So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs. "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard". Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on

So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs. "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard". Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized web could work in an ideal world in the future. The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook, etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for centralized messaging services — — there would still be the problem of centralized search. The beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not - tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Then all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google today. Centralization upon centralization. I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities. Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for) by the communities or some small local companies. If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents do, except data would belong to and be hosted by individuals who created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially millions of cells that perform queries in parallel. How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is thought provoking.