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Lots of developers DO work with the next generation of stuff, from solidity to matrix.org to LBRY to Dat to IPFS etc. And our stuff too. I am not upset at all!

by EGreg 4y ago

Lots of developers DO work with the next generation of stuff, from solidity to matrix.org to LBRY to Dat to IPFS etc. And our stuff too. I am not upset at all! In fact I know where you’re coming from because I have seen it so often on HN. It just seems very strange to me that this is happening on a site that started with promoting a “hacker ethos” and “hacking on things” — which is totally associated with rebelling AGAINST large centralized institutions and their power imbalance. Whether it’s ham radio operators or DYI culture or the indie engineering… anyone remember the indieweb movement? How about the Decentralized Web with Tim Berners-Lee? He wrote this: https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-lost-its-way-tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-... (2014) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-on-30-years-of-the-web-if-we-dream-a-little-we-can-get-the-web-we-want https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/12/tim-berne... (2019) A month before, I wrote this in CoinTelegraph, and it is still true today: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... What do you disagree with in Qbix? My cofounder and I met Tim’s SOLID team at MIT in 2014 (scroll down on https://wefunder.com/Qbix https://wefunder.com/Qbix) and since then he left MIT and started Inrupt. His vision is not unlike Dorsey and Web5 — but Dorsey will work with way better technology rather than Tim’s HTTP and SPARQL: It uses ION from Microsoft (championed by Daniel Buchner for years until M$ finally relented) that is based on the open Sidetree Protocol anchored by Bitcoin (or any other blockchain). And self-custodied private keys. I met the lead developer of SOLID - Dmitri Zagidulin — and briefly recruited him to work with us part-time and document our own decentralized identity solution, that was based on pseudonymous identies similar to xAuth from Meebo (years ago). Dmitri left Qbix due to disagreements between us not supporting web standards fully enough in our early iterations, as I believed adoption leads to standards (eg oAuth and HTTP itself) rather than the other way around. Dmitri was instrumental in helping working groups come together to form DID, which is the top spec for decentralized identity. Whereas stuff like OpenID has been largely a shit-show, DID has had adoption by various “methods” including ION btw. @marknadal wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311 Back in 2018, a mere four years ago, people cared deeply: https://www.decentralizedweb.net/ https://www.decentralizedweb.net/ There is also Fediverse, Diaspora, Matrix, Tor. But far more interesting to me is Dat/Hypercore (beaker browser uses it), PouchDB, IPFS and MaidSAFE. They are truly decentralized. Look, a lot of people are working hard to decentralize things for society. It’s much harder than yet another venture-funded closed capitalist silo that extracts rents forever. And you can be proud to call yourself a Web2 maximalist, but in every generation the old folks are shaking their fist at the young generation with the new technology and don’t understand why anyone needs the latest stuff. What was so bad about the old cars, anyway? They never broke down, unlike the new crap! Right? You sound like this guy to the people working on the latest in group signatures, BLS signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, verified credentials and self-sovereign identity: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fs-YpQj88ew https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fs-YpQj88ew Back then everyone also had no idea why the Internet was any good. Ballmer yelled “search is not a business!” Dave Letterman simply asked: Does Radio ring a bell? What problem did the Web solve back then? People didn’t know but made fun of all the <blink> and <marquee> tags and the tacky personal home pages. Same here. It’s early days, yet.

smoldesu 4y ago
There's a number of ways I can prove you wrong here, and I find it pretty endearing that you "know where I'm coming from" but think that things like Matrix and the Fediverse are foreign to me. Zero-knowledge proofs, look at you! It's like Little Einsteins in here. Here's the gist: I despise centralized services. Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the most evil companies I can imagine, and their atrocities that they committed against the web will never see trial because nobody cares enough to hold them accountable. There, happy? I hate the establishment as much as you do. I would still prefer for any one of those companies to control the web over Solana or Terra. I love IPFS, Matrix and Mastodon. All wonderful technologies, and much as you said, "truly decentralized". They're excellent examples of federation, and great pieces of software if you consider yourself an internet power-user. However, the average person will never use a single one of those technologies. There's simply no reason for them to use it. Google Drive is easier than Dropbox. Discord is simpler than Matrix. Twitter is faster than setting up Mastodon. Again, all of this incredible technology that you're speaking of has existed for years, and nobody has used it for anything significant. There is no "internet" moment, not even a BBS moment where we can see faint glimmers of light from the future. We got digital apes and a plethora of rug-pull scams, plus hundreds of millions in stolen coins that has yet to be recovered. You have to be pragmatic about change, otherwise you turn into a Richard Stallman: maybe ideologically correct, but so far-removed from normal human society that you can't be taken seriously. There are several noble people out there working in the field of decentralization, least of which being the people who bicker with people endlessly on forums while also promoting esoteric flavor-of-the-week Blockchains. HN knows good decentralization when they see it, which is why projects like Mastodon and Tor get upvoted, and things like OpenSea and $APE_TOKEN get flagged. There's nothing novel about this technology anymore, "average joe" has spoken and said he's not switching to Mastodon because Kanye doesn't have an account there. It's cool, but has no support even among the people who hate Twitter. It's fun to nerd-out about cool protocols, but Web3+ is DOA. I don't even know how you're arguing some of this stuff with a straight face when not a single major browser vendor even supports this junk. PS: Don't try to claim Mastodon, IPFS and Matrix as Web3. Just because they use secure cryptography doesn't make them comparable to the half-baked dreck that is coming out of the Web3 space right now. They're decidedly Web2-based protocols, every single one of them was built on the backbone of traditional networking models.

by EGreg 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago

There's a number of ways I can prove you wrong here, and I find it pretty endearing that you "know where I'm coming from" but think that things like Matrix and the Fediverse are foreign to me. Zero-knowledge proofs, look at you! It's like Little Einsteins in here. Here's the gist: I despise centralized services. Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the most evil companies I can imagine, and their atrocities that they committed against the web will never see trial because nobody cares enough to hold them accountable. There, happy? I hate the establishment as much as you do. I would still prefer for any one of those companies to control the web over Solana or Terra. I love IPFS, Matrix and Mastodon. All wonderful technologies, and much as you said, "truly decentralized". They're excellent examples of federation, and great pieces of software if you consider yourself an internet power-user. However, the average person will never use a single one of those technologies. There's simply no reason for them to use it. Google Drive is easier than Dropbox. Discord is simpler than Matrix. Twitter is faster than setting up Mastodon. Again, all of this incredible technology that you're speaking of has existed for years, and nobody has used it for anything significant. There is no "internet" moment, not even a BBS moment where we can see faint glimmers of light from the future. We got digital apes and a plethora of rug-pull scams, plus hundreds of millions in stolen coins that has yet to be recovered. You have to be pragmatic about change, otherwise you turn into a Richard Stallman: maybe ideologically correct, but so far-removed from normal human society that you can't be taken seriously. There are several noble people out there working in the field of decentralization, least of which being the people who bicker with people endlessly on forums while also promoting esoteric flavor-of-the-week Blockchains. HN knows good decentralization when they see it, which is why projects like Mastodon and Tor get upvoted, and things like OpenSea and $APE_TOKEN get flagged. There's nothing novel about this technology anymore, "average joe" has spoken and said he's not switching to Mastodon because Kanye doesn't have an account there. It's cool, but has no support even among the people who hate Twitter. It's fun to nerd-out about cool protocols, but Web3+ is DOA. I don't even know how you're arguing some of this stuff with a straight face when not a single major browser vendor even supports this junk. PS: Don't try to claim Mastodon, IPFS and Matrix as Web3. Just because they use secure cryptography doesn't make them comparable to the half-baked dreck that is coming out of the Web3 space right now. They're decidedly Web2-based protocols, every single one of them was built on the backbone of traditional networking models.