dominate a mesh network just as well as a traditional one and for the same reasons.
tomrod 5y ago
> It is hard to imagine how things could be different, yet the incentives for these businesses to exist were artificially erected. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a ride from a driver. This has a core flaw. While the service itself may be reasonably priced without the middling service, the information search costs are dramatically reduced. Couchsurf was a similar service in the mid-2000s for staying at strangers locations. But they were niche (couches) and didn't do much user protection. Along comes AirBnB with a model of services travelers want out of the middling service. Thus is thrives. This is wholly unconnected to IPv4+NAT
Natales 5y ago
Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything. I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora, Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies). In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up. Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement. Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious, production-quality systems based on dweb techs. When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why". What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them. As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them. The problems are clear but the solutions need to be clear too. So far many of the alternatives tend to focus more on the tech (decentralized protocols, this or that programming language, etc) than solving the problem. Even worse, sometimes the nature of the tech makes solving the problem more difficult or impossible (decentralized protocols brings a lot of challenges by themselves for example). I made a comment back in the day about my thoughts on Mastodon and similar alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Back in the day @moxie wrote a good text explaining why UX of a centralized solution will always be as good or better than UX of a decentralized solution. Most users crave pleasant UX, and easily discard applications and services that have annoying UX, as long as there is a sleeker alternative. I'd add that a centralized solution can be run by a big corporation extracting significant profits, and thus investing significant resources into it. Investing into a decentralized solution gives a much vaguer idea of ROI. Look at email, the long-standing champion of federated protocols. Most investment went into Gmail and Outlook, proprietary solutions that happen to interoperate with the rest of email universe, but which use proprietary ways to communicate to centralized infrastructure as their strong suit. They are wildly popular. I posit that for normal users a decentralized solution only makes sense when a centralized solution is impossible and / or illegal. See p2p music-sharing networks of 2000s, or modern bittorent. For bittorent though, centralized catalogs like TPB or rutracker are the norm, unlike the p2p search in Gnutella or DC++ of old. Even though incentives of those running TPB are better aligned with the interests of its users than e.g. in the cases of FB or Reddit, TPB is not a non-profit, AFIACT. So, for decentralized web of 1995 to return, a lot of people must have it very bad using the centralized web. Even though ad networks actively work in the direction of making the experience of web browsing insufferable, it appears that relatively simple tools like uBlock Origin, or paying a small subscription fee, make the experience okay again. So, YouTube + $5/mo, or even YouTube played via NewPipe, again trump the experience of using PeerTube, etc. BTW even if the internet becomes a mesh network on transport / connectivity level, it won't change much in these dynamics. Instant gratification + not needing to pay money are winning, and will win, the majority of the audience, by default.
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PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
To me, this seems totally backwards. The corporate presence on the (web|internet) isn't really taking advantage of IP (or TCP or any other internet transport-ish layer protocol). It's taken over the web, loosely defined as a protocol with HTTP at its core. Switching away from "the internet" buys you only one thing: for now, most corporate online presence will not follow you. But most of the problems that the author and most other people have with this corporate presence relies only on the HTTP+above aspects of the current web. If we switched the web to run on, I dunno, DECnet, and corporations followed, not a single problem (ok, maybe 2 :) would be solved. All the chit chat in the article about IPv4 vs IPV6, about NAT, about cable ownership: this is just noise. What's wrong with the web, if indeed there is actually wrong with the web at all does not originate in the internet. How many ways does the author think there will ever be of getting a packet across an ocean? The answer is destined to remain in the low single digits (i.e. a very small number of cables, controlled by something, plus perhaps a couple of satellite routings). The author identifies NAT as the primary cause of some computers not being "first class citizens" online, but a much more fundamental issue is asymmetrical connections. Your computer can pull data at 100MB/sec, but can only push 5MB/sec ... ergo, it can't sensibly act as a server to any widely popular material. You can consume, you cannot publish (widely popular material), without using someone else's network connection. (This asymmetry is not universal, but is still typical). The "content-centric" alternative proposed by the author is a nice distributed caching scheme. It's fundamentally a technical detail that is of little actual consequence to anyone, other than any impact it has on apparent performance when accessing information. When I want to read an article that a friend just told me about, I do not care where my computer gets it from, as long as it gets it. We already have this in a totally implicit way, via CDNs. The scheme proposed just makes this explicit, and in so doing adds an entirely new layer to content addressing. Anybody familiar with cache architectures is going to see the kinds of problems this can cause, and the potentially insane levels of complexity required to avoid them. How about we stop trying to "save the web" at all? How about we recognize that "the old web" continues to exist for those who care (and most do not). How about we recognize that the technical aspects of a distributed, hyperlinked content system are probably not likely to be the best substrate for other kinds of networked communication, and that therefore it doesn't matter if the web cannot "do it all".
collaborative 5y ago
I admit to not caring too much about these things. Then Google removed my app without any warning last week (it is now back in the Store) This has convinced me to move my model to a web-based one Development is already underway. The scare I got last week fuels my efforts. And WASM is great (and fast!)
- still_grokking 5y ago
  So you're moving from Google's Android platform to Google's Chrome platform?
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Although an exageration, I know what you mean. I hope for a better future, and while I am waiting, I need to be allowed to exist. App Stores are an existential threat
totetsu 5y ago
device to device communication is psrt of 3gpp plans for 5g, but its there to serve busineses iot use cases, not societal freedoms.
specialist 5y ago
TIL: Horace Dediu coined The Networking Paradox, a claim that no network of any kind has ever made a profit. Hysterical if true. Among other gems in this interview with Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium. A startup which claims to be "the world's first peer-to-peer wireless network". http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/265 http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/265 https://www.helium.com/about https://www.helium.com/about -- For the pedants, like a 1998 flashback, The Web is not the Internet. Different levels of the stack. Also, the anti-Web was called Xanadu. Like mediums before it, The Web is an ad-funded outrage machine, now amplified by algorithmic feedback loops. Responsible for annihilating truth, weaponizing doubts, history's largest transfer of wealth, and the murder of millions (so far). We can never know if the Xanadu path would have been better, preferable. Or if it was even feasible. But we do know that its systems of payments and copyright would have mooted the most toxic aspects of The Web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
- mrshadowgoose 5y ago
  "Responsible for [...] and the murder of millions (so far)" This is an incredibly strong claim. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, as I legitimately am not familiar with what you're referring to here. Would it be possible to get some more context on what event, or combination of events you are referring to with this?
sbazerque 5y ago
The basic internetworking protocols are fairly decentralized: access is ubiquitous and reasonably cheap. The handful of platforms we use to actually interact with each other over the net, on the other hand, have taken over the web. There's little competition, and most are on the verge of government intervention. It's the other way around: the Internet needs to be rescued from the web.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Title seems backwards. The challenge is to rescue the internet from the web. (or should we say "their" web) Letting the internet be dominated by a single use (www) is every bit short-sighted as letting the web be dominated by five gigantic websites.
megameter 5y ago
A major difficulty of dweb technology is answering "what's the point of it all" in a self-interested sense. For centralized, it's easy to motivate a Facebook because of the assumptions of user data and attention being valuable commodities. Doing this involves competition, so the platforms are also reasonably competitive in their "home turf" and boast high usage figures, even if they ineptly overreach into other markets. But decentralized has to embrace a kind of indifference to its users that makes it more like a natural force. Having more users is mostly a pain and lacks direct profit incentives, since, by definition, the gates are lowered and there is no tax to collect. That makes the self-interest more of a principled do-gooder fanaticism which operates outside the benchmarks of market success, and as such there's a heavy influence from anti-capitalist ideology in a lot of dweb projects. Of course, one form of reconciliation has come through the idea of re-injecting the market dynamic through cryptocurrency. This mode of incentive-setting can produce some tremendously ugly results, but looking at the projects out there(I am using Brave right now), neither does it seem to have failed outright either.
bawolff 5y ago
I think the article's way of thinking is an example of prioritizing vauge ideological concerns over pragmatic usefulness/fulfilling a need. And as such its doomed to failure. Linux didn't win the server & cell phone market by having the entire world read the GNU manifesto. It won by being good at what it does and meeting needs. The philosophy may have helped it do that, but meeting needs, not the ideological underpinning, is what won the day. All this distributed web stuff is all ideology first. At best you end up with a system that lets you do the same thing as the old system, but with much more complexity and latency (and that's the best case). There is no way that is ever going to win, except against the small minority who take ideological purity very seriously. After all, if people really wanted to get fb to go away, we would all be self-hosting blogs and rss feed readers would be our "wall". No new internet neccesary. The world choses to use fb instead.
cookiengineer 5y ago
Honestly, I thought about the very same problems a lot. And not only from a user's privacy perspective but also from a browser's perspective and from the perspective of a "god's eye's view" that big tech companies have. For the sake of argument, Google's or Cloudflare's DNS alone probably have so much data that any country or ISP pales in comparison. The web is broken and it gets more and more rotten over time. Google found out they don't need cookies to track people, so they invented FLoC and decided to actively don't give a damn about any privacy regulation on the planet - activating the tracking mechanism for everyone without any real influence or decision on the user's side. I think the web3 idea will never exist when we keep trying to reinvent the wheel of network protocols. New protocols and new ports can easily be blocked. At some point they're just portrayed like TOR, as a tool for evil rather than good; because the politics will get involved when power shifts to quickly for them to compensate. DNS over TLS just gets its 853 port blocked by most ISPs already so it's useless as a tool to shift the means of power here, and only DNS over HTTPs actually makes a real difference because it's way harder to block HTTPS and tell customer's that their internet still works. Given the nature how the web works, how it's transported and how dynamically it's changing in its resources over time - I think it's more important to focus on the idea of statistical truth in the moment, when the specific end user was using it. Some moments afterwards the same URLs change anyways, so it's important to preserve the resource's timeline - but not back until the dark age. Most parts of the world don't have the bandwidth to download gigabytes and still have crappy 2G slow and even lower network speeds. So a blockchain for a single website isn't a good idea to begin with. As a user I also don't know how hashes work, but I know how URLs work. URLs are predictable, hashes are not. The real strength of a peer to peer system is not only ledging, it's also offloading of network traffic. Every cached download that's offloaded via a closeby peer's cache is another tracking prevented. Every request that looks and behaves like Chrome's rendering engine on Windows/MacOS is another user saved from network fingerprint identification. Privacy is not keeping things to yourself. Real Privacy is looking like everybody else. For my own Browser I've decided to push the boundaries a little by implementing those features with the primary goal of being able to make the web work when you're offline or just connected to trusted peers (that have the URLs already cached). [1] And I'm honest here, it still needs a lot of work. Not only is JS malicious, but HTML/CSS has to be assumed to be malicious as well due to all specifications making it possible to identify people just by using CSS and background images or by simply making the website unusable with tricks like overflow:hidden or opacity:0, so these malicious parts have to be filtered out as well. Also: You don't need custom network protocols there. You don't need to roll your own crypto. HTTP, WebSockets and TLS are already peer to peer. The only thing missing is a decentralized way of cross-signing certificates and the ideas behind TLS notary could make the real difference in peer to peer networks. [2] [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth (highly alpha) [2] https://tlsnotary.org https://tlsnotary.org
Stampo00 5y ago
I think the article has it backwards. The Web is a dead end. It's too far gone, nothing left to save. The internet, on the other hand, has a lot of flexibility and potential left, if only it could be allowed to grow and flourish beyond the needs of the Web.
- deleted 5y ago
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seppoonbi 5y ago
Being really honest, I'm not sure if I mind that normies are on their own platforms since we don't have much in common. And they are free to develop their things how they like. Yeah it's sad that there is not more people like me doing things how i like but it is what it is. Just please don't ban p2p and stuff like that thx.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> A computer may be assigned the number 198.153.192.40, where the first part 198 refers to a specific region in the USA, and the other numbers help specify which particular computer in that region is the recipient. Is this just baby-talk for non-techies, or does the author really think this is how IP4 addresses are allocated?
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > Is this just baby-talk for non-techies, or does the author really think this is how IP4 addresses are allocated? The former, probably. Nominally, that is how IPv4 addresses are allocated, but the mass of caveats and "but actually"s required is enough to bury it many times over. (For starters, we actually care about network topology, which is only roughly correlated with geography. Additionally, address blocks are typically allocated to organizations, which again correlate only loosely with topology or geography. Those blocks are then subdivided on a basis that slighly relates to topology (but not geography), but only the extent that it helps limit the size of routing tables and BGP data. And of course there's all kinds of other messes mixed in with this as well.)
jeffkeen 5y ago
The thing that drives adoption from regular folk is making it dead easy to hop on to whatever the solution/product is. Most average joes who aren’t as fired up philosophically about these issues won’t go adopting a product that’s a rough time to use even if it’s for the greater good, and the Venn diagram of bleeding edge fringe future thinker tech solutions and great user experiences don’t often overlap.

131 points by freediver 5y ago

thelandofrandom 5y ago

I think we have a lot of potential with this in Web 3.0 - the trick - of course is adoption.

meiraleal 5y ago
Ironically, the "get rich fast" frenzy with crypto is making a lot of people join the distributed web without thinking about it.

dsego 5y ago

2017

arcturus17 5y ago

This is cool but it doesn’t address the elephant in the room: regular folk don’t care about any of this, they don’t care about the web being more closed and privative or even having some of their rights trampled. So how do you get them to care? Or how do you offer enough value that they migrate to new systems and protocols?

SimeVidas 5y ago
Ad blockers are on the rise. DuckDucGo searches are on the rise. All browsers except Chrome are continuously getting better at protecting the user’s privacy. Global Privacy Control (GPC) is gaining traction. I think privacy on the web is already heading in a good direction.
- donkarma 5y ago
  They only care because it's very visible to them
- userbinator 5y ago
  All browsers except Chrome You mean Firefox? That's another problem, the lack of any real browser diversity.
  - SimeVidas 5y ago
    Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Samsung Internet are all quite popular.
    - sli 5y ago
      Edge and Samsung Internet are both still Chrome.
      - SimeVidas 5y ago
        Yes, but Microsoft and Samsung are adding privacy features to their browsers. Specifically, tracking protection. I can’t imagine Google adding tracking protection to Chrome. That’s the difference.
- shaoonb 5y ago
  All browsers except Chrome are continuously losing market share too.
  - SimeVidas 5y ago
    True, a few percent per year. Still, the combined effect of tracking protection in non-Chrome browsers is changing the web for the better, I think. For example, websites must deal with Safari’s tracking prevention because there’s no alternative on iOS, so Apple does have some control.
rektide 5y ago
worrying about everyone else is a losers game. worry about yourself & building the healthiest "local" community you can first. there's a lot of neat little networks that are active, that have a community. even if you are just connecting with other p2p, decentralized, whatever folk, & the whole world hasn't adopted your platform, so what? open source doesn't have to scale. start with what beautiful ideas you have.
pictur 5y ago
What will save the internet will probably be a project like the internet that millions of people can flock to at once. I love these kind of romantic articles, but I think they look at it from a romantic point of view.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Millions didn’t flock to the internet at once. People were trash talking Kirk vs Picard in 1987, they were be moaning Eternal September from 1993, in 1996 there was AOL for a few bleeding edge people, but the Internet was useful even with just 30 million people worldwide. even in 2000 the Internet was something Al Gore was waffling on about for the majority of even the western world. You don’t need to reach a billion people to be useful. Wikipedia didn’t have a billion users when it was first useful, nor did OSM, or slashdot, or alt.Wesley.crusher.die.die.die
enriquto 5y ago
Millions of people do already care. Why do you want most people to care? Honest question. It is a really serious concern, even if a majority does not directly think about it. Just like water pollution or fertilizer runoff. Essential stuff, that affects everybody, but there's no real need for everybody to care about it. I don't understand why you paint this as a an elephant in the room to address. Not all battles are won by swinging public opinion.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  Because what are ideas in technology without adoption? To your point, arguably not enough people have cared about climate issues for too long… It is only now that pressure is piling up on governments and corporations to change, and arguably it’s late and much remains to be done. Similarly, the trends towards a gated web described in the article continue to grow. I want more people to care because my rights and those of my loved ones are better protected if enough people care. I also want people to care because I prefer to develop open web products and services, and the more demand there is for them, the easier designers and developers in the space can make a living. Why would anyone not want more people to care?
- totetsu 5y ago
  because people don't even give out their phone number or email address anymore. And if your the person trying to tell them all the apps they use are bad and to install an app they've never heard of, then thats a big barrier to all kinds of social participation.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
> regular folk don’t care about any of this Regular people don't care about operating systems, yet many of us are able to have a superior desktop experience by using Linux. Regular people don't care about fine music, but we're still able to listen to Mussorgsky and are not forced to listen to Ariane Grande. Regular people don't care enough about technology to sit around discussing it in their spare time, and yet here we are. There's a lot of things that regular people don't care about. Let's concentrate on making something good, that enough people will use, rather than winning a popularity contest.
- dgb23 5y ago
  I very much agree with this sentiment. But given that, I don’t care about social platforms anymore. I don’t use FB since years, I use Signal with those who care, I visit reddit very irregularly since a while and twitter only if I get a link from someone outside of it. What I’m trying to say to say is that I find the whole model just not very compelling anymore, maybe even harmful. There are some subreddits that are more like forums (like this one) but the general experience is just not something I think is worth striving for, whether it is decentralized or not. What I do care about very much is communicating with interesting people and to read or watch interesting content. The signal to noise ratio is typically disappointing on these platforms.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  I agree. Fuck the regular folks! They are a cross upon our backs
- lioeters 5y ago
  That's the spirit! I'm glad someone is able to express this clearly. We need more people to be innovators and early adopters, to guide and consciously participate in the technology adoption life cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
- semitones 5y ago
  For the desktop experience, or listening to music, that logic works well. But the network effect (winning the "popularity contest") is crucial for services that are much more network-dependent, i.e. what's being described in the article, or even hackernews (if there were only 100 people on this site we'd have much lower quality links/discussions)
ipaddr 5y ago
Regular folks are AOL users of the past. We never really wanted them on our sites because they were 'lame' and we were 'elite'. Why do we want them? They can't even edit an html page. That was the general feeling way back then. Fast forward 95% of the internet is made up of AOL users who primary use their phone and a few walled garden apps. Why would we want them to be part of the systems we are building that serve our needs? Not everyone needs to be part of a techie enclave on the internet. The barrier of walled garden can help us create an identity outside. Those ready to make the jump should be welcomed and onboarded. The difference from before and now is money. Everyone wants everyone together because it means more money. If you can live without the money a lot of cool projects and unique communities are possible.
- rektide 5y ago
  Part of me agrees but this is pretty vulgar & anti-populist. Perhaps thinking of the situation as an Overton window, a range of "normal" stances to tech, is more what this about than enclaves. I have another reply to parent despising a similar "do for ourselves" attitude, and I think that's capital, but there is a "follow the alpha geeks" aspect to tech too, for the good stuff hopefully does come down, does propogate, does spread. the Overton window of tech shifts, slowly, if new good self replicating practicing communities of tech are visibly doing better. right now I don't think anyone cares because there's so little apparent difference. but there's low visibility because it's so early, we're so new with our different social approaches, and few alternate approaches are radically compelling, few offer radically better features or better experience. I continue to think protocol based systems, as we stay getting good at them, will offer radical creativity& empowerment that classic big social can't it won't. and that's when we start changing hearts and minds, stay being highly visible, when we are empowered& leveraging it, when we are making our self determinism count. we are not there but we are getting better. what I want to underscore is, right now tech is a secret. there's all sorts of amazing people who would do amazing things of they were involved here. unlike Eternal September where Usenet got swamped with low nettiquette text, this is a chance to involve people: our designs are fast more egalitarian than fairly top-down Usenet. this is an onroad to upgrading yourself, a repersonalization of computing, to make it real & in front of you, rather than floating around on Zuck's servers. for sure a lot of people will go about, unchanged. and would bring semi questionable value to these alternative ecosystems. they one should still be served. two, we will have failed entirely if we don't lift some people up, open their eyes & excited their hearts, by properly prove them in touch with the communications engines of their lives.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

(2017) Wrt decentralized/p2p networks mentioned in TFA I guess we're a bit more informed (disillusioned) today, seeing as even devs happily flock to github where they get shafted (copilot) and looking at the lack of beaker/hypercore (née dat) and ipfs adoption. And also lack of any initiative to make HTML fit for non-js/doc-only delivery on protocols other than http. To the contrary, http/3 is even eating TCP/IP (DoH).

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

It's hard to pinpoint a cohesive thesis in this long, winding article. It's a mix of explanations about how the internet works (IP addresses, undersea cables) and talking about the scale of Facebook, Instagram, and other big tech companies. The author is concerned that too many internet users choose to use big tech websites, which he suggests is a threat to the open internet: > Those are large enough numbers to admit that the open Web is already rather irrelevant to Zuckerberg’s products. But this claim doesn't make any sense, because with few exceptions people still need the open internet to access Facebook. Is Facebook really stopping any of us from using other parts of the internet? Sure, we can point to Facebook's initiatives to provide free internet access in some countries as a sign that they want to control some of the internet, but it's irrelevant for 99%+ of the population. As much as I love mesh networks, the idea that we're going to replace the internet with regional mesh networks is a pipe dream. Mesh networks could be fun as a relatively low-bandwidth alternative network, but there is zero incentive for the average consumer or even a tech person to give up their high speed internet access that already does everything they need. I'm getting tired of these articles that neglect to consider that maybe people who voluntarily choose to use products like Facebook do so because they actually want to. It's becoming a common theme to talk about the general public like sheep who are under the control of evil tech companies, and to pretend that us enlightened tech people need to use our hardware and software skills to stop people from choosing to use websites they enjoy. There are some legitimate concerns around things like privacy and tracking, but the solution isn't to create an alternate internet universe and hope that everyone decides to give up the main internet for this alternate, Facebook-free version of the internet.

EGreg 5y ago
Do you want a practical approach? Something that will actually APPEAL to people and has a chance of working? https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
waterproof 5y ago
+1, I also found it hard to follow the thread here. For instance, they spend a lot of time on IP address scarcity, and then imply - without explaining why - that it has something to do with Facebook or Google's dominance. Is a lack of IP addresses really preventing folks from competing with the giants? No, FB and Google are huge because they provide more value and people want to use them, not because Ello or Ask Jeeves were starved for IP addresses.

root_axis 5y ago

I am skeptical of arguments based on MAUs. Just because someone opened up Facebook a few times in the month doesn't mean FB is an important part of their life. People point to these big numbers as if they represent an exhaustive measurement of the internet rather than a minuscule fraction of how the typical individual spends their time online.

mrkramer 5y ago

>While Facebook was growing on the Web, Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and the world was revolutionized by smartphones after that. Zuckerberg saw the mobile megatrend before many others did, and as early as 2009 there was a Facebook mobile app with explosive growth. That's not true; Zuckerberg spent a lot of time and resources pursuing HTML5 Facebook app which was meant for all smartphone devices. When he realized HTML5 web app it's not going to work [0] Instagram already emerged and started growing rapidly. That's when he figured out he needs to make native mobile Facebook app and purchase Instagram in order to gain foot in mobile space and in order to eliminate possible competition in social photo industry. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-bigges...

bredren 5y ago
Ya, I’m not sure why Zuck is getting praise for foresight in mobile. He fought mobile, and left their mobile czar position open for years. I believe he’s even explicitly stated he missed mobile.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  GP ultimately says exactly the opposite - Zuckerberg may have had different plans for mobile to start with but he reacted swiftly. How can anyone say he “missed mobile” when he led the biggest mobile play of any software company in the world, leading to a dominant position today? Top analysts like Ben Thomson widely give him credit for it. If he says he “missed mobile” it’s possibly false humility and actual hubris, or he means something completely different.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I think the OP refers to Facebook waiting really long to offer a mobile app. Many others jumped into the gap (I personally used an app called "Friendly for Facebook"). They were indeed really slow to recognise mobile as a worthwhile platform. So long that it would have jeopardised their position if it hadn't already been pretty much invincible.

rektide 5y ago

the phrasing & core idea is epic. head over heels in love with the idea that the medium, pages made out of resources, is great, but that the transport system is bollocks. a very astute OSI Network Layer observation that i quite like. it has it's limitations but personally i believe servers generating signed bundles of content that we can transit as we like to each other ameliorates almost all the downside of the current web transport stack. That's happening under the WebPackage work: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web-packaging.html https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web...

u8mybrownies 5y ago

The big missing piece in this article is the economics perspective. Aka FB could dominate a mesh network just as well as a traditional one and for the same reasons.

tomrod 5y ago

> It is hard to imagine how things could be different, yet the incentives for these businesses to exist were artificially erected. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a ride from a driver. This has a core flaw. While the service itself may be reasonably priced without the middling service, the information search costs are dramatically reduced. Couchsurf was a similar service in the mid-2000s for staying at strangers locations. But they were niche (couches) and didn't do much user protection. Along comes AirBnB with a model of services travelers want out of the middling service. Thus is thrives. This is wholly unconnected to IPv4+NAT

Natales 5y ago

Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything. I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora, Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies). In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up. Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement. Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious, production-quality systems based on dweb techs. When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why". What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them. As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

Nextgrid 5y ago
> the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them. The problems are clear but the solutions need to be clear too. So far many of the alternatives tend to focus more on the tech (decentralized protocols, this or that programming language, etc) than solving the problem. Even worse, sometimes the nature of the tech makes solving the problem more difficult or impossible (decentralized protocols brings a lot of challenges by themselves for example). I made a comment back in the day about my thoughts on Mastodon and similar alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
- nine_k 5y ago
  Back in the day @moxie wrote a good text explaining why UX of a centralized solution will always be as good or better than UX of a decentralized solution. Most users crave pleasant UX, and easily discard applications and services that have annoying UX, as long as there is a sleeker alternative. I'd add that a centralized solution can be run by a big corporation extracting significant profits, and thus investing significant resources into it. Investing into a decentralized solution gives a much vaguer idea of ROI. Look at email, the long-standing champion of federated protocols. Most investment went into Gmail and Outlook, proprietary solutions that happen to interoperate with the rest of email universe, but which use proprietary ways to communicate to centralized infrastructure as their strong suit. They are wildly popular. I posit that for normal users a decentralized solution only makes sense when a centralized solution is impossible and / or illegal. See p2p music-sharing networks of 2000s, or modern bittorent. For bittorent though, centralized catalogs like TPB or rutracker are the norm, unlike the p2p search in Gnutella or DC++ of old. Even though incentives of those running TPB are better aligned with the interests of its users than e.g. in the cases of FB or Reddit, TPB is not a non-profit, AFIACT. So, for decentralized web of 1995 to return, a lot of people must have it very bad using the centralized web. Even though ad networks actively work in the direction of making the experience of web browsing insufferable, it appears that relatively simple tools like uBlock Origin, or paying a small subscription fee, make the experience okay again. So, YouTube + $5/mo, or even YouTube played via NewPipe, again trump the experience of using PeerTube, etc. BTW even if the internet becomes a mesh network on transport / connectivity level, it won't change much in these dynamics. Instant gratification + not needing to pay money are winning, and will win, the majority of the audience, by default.

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PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

To me, this seems totally backwards. The corporate presence on the (web|internet) isn't really taking advantage of IP (or TCP or any other internet transport-ish layer protocol). It's taken over the web, loosely defined as a protocol with HTTP at its core. Switching away from "the internet" buys you only one thing: for now, most corporate online presence will not follow you. But most of the problems that the author and most other people have with this corporate presence relies only on the HTTP+above aspects of the current web. If we switched the web to run on, I dunno, DECnet, and corporations followed, not a single problem (ok, maybe 2 :) would be solved. All the chit chat in the article about IPv4 vs IPV6, about NAT, about cable ownership: this is just noise. What's wrong with the web, if indeed there is actually wrong with the web at all does not originate in the internet. How many ways does the author think there will ever be of getting a packet across an ocean? The answer is destined to remain in the low single digits (i.e. a very small number of cables, controlled by something, plus perhaps a couple of satellite routings). The author identifies NAT as the primary cause of some computers not being "first class citizens" online, but a much more fundamental issue is asymmetrical connections. Your computer can pull data at 100MB/sec, but can only push 5MB/sec ... ergo, it can't sensibly act as a server to any widely popular material. You can consume, you cannot publish (widely popular material), without using someone else's network connection. (This asymmetry is not universal, but is still typical). The "content-centric" alternative proposed by the author is a nice distributed caching scheme. It's fundamentally a technical detail that is of little actual consequence to anyone, other than any impact it has on apparent performance when accessing information. When I want to read an article that a friend just told me about, I do not care where my computer gets it from, as long as it gets it. We already have this in a totally implicit way, via CDNs. The scheme proposed just makes this explicit, and in so doing adds an entirely new layer to content addressing. Anybody familiar with cache architectures is going to see the kinds of problems this can cause, and the potentially insane levels of complexity required to avoid them. How about we stop trying to "save the web" at all? How about we recognize that "the old web" continues to exist for those who care (and most do not). How about we recognize that the technical aspects of a distributed, hyperlinked content system are probably not likely to be the best substrate for other kinds of networked communication, and that therefore it doesn't matter if the web cannot "do it all".

collaborative 5y ago

I admit to not caring too much about these things. Then Google removed my app without any warning last week (it is now back in the Store) This has convinced me to move my model to a web-based one Development is already underway. The scare I got last week fuels my efforts. And WASM is great (and fast!)

still_grokking 5y ago
So you're moving from Google's Android platform to Google's Chrome platform?
- collaborative 5y ago
  Although an exageration, I know what you mean. I hope for a better future, and while I am waiting, I need to be allowed to exist. App Stores are an existential threat

totetsu 5y ago

device to device communication is psrt of 3gpp plans for 5g, but its there to serve busineses iot use cases, not societal freedoms.

specialist 5y ago

TIL: Horace Dediu coined The Networking Paradox, a claim that no network of any kind has ever made a profit. Hysterical if true. Among other gems in this interview with Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium. A startup which claims to be "the world's first peer-to-peer wireless network". http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/265 http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/265 https://www.helium.com/about https://www.helium.com/about -- For the pedants, like a 1998 flashback, The Web is not the Internet. Different levels of the stack. Also, the anti-Web was called Xanadu. Like mediums before it, The Web is an ad-funded outrage machine, now amplified by algorithmic feedback loops. Responsible for annihilating truth, weaponizing doubts, history's largest transfer of wealth, and the murder of millions (so far). We can never know if the Xanadu path would have been better, preferable. Or if it was even feasible. But we do know that its systems of payments and copyright would have mooted the most toxic aspects of The Web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

mrshadowgoose 5y ago
"Responsible for [...] and the murder of millions (so far)" This is an incredibly strong claim. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, as I legitimately am not familiar with what you're referring to here. Would it be possible to get some more context on what event, or combination of events you are referring to with this?

sbazerque 5y ago

The basic internetworking protocols are fairly decentralized: access is ubiquitous and reasonably cheap. The handful of platforms we use to actually interact with each other over the net, on the other hand, have taken over the web. There's little competition, and most are on the verge of government intervention. It's the other way around: the Internet needs to be rescued from the web.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Title seems backwards. The challenge is to rescue the internet from the web. (or should we say "their" web) Letting the internet be dominated by a single use (www) is every bit short-sighted as letting the web be dominated by five gigantic websites.

megameter 5y ago

A major difficulty of dweb technology is answering "what's the point of it all" in a self-interested sense. For centralized, it's easy to motivate a Facebook because of the assumptions of user data and attention being valuable commodities. Doing this involves competition, so the platforms are also reasonably competitive in their "home turf" and boast high usage figures, even if they ineptly overreach into other markets. But decentralized has to embrace a kind of indifference to its users that makes it more like a natural force. Having more users is mostly a pain and lacks direct profit incentives, since, by definition, the gates are lowered and there is no tax to collect. That makes the self-interest more of a principled do-gooder fanaticism which operates outside the benchmarks of market success, and as such there's a heavy influence from anti-capitalist ideology in a lot of dweb projects. Of course, one form of reconciliation has come through the idea of re-injecting the market dynamic through cryptocurrency. This mode of incentive-setting can produce some tremendously ugly results, but looking at the projects out there(I am using Brave right now), neither does it seem to have failed outright either.

bawolff 5y ago

I think the article's way of thinking is an example of prioritizing vauge ideological concerns over pragmatic usefulness/fulfilling a need. And as such its doomed to failure. Linux didn't win the server & cell phone market by having the entire world read the GNU manifesto. It won by being good at what it does and meeting needs. The philosophy may have helped it do that, but meeting needs, not the ideological underpinning, is what won the day. All this distributed web stuff is all ideology first. At best you end up with a system that lets you do the same thing as the old system, but with much more complexity and latency (and that's the best case). There is no way that is ever going to win, except against the small minority who take ideological purity very seriously. After all, if people really wanted to get fb to go away, we would all be self-hosting blogs and rss feed readers would be our "wall". No new internet neccesary. The world choses to use fb instead.

cookiengineer 5y ago

Honestly, I thought about the very same problems a lot. And not only from a user's privacy perspective but also from a browser's perspective and from the perspective of a "god's eye's view" that big tech companies have. For the sake of argument, Google's or Cloudflare's DNS alone probably have so much data that any country or ISP pales in comparison. The web is broken and it gets more and more rotten over time. Google found out they don't need cookies to track people, so they invented FLoC and decided to actively don't give a damn about any privacy regulation on the planet - activating the tracking mechanism for everyone without any real influence or decision on the user's side. I think the web3 idea will never exist when we keep trying to reinvent the wheel of network protocols. New protocols and new ports can easily be blocked. At some point they're just portrayed like TOR, as a tool for evil rather than good; because the politics will get involved when power shifts to quickly for them to compensate. DNS over TLS just gets its 853 port blocked by most ISPs already so it's useless as a tool to shift the means of power here, and only DNS over HTTPs actually makes a real difference because it's way harder to block HTTPS and tell customer's that their internet still works. Given the nature how the web works, how it's transported and how dynamically it's changing in its resources over time - I think it's more important to focus on the idea of statistical truth in the moment, when the specific end user was using it. Some moments afterwards the same URLs change anyways, so it's important to preserve the resource's timeline - but not back until the dark age. Most parts of the world don't have the bandwidth to download gigabytes and still have crappy 2G slow and even lower network speeds. So a blockchain for a single website isn't a good idea to begin with. As a user I also don't know how hashes work, but I know how URLs work. URLs are predictable, hashes are not. The real strength of a peer to peer system is not only ledging, it's also offloading of network traffic. Every cached download that's offloaded via a closeby peer's cache is another tracking prevented. Every request that looks and behaves like Chrome's rendering engine on Windows/MacOS is another user saved from network fingerprint identification. Privacy is not keeping things to yourself. Real Privacy is looking like everybody else. For my own Browser I've decided to push the boundaries a little by implementing those features with the primary goal of being able to make the web work when you're offline or just connected to trusted peers (that have the URLs already cached). [1] And I'm honest here, it still needs a lot of work. Not only is JS malicious, but HTML/CSS has to be assumed to be malicious as well due to all specifications making it possible to identify people just by using CSS and background images or by simply making the website unusable with tricks like overflow:hidden or opacity:0, so these malicious parts have to be filtered out as well. Also: You don't need custom network protocols there. You don't need to roll your own crypto. HTTP, WebSockets and TLS are already peer to peer. The only thing missing is a decentralized way of cross-signing certificates and the ideas behind TLS notary could make the real difference in peer to peer networks. [2] [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth (highly alpha) [2] https://tlsnotary.org https://tlsnotary.org

Stampo00 5y ago

I think the article has it backwards. The Web is a dead end. It's too far gone, nothing left to save. The internet, on the other hand, has a lot of flexibility and potential left, if only it could be allowed to grow and flourish beyond the needs of the Web.

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seppoonbi 5y ago

Being really honest, I'm not sure if I mind that normies are on their own platforms since we don't have much in common. And they are free to develop their things how they like. Yeah it's sad that there is not more people like me doing things how i like but it is what it is. Just please don't ban p2p and stuff like that thx.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> A computer may be assigned the number 198.153.192.40, where the first part 198 refers to a specific region in the USA, and the other numbers help specify which particular computer in that region is the recipient. Is this just baby-talk for non-techies, or does the author really think this is how IP4 addresses are allocated?

a1369209993 5y ago
> Is this just baby-talk for non-techies, or does the author really think this is how IP4 addresses are allocated? The former, probably. Nominally, that is how IPv4 addresses are allocated, but the mass of caveats and "but actually"s required is enough to bury it many times over. (For starters, we actually care about network topology, which is only roughly correlated with geography. Additionally, address blocks are typically allocated to organizations, which again correlate only loosely with topology or geography. Those blocks are then subdivided on a basis that slighly relates to topology (but not geography), but only the extent that it helps limit the size of routing tables and BGP data. And of course there's all kinds of other messes mixed in with this as well.)

jeffkeen 5y ago

The thing that drives adoption from regular folk is making it dead easy to hop on to whatever the solution/product is. Most average joes who aren’t as fired up philosophically about these issues won’t go adopting a product that’s a rough time to use even if it’s for the greater good, and the Venn diagram of bleeding edge fringe future thinker tech solutions and great user experiences don’t often overlap.