21 ms·

Distributed Everything

297 points by gwenbell 13y ago

seiji 13y ago
Brilliant article. There's a great list of current-gen distributed things towards the end, but we still need people who make things to keep making non-centralized usable platforms. Get us out of gmail-istan and fadbook-istan and hn-monsterator-istans. Give us our nerdependence back.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  > Give us our nerdependence back. Sure, that's a good first step. But then how do we get our families on board?
  - seiji 13y ago
    I don't follow? I think you're thinking it means quitting jobs and working unsupported? It doesn't have to go that far. Try making things in your free time under fast-feedback constraints. Post half completed things to HN, tell the haters to fuckoff, and email your supporters to build up a coalition of the not willing to be datamined anymore. We know they know more about us than we know they know. We need to truncate their abilities before they have mind penetrating radar.
    - mwcampbell 13y ago
      I wasn't clear. I mean that eventually, we'll want our non-hacker family and friends to leave Facebook, Gmail, etc. and join us on the decentralized Internet.
      - seiji 13y ago
        Oooh. I see. That's why I italicized useful in the original comment. We haven't cracked usable distributed systems for the masses except for the original Skype system. I don't have any answers here, but we can abstract away the scary parts, throw some memes and pictures that timeout on top, then take over the world.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Google has been relatively "good" to us, the users, so far, and they've even been our allies in some cases(SOPA, ITU). But make no mistake, when the Internet will start a trend towards fully decentralized/more anonymous services, they will become our enemy, because that will endanger their very way of making a revenue. If I were a Google boss I'd try to start making money from other business models besides ads as soon as possible, possibly from hardware, like Apple. I think they're already planning this to some extent with Motorola, Google Glass, and even Google Fiber. But they need to hurry up. That trend might arrive sooner than they expect (within 5 years). Facebook is already dead. They just don't know it yet (it takes a while for the market inertia to stop).
  - gizmo686 13y ago
    I agree with your point, but think your wording sidesteps the issue. Google has been our allies because the same things that we were against (IE a closed internet) directly endanger their revenue. They won't change their attitude when they see a huge threat to their revenue, although we may notice that their motives have always been revenue, and that does not necessarily align with ours. Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed advertising through other means goes down. Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger you are the better you can take advantage of it.
    - nine_k 13y ago
      BTW why a rise of anonymous private communication would mean an end to the existing web, as indexed by Google? A lot of things are still perfectly OK to do in public. Consider open information sites as Wikipedia, most business information sites, and even most online commerce.
    - deleted 13y ago
zorbo 13y ago
I find it funny that the author chose to publish this on medium. Had he not, would I have ended up reading it? Which is better, reaching a large audience with mild incitement which is tolerated by the censors, or being able to be as provocative as you wish, but remaining unread?
- muuck 13y ago
  Non issue, I and most people here I think read the article because we found the link here on the front page. Not because the author used Medium.
waffle_ss 13y ago
The founding fathers set up America as a distributed system. It's no accident that as the federal government has taken more power from the states that it has gone to shit.
- hga 13y ago
  The states were complicit in this: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Amendment_XVII http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_U... (Ratified in 1913 during the heyday of the Progressives, popular election of the Senator, turning it into a stuffy mini-House instead of representing the states by virtue of being elected by state legislatures.)
  - btilly 13y ago
    Let us be clear that one of the reasons that it was ratified is because people were sick and tired of abuses like rich people buying senate seats. See http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/06/a-little-story-about-an-ancient-montana-plutocrat http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/06/a-little-story-a... for verification. And note that while he was obvious and egregious, he was not alone. Look up William Lorimer for another example.
    - hga 13y ago
      Sure, that was a problem, but was this cure along with the rest of the Progressives' grand plan of centralizing power in the Federal government worth the cost? Are you happy with what our now nearly all powerful central government is doing and what everyone can easily extrapolate for the future? (Well, until it runs out of money, then the real fun begins.)
- mtgx 13y ago
  I think there needs to be a strong balance. For example, I think the "centralization" of EU has been great for unifying citizens across the continent, unifying trade, making it easy to travel and work in other countries, and perhaps the most important aspect - stopping European wars. So far it seems like a pretty democratic system, and the laws tend to be much better, and with a lot more common sense than the ones being passed in US right now. But I'd be really wary about making it anymore centralized than it is.
mwcampbell 13y ago
The author suggested Bitters for publishing a good web site. That may be a good option for us hackers. For our non-hacker family and friends, it seems to me that the best option is currently self-hosted WordPress. But WP is quite infamous for insecurity. Is there anything better?
- noja 13y ago
  http://www.movabletype.org/ http://www.movabletype.org/ ?
jongraehl 13y ago
This blog post is a threat to medium.com and maybe they'll delete his account? Please. That said, cjdns and pump.io were interesting to read about. I don't see any practical benefit to using them now, but they look like fun hobby projects.
n0on3 13y ago
you know the kind of solution you come up with when you just realized you made some terrible mistake and adrenaline keeps flowing no matter how much you try to stay calm? this is exactly how this post looks like to me. Don't get me wrong, you are damned right. But unfortunately it's nothing new, we saw similar trends in the past with other media and you know what.. people will read your piece, say you are brilliant, then forget about it and keep doing what feel more comfortable to them, which in the end it's just the way they learned to live. Nodejs, HTML5 and CSS3.. seriously? Well done catching the problem in its n-th instance, but encouraging people to develop tech skills to avoid something they don't fully understand is not really going to help. unfortunately.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
wooster 13y ago
Amusingly, as I'm typing this, the author's site is down: http://evbogue.com/ http://evbogue.com/
shortformblog 13y ago
I think while there's a valid point in here, it strikes me as kind of harsh towards the larger public, which has never heard of IRC … for a reason. It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. Which is why it's essentially stayed around as more of a backchannel than anything else. Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals. Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this. If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  > It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services like Twitter and Facebook. :)
  - shortformblog 13y ago
    The teen chatters of the world—the ones who set the cultural trends—got a handle on it, but did their parents? :)
    - nine_k 13y ago
      The parents often don't catch on Twitter either. I think it's mostly due to a different communication culture, not technical ineptitude.
donaldguy 13y ago
He is missing an important point here that is well illustrated by his coffee metaphor: I don't go to Starbucks, but I don't make my espresso drinks at home either -- I go to smaller coffee shops for two things: convenience, which he acknowledges, and what he ignores -- specialized expertise. I could spend time learning how to make a good latte or mocha at home, but right now I don't want to; I have better things to do. And in the short term, what I could manage by myself probably won't be as good what I get poured at the small shop down the street. Similarly, everyone who wants to write online could learn all the web tech, but using Medium is, yes, easier, but also probably results in a higher quality product (in both presentation and especially distribution) than what they will manage on their own in the short term. There is expertise that's gone into Medium that many writers don't have or want to acquire (yet). Sure censorship can be an issue, but I don't believe that these skills are becoming impossible to pick up when they become needed, as he seems to imply. Use Medium or Svbtle or whatever while they work and move off when they actually become a problem, or simple when your time and interests change enough that you actually want to pick up web development (or espresso brewing) expertise.
- ISL 13y ago
  A small coffee shop would align with the author's intent. The post favors distribution over centralization; federation, so long as it's into small-enough chunks, tends to do the same thing.
  - donaldguy 13y ago
    But at the moment, Medium is a small(er) platform. If my local coffee shop does a hugely successful business and is pushed by the market or management decisions to resemble the Starbucks he describes, I will probably find a new one. I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams) started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at least. But maybe that makes me foolish.
- notatoad 13y ago
  distribution doesn't necessarily mean doing everything yourself. imagine a world where you picked a service to publish your blog posts on, and your readers could choose what service they read those posts on. the publish and read services could be totally different, just as long as they are interoperable (for the sake of argument, let's call this compatibility layer "RSS"). if you don't want keywords like bitcoin filtered out of your posts, you just have to choose a publishing service that allows it. if your readers want to read posts about bitcoin, they have to choose a reader service that allows that. neither your choice nor theirs impacts anybody but the person making the choice. if you use a centralized service, your choice of service impacts your readers. you are making decisions for your whole network, not just for yourself. the problem isn't htat some services suck, the problem is that when you choose a service that sucks, you are implicitly promoting that shittiness through the network effect. decentralization solves this.
johnchristopher 13y ago
> A year ago (late 2011/2012) I got very interested in this centralized/distributed problem. I’d been traveling around the world. First I went down to Mexico, and saw how free it is down there. I went back up to San Francisco, and I sold my iPhone in the Mission. I don't understand the logical link between those sentences. What does he mean when he writes "[I] saw how free it is down there." and why did it lead him to sell his iPhone ?
Detrus 13y ago
The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How to be go to places. Poogle Glus, F*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address/contact book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it. It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse. A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble. Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish. Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.
- nine_k 13y ago
  Who exactly needs attention, and from whom? * Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them. * "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people. * Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them. * People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives. Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is good (lower prices, more openness). But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of censorship) may be one of such things.
mwcampbell 13y ago
Unfortunately, even if you run a VPS on DigitalOcean or Linode or the like, you are still using a very centralized service. These services concentrate many servers in a few data centers. The US data centers are mostly on the coasts, though Linode has one in Dallas. Sure, this is efficient, but efficiency has its downsides. I think we need at least one competent web hosting provider operating in every state of the US, and more for the large states.
_prometheus 13y ago
> How about Visit my distributed website at http://198.199.80.174/ http://198.199.80.174/ FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.
- spydum 13y ago
  DNS is HIGHLY distributed (more so than SMTP)
  - insom 13y ago
    The protocol is, while the domain system isn't. But then, you could say that about IPv4 and IPv6 - you have to get your allocation from somewhere, and your LIR gets it from its RIR and your RIR gets it from IANA. As long as you're using publicaly addressable computers, the system is in some way centralised. (And that's probably okay).
  - prodigal_erik 13y ago
    DNS is federated, which means a central authority has discretion over how it's distributed and to whom. You can put up your own server at any time, but nobody besides you will use it unless VeriSign (or whoever operates the registry for your TLD) agrees that it is currently authoritative for your subdomain.
6d0debc071 13y ago
Have you considered that, perhaps, the reason facebook is full of people with nothing to say is because most people have nothing to say? I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before. The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep. And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh. Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.
- Heliosmaster 13y ago
  There is this great quote attributed to Mark Twain: "If you have nothing to say, say nothing." The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this, but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to "dumb shit".
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    I do wonder how much of that we're responsible for sometimes. I was quite little when the internet started to become popular, to the extent that I barely remember it, but I do remember that it used to seem to make people... well, I don't want to say smarter but definitely more rounded. Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments, the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think, how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better conversations to find them and be nurtured by them. Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a desired quality then ... oh dear. :/ You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that there's nothing on the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily true - but equally actually finding something like Gwern's site or Hacker News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain circles already.... The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive structures to me.
chipsy 13y ago
Recently I've been fascinated by the concept of individuals having a "private cloud" service - a server that they own or rent, which has all the data that an individual could hope to have centralized, contains APIs and UI for remote access from client devices, and acts as the middleman for most transactions with the outside world. The beauty of this is that if it were developed as a unified system, minimal tinkering would be necessary for a layman user. A preinstalled, auto-updating OS would do the heavy lifting - we're aiming for a situation where a bare minimum of configuration becomes necessary. Once configuration is done, all the user needs to know to reach _all_ of their data is a URL and a password. The server itself can (ultimately) become the identity service for all remote accounts. It has a straightforward progression of development and adoption, too. Create a web app that kludges together some messaging, identity, and storage solutions - the stuff needed to do this at an 80% level already exists, for the most part. Package it into an image installable on a VPS. Subsequently, make native apps for the client devices, or adapt existing ones, to match the experience of Dropbox/GTalk/etc. Last, build a hosting service or sell hardware tailored around simplifying the configuration process, providing backups, etc. As you get further into the adoption process, more and more possibilities to reclaim data open up, since you'll hit the critical masses necessary to push new protocols into the system.
- amirmc 13y ago
  Yup, this is the kind of thing I'm working on at the moment and I'm finding that other folks are thinking along similar lines (but taking different approaches). The first application we want to build on top of the underlying 'private cloud' is email. My viewpoint is that to do this properly, we need to think through things from the ground up with privacy and security built in, otherwise I don't see it as that much better than current systems (you'd just be getting the illusion of security/ownership/etc). It's really not the kind of system that lends itself to the mantra of 'move fast and break things'. Such software would also have to be open-source (to a large extent) so that others can verify security or people can deploy it to their own machines (I'd personally prefer a hosted version, knowing that I can migrate off if I want to). The question is what kinds of business model can one build around such a product. Would you be willing to pay for such a service? If so, how much and what features would you expect from an early version? Would an app-store model make sense to you? In any case, if you or anyone else is interested in finding out more about the work (esp alpha releases), feel free to drop me an email (in my profile).
nine_k 13y ago
Let me mention https://nightweb.net https://nightweb.net Nightweb connects your Android device or PC to an anonymous, peer-to-peer social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices and PCs. Also, posting this on Independence Day just feels right.
cjbarber 13y ago
Why is Mailchimp filtering 'bitcoin'? That was one of the most shocking parts of the article for me. (Which is a sad point in itself, that I almost expect many of the other things mentioned. But that innocent Chimp filtering out a word that the valley loves right now? Strange.)
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
  Yes, that stood out to me, too, because it is surprising and should be easily verifiable. Any Mailchimp users or employees care to comment?
- jld 13y ago
  There's a note in the margin that MailChimp is concerned that ISPs may filter emails that contain 'bitcoin' in them.
dot 13y ago
> a suburb west of San Francisco Hawaii? :)
nmc 13y ago
You want a distributed F*book? Try PSYC on GNUnet! http://about.psyc.eu http://about.psyc.eu https://gnunet.org https://gnunet.org
revorad 13y ago
Meanwhile - https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080 https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080
RyanZAG 13y ago
"IRC. Everyone who wants to make sure their messages land use IRC as a backchannel now." No, damnit. IRC is logged, double logged, and then has all of the logs shipped offsite to be engraved in bedrock. IRC servers, because of their history in pirated content, are very heavily controlled by law enforcement. A huge number of raids have been carried out around the world based off what people have said on IRC. IRC is very much not the solution to the widespread monitoring of facebook.
- jaryd 13y ago
  A lot of my friends who use IRC as a primary communication channel will stick to invite-only self-hosted SILC IRC networks. These are essentially 1 step above darknet (eg: local IRCd), and are a far cry from the efnets of the IRC-verse.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    All it takes is a warrant and a plea bargain, and your private 'darknet' (haha) irc server is now a honeypot collecting all the traffic you thought was private. The more popular an easily controlled solution like private IRC servers become, the greater the advantage for law enforcement and others to control them. End-to-end encryption is a requirement for secure communication. Anything less is the same as scribbling on paper and tossing it to the recipient, and hoping nobody catches it on the way.
    - jaryd 13y ago
      PRQ (http://prq.se http://prq.se) serves as a decent host insofar that it's harder for the server to be seized--it works for us. Obviously there is no perfect solution, but if you don't have a target on your back then this is one way to decentralize communication with a group of friends. To take it a step further, end to end encryption is only good when you can protect your private key and passphrase... All you have to do is take a look at Rakshasha (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU) for a practical example of how compromised we all really are.
    - 13y ago
pyre 13y ago
While I do agree to some extent with this post, it is naive in a lot of places. Forgive me if this comes across as picking at the post, but I feel that some of these things need to be said. > You know the sources. You’re all on them. [...] Shitter. While Twitter is grouped with all of these others, I don't find Twitter to be on the same level as Facebook or Google Plus. Maybe it's just me, but I view it as a very large, public forum/chat. (I guess I'm in minority here?) Chatting on Freenode in a public channel isn't necessarily any more private than Twitter. > When you use these services, you’re not even a button > pushing Starbucks at Barista. You’re just ordering a > free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the > future. You’re not even pushing the button.You’re just a > user. This is misleading. People contributing to Medium are creating content. They are not passively consuming content via YouTube, or only posting ephemeral content via Twitter. Just look at the post that you created. Sure it's published via a 'central' service, but you are not a 'drone' just regurgitating content or providing little to no value to your readers. The real danger in centralized services is when they eclipse everything else. The inflection point where they become a blackhole, sucking everything else in (e.g. long-form blog posts aren't read by a large audience if they aren't on Medium) is the real danger. > So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails, > I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails. The MailChimp/Tiny Letter issue is an issue of centralization caused by the downsides of decentralization. It becomes increasingly hard to deal with email as the 'small guy' because: 1. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making sure your emails are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g. Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail). 2. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that email admins must play with spammers. If email was a centralized service, spammers would probably be easier to block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword. This leads to less competition in the email market because it's a hassle that few people want to deal with when deciding to start a new business. > So as more and more people started using these services, > I noticed the level of the conversations around me > dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have > in kindergarten. Unfortunately this is what happens when you draw in more and more of the general public. You can't solve this issue with decentralization, unless your decentralized solution sets the bar high enough that these people just choose not to participate. > You don’t accidentally end up inside someone’s public > furry porn collection Most people don't view accidentally stumbling into someone else's furry porn collection as an upside. You're never going to get many people to 'sign up'(1) for something like this. (1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized service. Just 'signing up' as in joining in. > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no > idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no > idea how to create a link to another website. If you ever think that the general public is going to want to write HTML or deploy Node.js applications, then you have another thing coming. This is like suggesting that everyone should learn how to repair their car to avoid getting screwed by shady mechanics. It doesn't hold up in the real world. It might be nice, but it's a pipe dream. > Don’t just log out. Delete your accounts. This will > force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way. I appreciate the sentiment, but how many people has, "Go start coding in Vim and disable the arrow keys to learn," convinced? And this is among the 'tech elite.' I don't understand how you think that this is convincing argument for the general public. > Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital > Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server. First, the 'distributed vs. centralized' debate needs to have terms defined. Sure, Facebook is definitely centralized, and P2P is definitely decentralized, but what about hosting your own server? It's more decentralized to host your own server than something like Facebook, but the government can still just ask your hosting provider for access to your server without a warrant. So how has this really helped us? It's made it harder for the government to get access to your data because data is now in lots of little silos rather than a handful of huge ones, but it's still not the panacea that it's presented as here. To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like Facebook, centralized. The stovetop expresso maker is more like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting your own server? That's more like renting an expresso maker at a community-center. Technically you don't own the expresso maker, even though you are renting/leasing it. At any time, the expresso maker could be used be someone else if that's what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements that are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with law enforcement). > Deploy using Node.js using Bitters. I'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?' > Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your > filter bubble, and respects your privacy. Unfortunately there are a few issues here: 1. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data. Sure, they aren't sending usage statistics back to Yahoo! (so far as I know), but how free are we really from the giant data silos when we are still connected to them for things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to the point that it would be severely cutting into Google or Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the program would probably be terminated. 2. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of functionality as the big players. Many people have attempted to switch to DDG over the recent NSA revelations, only to switch back to Google. 3. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to have everyone switch from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA targets them instead. What have we really won, then? The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition in the web search market, but if we are to attempt to hold the web search engine market to the distributed ideal we are discussing, then what we really need is something else.
coldcode 13y ago
If you are pushing packets anywhere on the public internet you aren't really all that disconnected. Much of what the author talks about assumes all of your contacts are highly intelligent and paranoid programmers. That leaves out 99% of my family and friends. Any highly technically advanced decentralized secure non-NSA-readable communication technology is likely indistinguishable from magic to the general public.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I liked it. Couple of notes. The internet was more distributed and protocols were way more flexible. Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just TCP/IP. The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as "locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location. An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers. Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse. But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.
llama42 13y ago
> Little did I know that Singapore doesn’t have the same freedom of speech laws we take for granted in America. > In other words, you can get in big trouble in Singapore just for saying or writing something. whoa... sounds like my country.
thomasf1 13y ago
This analogy just seems a bit confusing to me and threw me off the main point... End users, readers = coffee consumers Bloggers = baristas, either working in their own store or a Starbucks. Mixing the two up doesn't make sense. Well, there are a couple of bloggers that are their only readers - hopefully less guys than the ones that brew their own coffee though ;).
- thomasf1 13y ago
  Is's hard to find a analogy that really fits well... Bloggers typically benefit from their activity, wether they blog on a platform or have their own blog. In both cases, they have an audience. As your main point is about fully controlling the tools you'd use for their work, maybe something like racing drivers building their own cars would work better...
luke-stanley 13y ago
Deleting everything on Facebook is NOT likely a good way to increase engagement on a separate platform. More likely, people will just forget about you! The problem is, with the Dunbar limit, these tools serve part of peoples memory. There almost certainly MUST BE A TRANSITION to the new peer based tools. Why doesn't Ven Portman / Ev Bogue mention PGP? I don't see his public key anywhere, why talk about emailing people what you are working on openly if you want to "evolve beyond reach"? Hard to take seriously.
alexvr 13y ago
Anyone notice the parallels between this and the transcendentalist movement?
wilkie 13y ago
Commenters: you need some terms defined with context. Let's do that. I'm a founder and one of the current maintainers of the distributed/federated microblogging platform rstat.us. In this particular context, centralized vs distributed have to do with control over both storage and propagation of your data more so than its architecture. Or at least, the concerns over how to better control storage/propagation drive decisions about architecture. Twitter, Facebook, etc are centralized in this case. Your data goes to them, they propagate it, you have little to no control. Their system is designed around that. Identi.ca, rstat.us, diaspora are distributed. You control the software that holds the data and distributes it to others. Many designs are possible, even that which you design yourself. Do these distributed platforms still have centralized components? Yes. There are lots of centralized pieces. Doesn't matter. Minimizing them is still the goal. Less is progress. It's not perfect; it's better. What's stopping distributed platforms from overtaking centralized ones? The typical things: politics, lack of resources, high barrier of entry for non-tech folks. Can distributed platforms do X? Yes. For example, the very usual: "But they can't handle spam!" Sure they can. Distributed platforms exist to share information. They can share blacklists. Share training data for spam filters. Ultimately, if they can distribute content, then they can distribute metadata. The only thing a centralized platform can do that a distributed one cannot is provide immediate global consistency... but considering most centralized services grow to the scale where they are internally distributed anyway, they can't even do that. What do we need to do to succeed? We need software that is light, easily understood, easily augmentable, modular. Something that can easily and freely be deployed with minimal effort from a city's public library. Deployment on hosted or publicly available servers... or packaged on cheap hardware to be used in the home or taken with you. Hardware and deployment services that don't really exist. But creating the software may be the motivation to create them. Who will build it? I've published research on distributed systems and distributed databases. I founded rstat.us with some friends which has had over 60 diverse contributors from around the world. It got some good, albeit small press, but OStatus (the protocol that rstat.us sits upon) is being superseded. So I'm working on this: - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n - Support for social sentence generation for many languages/cultures - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus https://github.com/hotsh/lotus - A discovery layer and data structures for distributed social graphs. It negotiates the protocol so many different distributed social systems can interact (which is the point, ya think?). (models) - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb - Small persistence layer. (models+db) - https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus - Rack extension for interacting with the social graph and content generation as hypermedia over HTTP. (controllers) - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site - Example site (hoping to pull much of the view/presentation logic into a separate repo) Modular. Easily modifiable. Released as closely to the public domain as is possible (CC0.) With these combined, you can build any number or variety of distributed social web systems (image sites, photo album sites, hosting of web comics, flash games, blogging, etc etc etc.) Hopefully they will share a common deployment strategy so if you build a new thing, however unique, it will be just as easy to deploy from the point-of-view of somebody not very well-versed in technology. So... Me. I'll do it. With some help. If you care, here is my gittip (I only need $250/wk to squeak by): https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/ https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/
damian2000 13y ago
I agree with the message behind this post, but it comes across as hyperbole. The thing that irks me on his website is that the sole payment method for his eBook (Deploy Node) is PayPal. Nothing wrong with this of course, but in the context of this post, well it seems a bit off.
xtc 13y ago
Shameless self-promotion while also using the same service you denounce. Why did you post your criticism of Medium on Medium? You wanted a larger audience to hear your opinion. That's what the majority of writers on services like Medium are aiming for. Plenty of people currently joining Medium in troves are probably just as capable of creating their own blog, and I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of them use both. Syndicated sites are where people come to have their voice heard. Just like how this was posted on Hacker News, a central site where like-minded individuals enjoy viewing pertinent information and have a larger discussion about these matters. Isn't that one of the primary functions of the internet? Plus, using names like 'Shitter' and 'F*book' made me discredit your argument rather quick, personally. What's next, is 'Micro$oft' also keeping you down? Or would you rather everyone create their own OS? On another note, IRC is a safe-haven? That's fascinating news.
sergeykish 13y ago
You want people to give away so much and propose what?! > start by learning some Internet basics. HTML5 and CSS3 Isn't this a bright future? People all around saving the world by typing HTML tags and CSS rules. Let me clarify something: HTML is a DOM serialization. It's editing by hands is as stupid as typing UTF-8 byte by byte. Our tools are weak. Consuming and publishing are disconnected. To publish information one has to convert it and push on server. Now it's copy, not original document. Modern web tries to solve this problem by making web the only place. Sure it requires resources and for sure it's centralized. I'd like to have all hypertext goodness on local computer. Make interconnected notes, publish them by clicking button and don't worry about synchronization or file name. Interconnect with web, know that every page I'm interested in is cached locally, edit these pages in place. It would be nice to use 320MHz 16MB RAM wireless router as always present server. > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore Can you write HTML WYSIWYG editor? Can you write tooling to query interconnected data? Maybe at least some users would not need to store data outside
bryanchen 13y ago
Okay, this is kind of off-topic to the main gist of the article, but I'm a Singaporean living in Singapore, and I believe that the article is rather mischievous (or the author genuinely does not know/bother to know the facts). First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people. Next, I'm tired of people saying that free speech is limited in Singapore. It is not. There are rules in place to prevent over-zealous extremists (of any kind or nature). I urge anyone who feels otherwise to take a look at Singapore's short national history - about mass inter-racial riots that caused massive turmoil in the country. This is why the laws have been enacted. These laws simply say that we aren't allowed to publicly denounce another religion, or another race. And before you start jumping up and down saying "that's limiting my freedom to speak!", let me clarify. It's not what you think. It's not that I can't complain or even speak badly about someone else's race or religion in public. I can. But the moment I start shouting these insults, that's when the authorities would take action against me. It's only civilised, and the government has formalised this civility. On one hand, people ignorant to historical events in Singapore can simply surmise that they are tools by the government to inhibit freedom of speech. On the other hand, however, and this is what I personally feel, these laws exist to keep the peace. Think about it. Singapore is a small island filled with people of different races and religions. Yet we don't have religious wars and we certainly don't have racial riots. And finally, the claim of, "I suspect at some point the Singapore intelligence agency may have hacked into my email while I was there (another IP was registering on my Gmail account). Also I believe I was interviewed by a Singaporean spy." I seriously doubt it. Do you really think that if a highly trained spy wanted to covertly interview you, a technical writer and web developer, that you would know? And if they did want you to know, you would have known that you're being interviewed. I doubt (and here I'm assuming) that spending hours reading conspiracy theories online would make one an expert in counter-intelligence. Again, like what I said, this ill-constructed idea that the author has is probably due to the lack of understanding of the so-called "blogging license". And again, I repeat: one DOES NOT require a licence to blog. Over the last couple of years, I've seen an increase in the number of people (mostly foreigners) writing articles about Singapore, saying that citizens' liberties are curtailed and limited. Again, as a citizen, this isn't true. Just like how Americans value their "freedoms", sometimes till the point of absurdity (absurd at least to foreigners like myself, and with regards to "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"), we Singaporeans value the peace and harmony within our tiny island-state. We put this, sometimes, even above our own personal liberty - like the freedom to shout racist remarks in a coffeeshop. Is that wrong? Only someone who has seen the bloody effects of racial and religious unrest would be qualified to answer the question.
dschiptsov 13y ago
Why so many points? Does this considered a good writing nowadays?)

297 points by gwenbell 13y ago

seiji 13y ago

Brilliant article. There's a great list of current-gen distributed things towards the end, but we still need people who make things to keep making non-centralized usable platforms. Get us out of gmail-istan and fadbook-istan and hn-monsterator-istans. Give us our nerdependence back.

mwcampbell 13y ago
> Give us our nerdependence back. Sure, that's a good first step. But then how do we get our families on board?
- seiji 13y ago
  I don't follow? I think you're thinking it means quitting jobs and working unsupported? It doesn't have to go that far. Try making things in your free time under fast-feedback constraints. Post half completed things to HN, tell the haters to fuckoff, and email your supporters to build up a coalition of the not willing to be datamined anymore. We know they know more about us than we know they know. We need to truncate their abilities before they have mind penetrating radar.
  - mwcampbell 13y ago
    I wasn't clear. I mean that eventually, we'll want our non-hacker family and friends to leave Facebook, Gmail, etc. and join us on the decentralized Internet.
    - seiji 13y ago
      Oooh. I see. That's why I italicized useful in the original comment. We haven't cracked usable distributed systems for the masses except for the original Skype system. I don't have any answers here, but we can abstract away the scary parts, throw some memes and pictures that timeout on top, then take over the world.
mtgx 13y ago
Google has been relatively "good" to us, the users, so far, and they've even been our allies in some cases(SOPA, ITU). But make no mistake, when the Internet will start a trend towards fully decentralized/more anonymous services, they will become our enemy, because that will endanger their very way of making a revenue. If I were a Google boss I'd try to start making money from other business models besides ads as soon as possible, possibly from hardware, like Apple. I think they're already planning this to some extent with Motorola, Google Glass, and even Google Fiber. But they need to hurry up. That trend might arrive sooner than they expect (within 5 years). Facebook is already dead. They just don't know it yet (it takes a while for the market inertia to stop).
- gizmo686 13y ago
  I agree with your point, but think your wording sidesteps the issue. Google has been our allies because the same things that we were against (IE a closed internet) directly endanger their revenue. They won't change their attitude when they see a huge threat to their revenue, although we may notice that their motives have always been revenue, and that does not necessarily align with ours. Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed advertising through other means goes down. Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger you are the better you can take advantage of it.
  - nine_k 13y ago
    BTW why a rise of anonymous private communication would mean an end to the existing web, as indexed by Google? A lot of things are still perfectly OK to do in public. Consider open information sites as Wikipedia, most business information sites, and even most online commerce.
  - deleted 13y ago

zorbo 13y ago

I find it funny that the author chose to publish this on medium. Had he not, would I have ended up reading it? Which is better, reaching a large audience with mild incitement which is tolerated by the censors, or being able to be as provocative as you wish, but remaining unread?

muuck 13y ago
Non issue, I and most people here I think read the article because we found the link here on the front page. Not because the author used Medium.

waffle_ss 13y ago

The founding fathers set up America as a distributed system. It's no accident that as the federal government has taken more power from the states that it has gone to shit.

hga 13y ago
The states were complicit in this: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Amendment_XVII http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_U... (Ratified in 1913 during the heyday of the Progressives, popular election of the Senator, turning it into a stuffy mini-House instead of representing the states by virtue of being elected by state legislatures.)
- btilly 13y ago
  Let us be clear that one of the reasons that it was ratified is because people were sick and tired of abuses like rich people buying senate seats. See http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/06/a-little-story-about-an-ancient-montana-plutocrat http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/06/a-little-story-a... for verification. And note that while he was obvious and egregious, he was not alone. Look up William Lorimer for another example.
  - hga 13y ago
    Sure, that was a problem, but was this cure along with the rest of the Progressives' grand plan of centralizing power in the Federal government worth the cost? Are you happy with what our now nearly all powerful central government is doing and what everyone can easily extrapolate for the future? (Well, until it runs out of money, then the real fun begins.)
mtgx 13y ago
I think there needs to be a strong balance. For example, I think the "centralization" of EU has been great for unifying citizens across the continent, unifying trade, making it easy to travel and work in other countries, and perhaps the most important aspect - stopping European wars. So far it seems like a pretty democratic system, and the laws tend to be much better, and with a lot more common sense than the ones being passed in US right now. But I'd be really wary about making it anymore centralized than it is.

mwcampbell 13y ago

The author suggested Bitters for publishing a good web site. That may be a good option for us hackers. For our non-hacker family and friends, it seems to me that the best option is currently self-hosted WordPress. But WP is quite infamous for insecurity. Is there anything better?

noja 13y ago
http://www.movabletype.org/ http://www.movabletype.org/ ?

jongraehl 13y ago

This blog post is a threat to medium.com and maybe they'll delete his account? Please. That said, cjdns and pump.io were interesting to read about. I don't see any practical benefit to using them now, but they look like fun hobby projects.

n0on3 13y ago

you know the kind of solution you come up with when you just realized you made some terrible mistake and adrenaline keeps flowing no matter how much you try to stay calm? this is exactly how this post looks like to me. Don't get me wrong, you are damned right. But unfortunately it's nothing new, we saw similar trends in the past with other media and you know what.. people will read your piece, say you are brilliant, then forget about it and keep doing what feel more comfortable to them, which in the end it's just the way they learned to live. Nodejs, HTML5 and CSS3.. seriously? Well done catching the problem in its n-th instance, but encouraging people to develop tech skills to avoid something they don't fully understand is not really going to help. unfortunately.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

wooster 13y ago

Amusingly, as I'm typing this, the author's site is down: http://evbogue.com/ http://evbogue.com/

shortformblog 13y ago

I think while there's a valid point in here, it strikes me as kind of harsh towards the larger public, which has never heard of IRC … for a reason. It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. Which is why it's essentially stayed around as more of a backchannel than anything else. Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals. Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this. If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.

williamcotton 13y ago
> It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services like Twitter and Facebook. :)
- shortformblog 13y ago
  The teen chatters of the world—the ones who set the cultural trends—got a handle on it, but did their parents? :)
  - nine_k 13y ago
    The parents often don't catch on Twitter either. I think it's mostly due to a different communication culture, not technical ineptitude.

donaldguy 13y ago

He is missing an important point here that is well illustrated by his coffee metaphor: I don't go to Starbucks, but I don't make my espresso drinks at home either -- I go to smaller coffee shops for two things: convenience, which he acknowledges, and what he ignores -- specialized expertise. I could spend time learning how to make a good latte or mocha at home, but right now I don't want to; I have better things to do. And in the short term, what I could manage by myself probably won't be as good what I get poured at the small shop down the street. Similarly, everyone who wants to write online could learn all the web tech, but using Medium is, yes, easier, but also probably results in a higher quality product (in both presentation and especially distribution) than what they will manage on their own in the short term. There is expertise that's gone into Medium that many writers don't have or want to acquire (yet). Sure censorship can be an issue, but I don't believe that these skills are becoming impossible to pick up when they become needed, as he seems to imply. Use Medium or Svbtle or whatever while they work and move off when they actually become a problem, or simple when your time and interests change enough that you actually want to pick up web development (or espresso brewing) expertise.

ISL 13y ago
A small coffee shop would align with the author's intent. The post favors distribution over centralization; federation, so long as it's into small-enough chunks, tends to do the same thing.
- donaldguy 13y ago
  But at the moment, Medium is a small(er) platform. If my local coffee shop does a hugely successful business and is pushed by the market or management decisions to resemble the Starbucks he describes, I will probably find a new one. I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams) started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at least. But maybe that makes me foolish.
notatoad 13y ago
distribution doesn't necessarily mean doing everything yourself. imagine a world where you picked a service to publish your blog posts on, and your readers could choose what service they read those posts on. the publish and read services could be totally different, just as long as they are interoperable (for the sake of argument, let's call this compatibility layer "RSS"). if you don't want keywords like bitcoin filtered out of your posts, you just have to choose a publishing service that allows it. if your readers want to read posts about bitcoin, they have to choose a reader service that allows that. neither your choice nor theirs impacts anybody but the person making the choice. if you use a centralized service, your choice of service impacts your readers. you are making decisions for your whole network, not just for yourself. the problem isn't htat some services suck, the problem is that when you choose a service that sucks, you are implicitly promoting that shittiness through the network effect. decentralization solves this.

johnchristopher 13y ago

> A year ago (late 2011/2012) I got very interested in this centralized/distributed problem. I’d been traveling around the world. First I went down to Mexico, and saw how free it is down there. I went back up to San Francisco, and I sold my iPhone in the Mission. I don't understand the logical link between those sentences. What does he mean when he writes "[I] saw how free it is down there." and why did it lead him to sell his iPhone ?

Detrus 13y ago

The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How to be go to places. Poogle Glus, F*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address/contact book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it. It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse. A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble. Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish. Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.

nine_k 13y ago
Who exactly needs attention, and from whom? * Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them. * "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people. * Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them. * People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives. Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is good (lower prices, more openness). But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of censorship) may be one of such things.

mwcampbell 13y ago

Unfortunately, even if you run a VPS on DigitalOcean or Linode or the like, you are still using a very centralized service. These services concentrate many servers in a few data centers. The US data centers are mostly on the coasts, though Linode has one in Dallas. Sure, this is efficient, but efficiency has its downsides. I think we need at least one competent web hosting provider operating in every state of the US, and more for the large states.

_prometheus 13y ago

> How about Visit my distributed website at http://198.199.80.174/ http://198.199.80.174/ FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.

spydum 13y ago
DNS is HIGHLY distributed (more so than SMTP)
- insom 13y ago
  The protocol is, while the domain system isn't. But then, you could say that about IPv4 and IPv6 - you have to get your allocation from somewhere, and your LIR gets it from its RIR and your RIR gets it from IANA. As long as you're using publicaly addressable computers, the system is in some way centralised. (And that's probably okay).
- prodigal_erik 13y ago
  DNS is federated, which means a central authority has discretion over how it's distributed and to whom. You can put up your own server at any time, but nobody besides you will use it unless VeriSign (or whoever operates the registry for your TLD) agrees that it is currently authoritative for your subdomain.

6d0debc071 13y ago

Have you considered that, perhaps, the reason facebook is full of people with nothing to say is because most people have nothing to say? I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before. The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep. And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh. Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.

Heliosmaster 13y ago
There is this great quote attributed to Mark Twain: "If you have nothing to say, say nothing." The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this, but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to "dumb shit".
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  I do wonder how much of that we're responsible for sometimes. I was quite little when the internet started to become popular, to the extent that I barely remember it, but I do remember that it used to seem to make people... well, I don't want to say smarter but definitely more rounded. Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments, the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think, how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better conversations to find them and be nurtured by them. Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a desired quality then ... oh dear. :/ You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that there's nothing on the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily true - but equally actually finding something like Gwern's site or Hacker News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain circles already.... The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive structures to me.

chipsy 13y ago

Recently I've been fascinated by the concept of individuals having a "private cloud" service - a server that they own or rent, which has all the data that an individual could hope to have centralized, contains APIs and UI for remote access from client devices, and acts as the middleman for most transactions with the outside world. The beauty of this is that if it were developed as a unified system, minimal tinkering would be necessary for a layman user. A preinstalled, auto-updating OS would do the heavy lifting - we're aiming for a situation where a bare minimum of configuration becomes necessary. Once configuration is done, all the user needs to know to reach _all_ of their data is a URL and a password. The server itself can (ultimately) become the identity service for all remote accounts. It has a straightforward progression of development and adoption, too. Create a web app that kludges together some messaging, identity, and storage solutions - the stuff needed to do this at an 80% level already exists, for the most part. Package it into an image installable on a VPS. Subsequently, make native apps for the client devices, or adapt existing ones, to match the experience of Dropbox/GTalk/etc. Last, build a hosting service or sell hardware tailored around simplifying the configuration process, providing backups, etc. As you get further into the adoption process, more and more possibilities to reclaim data open up, since you'll hit the critical masses necessary to push new protocols into the system.

amirmc 13y ago
Yup, this is the kind of thing I'm working on at the moment and I'm finding that other folks are thinking along similar lines (but taking different approaches). The first application we want to build on top of the underlying 'private cloud' is email. My viewpoint is that to do this properly, we need to think through things from the ground up with privacy and security built in, otherwise I don't see it as that much better than current systems (you'd just be getting the illusion of security/ownership/etc). It's really not the kind of system that lends itself to the mantra of 'move fast and break things'. Such software would also have to be open-source (to a large extent) so that others can verify security or people can deploy it to their own machines (I'd personally prefer a hosted version, knowing that I can migrate off if I want to). The question is what kinds of business model can one build around such a product. Would you be willing to pay for such a service? If so, how much and what features would you expect from an early version? Would an app-store model make sense to you? In any case, if you or anyone else is interested in finding out more about the work (esp alpha releases), feel free to drop me an email (in my profile).

nine_k 13y ago

Let me mention https://nightweb.net https://nightweb.net Nightweb connects your Android device or PC to an anonymous, peer-to-peer social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices and PCs. Also, posting this on Independence Day just feels right.

cjbarber 13y ago

Why is Mailchimp filtering 'bitcoin'? That was one of the most shocking parts of the article for me. (Which is a sad point in itself, that I almost expect many of the other things mentioned. But that innocent Chimp filtering out a word that the valley loves right now? Strange.)

ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Yes, that stood out to me, too, because it is surprising and should be easily verifiable. Any Mailchimp users or employees care to comment?
jld 13y ago
There's a note in the margin that MailChimp is concerned that ISPs may filter emails that contain 'bitcoin' in them.

dot 13y ago

> a suburb west of San Francisco Hawaii? :)

nmc 13y ago

You want a distributed F*book? Try PSYC on GNUnet! http://about.psyc.eu http://about.psyc.eu https://gnunet.org https://gnunet.org

revorad 13y ago

Meanwhile - https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080 https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080

RyanZAG 13y ago

"IRC. Everyone who wants to make sure their messages land use IRC as a backchannel now." No, damnit. IRC is logged, double logged, and then has all of the logs shipped offsite to be engraved in bedrock. IRC servers, because of their history in pirated content, are very heavily controlled by law enforcement. A huge number of raids have been carried out around the world based off what people have said on IRC. IRC is very much not the solution to the widespread monitoring of facebook.

jaryd 13y ago
A lot of my friends who use IRC as a primary communication channel will stick to invite-only self-hosted SILC IRC networks. These are essentially 1 step above darknet (eg: local IRCd), and are a far cry from the efnets of the IRC-verse.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  All it takes is a warrant and a plea bargain, and your private 'darknet' (haha) irc server is now a honeypot collecting all the traffic you thought was private. The more popular an easily controlled solution like private IRC servers become, the greater the advantage for law enforcement and others to control them. End-to-end encryption is a requirement for secure communication. Anything less is the same as scribbling on paper and tossing it to the recipient, and hoping nobody catches it on the way.
  - jaryd 13y ago
    PRQ (http://prq.se http://prq.se) serves as a decent host insofar that it's harder for the server to be seized--it works for us. Obviously there is no perfect solution, but if you don't have a target on your back then this is one way to decentralize communication with a group of friends. To take it a step further, end to end encryption is only good when you can protect your private key and passphrase... All you have to do is take a look at Rakshasha (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU) for a practical example of how compromised we all really are.
  - 13y ago

pyre 13y ago

While I do agree to some extent with this post, it is naive in a lot of places. Forgive me if this comes across as picking at the post, but I feel that some of these things need to be said. > You know the sources. You’re all on them. [...] Shitter. While Twitter is grouped with all of these others, I don't find Twitter to be on the same level as Facebook or Google Plus. Maybe it's just me, but I view it as a very large, public forum/chat. (I guess I'm in minority here?) Chatting on Freenode in a public channel isn't necessarily any more private than Twitter. > When you use these services, you’re not even a button > pushing Starbucks at Barista. You’re just ordering a > free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the > future. You’re not even pushing the button.You’re just a > user. This is misleading. People contributing to Medium are creating content. They are not passively consuming content via YouTube, or only posting ephemeral content via Twitter. Just look at the post that you created. Sure it's published via a 'central' service, but you are not a 'drone' just regurgitating content or providing little to no value to your readers. The real danger in centralized services is when they eclipse everything else. The inflection point where they become a blackhole, sucking everything else in (e.g. long-form blog posts aren't read by a large audience if they aren't on Medium) is the real danger. > So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails, > I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails. The MailChimp/Tiny Letter issue is an issue of centralization caused by the downsides of decentralization. It becomes increasingly hard to deal with email as the 'small guy' because: 1. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making sure your emails are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g. Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail). 2. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that email admins must play with spammers. If email was a centralized service, spammers would probably be easier to block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword. This leads to less competition in the email market because it's a hassle that few people want to deal with when deciding to start a new business. > So as more and more people started using these services, > I noticed the level of the conversations around me > dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have > in kindergarten. Unfortunately this is what happens when you draw in more and more of the general public. You can't solve this issue with decentralization, unless your decentralized solution sets the bar high enough that these people just choose not to participate. > You don’t accidentally end up inside someone’s public > furry porn collection Most people don't view accidentally stumbling into someone else's furry porn collection as an upside. You're never going to get many people to 'sign up'(1) for something like this. (1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized service. Just 'signing up' as in joining in. > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no > idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no > idea how to create a link to another website. If you ever think that the general public is going to want to write HTML or deploy Node.js applications, then you have another thing coming. This is like suggesting that everyone should learn how to repair their car to avoid getting screwed by shady mechanics. It doesn't hold up in the real world. It might be nice, but it's a pipe dream. > Don’t just log out. Delete your accounts. This will > force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way. I appreciate the sentiment, but how many people has, "Go start coding in Vim and disable the arrow keys to learn," convinced? And this is among the 'tech elite.' I don't understand how you think that this is convincing argument for the general public. > Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital > Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server. First, the 'distributed vs. centralized' debate needs to have terms defined. Sure, Facebook is definitely centralized, and P2P is definitely decentralized, but what about hosting your own server? It's more decentralized to host your own server than something like Facebook, but the government can still just ask your hosting provider for access to your server without a warrant. So how has this really helped us? It's made it harder for the government to get access to your data because data is now in lots of little silos rather than a handful of huge ones, but it's still not the panacea that it's presented as here. To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like Facebook, centralized. The stovetop expresso maker is more like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting your own server? That's more like renting an expresso maker at a community-center. Technically you don't own the expresso maker, even though you are renting/leasing it. At any time, the expresso maker could be used be someone else if that's what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements that are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with law enforcement). > Deploy using Node.js using Bitters. I'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?' > Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your > filter bubble, and respects your privacy. Unfortunately there are a few issues here: 1. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data. Sure, they aren't sending usage statistics back to Yahoo! (so far as I know), but how free are we really from the giant data silos when we are still connected to them for things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to the point that it would be severely cutting into Google or Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the program would probably be terminated. 2. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of functionality as the big players. Many people have attempted to switch to DDG over the recent NSA revelations, only to switch back to Google. 3. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to have everyone switch from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA targets them instead. What have we really won, then? The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition in the web search market, but if we are to attempt to hold the web search engine market to the distributed ideal we are discussing, then what we really need is something else.

coldcode 13y ago

If you are pushing packets anywhere on the public internet you aren't really all that disconnected. Much of what the author talks about assumes all of your contacts are highly intelligent and paranoid programmers. That leaves out 99% of my family and friends. Any highly technically advanced decentralized secure non-NSA-readable communication technology is likely indistinguishable from magic to the general public.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I liked it. Couple of notes. The internet was more distributed and protocols were way more flexible. Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just TCP/IP. The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as "locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location. An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers. Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse. But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.

llama42 13y ago

> Little did I know that Singapore doesn’t have the same freedom of speech laws we take for granted in America. > In other words, you can get in big trouble in Singapore just for saying or writing something. whoa... sounds like my country.

thomasf1 13y ago

This analogy just seems a bit confusing to me and threw me off the main point... End users, readers = coffee consumers Bloggers = baristas, either working in their own store or a Starbucks. Mixing the two up doesn't make sense. Well, there are a couple of bloggers that are their only readers - hopefully less guys than the ones that brew their own coffee though ;).

thomasf1 13y ago
Is's hard to find a analogy that really fits well... Bloggers typically benefit from their activity, wether they blog on a platform or have their own blog. In both cases, they have an audience. As your main point is about fully controlling the tools you'd use for their work, maybe something like racing drivers building their own cars would work better...

luke-stanley 13y ago

Deleting everything on Facebook is NOT likely a good way to increase engagement on a separate platform. More likely, people will just forget about you! The problem is, with the Dunbar limit, these tools serve part of peoples memory. There almost certainly MUST BE A TRANSITION to the new peer based tools. Why doesn't Ven Portman / Ev Bogue mention PGP? I don't see his public key anywhere, why talk about emailing people what you are working on openly if you want to "evolve beyond reach"? Hard to take seriously.

alexvr 13y ago

Anyone notice the parallels between this and the transcendentalist movement?

wilkie 13y ago

Commenters: you need some terms defined with context. Let's do that. I'm a founder and one of the current maintainers of the distributed/federated microblogging platform rstat.us. In this particular context, centralized vs distributed have to do with control over both storage and propagation of your data more so than its architecture. Or at least, the concerns over how to better control storage/propagation drive decisions about architecture. Twitter, Facebook, etc are centralized in this case. Your data goes to them, they propagate it, you have little to no control. Their system is designed around that. Identi.ca, rstat.us, diaspora are distributed. You control the software that holds the data and distributes it to others. Many designs are possible, even that which you design yourself. Do these distributed platforms still have centralized components? Yes. There are lots of centralized pieces. Doesn't matter. Minimizing them is still the goal. Less is progress. It's not perfect; it's better. What's stopping distributed platforms from overtaking centralized ones? The typical things: politics, lack of resources, high barrier of entry for non-tech folks. Can distributed platforms do X? Yes. For example, the very usual: "But they can't handle spam!" Sure they can. Distributed platforms exist to share information. They can share blacklists. Share training data for spam filters. Ultimately, if they can distribute content, then they can distribute metadata. The only thing a centralized platform can do that a distributed one cannot is provide immediate global consistency... but considering most centralized services grow to the scale where they are internally distributed anyway, they can't even do that. What do we need to do to succeed? We need software that is light, easily understood, easily augmentable, modular. Something that can easily and freely be deployed with minimal effort from a city's public library. Deployment on hosted or publicly available servers... or packaged on cheap hardware to be used in the home or taken with you. Hardware and deployment services that don't really exist. But creating the software may be the motivation to create them. Who will build it? I've published research on distributed systems and distributed databases. I founded rstat.us with some friends which has had over 60 diverse contributors from around the world. It got some good, albeit small press, but OStatus (the protocol that rstat.us sits upon) is being superseded. So I'm working on this: - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n - Support for social sentence generation for many languages/cultures - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus https://github.com/hotsh/lotus - A discovery layer and data structures for distributed social graphs. It negotiates the protocol so many different distributed social systems can interact (which is the point, ya think?). (models) - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb - Small persistence layer. (models+db) - https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus - Rack extension for interacting with the social graph and content generation as hypermedia over HTTP. (controllers) - https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site - Example site (hoping to pull much of the view/presentation logic into a separate repo) Modular. Easily modifiable. Released as closely to the public domain as is possible (CC0.) With these combined, you can build any number or variety of distributed social web systems (image sites, photo album sites, hosting of web comics, flash games, blogging, etc etc etc.) Hopefully they will share a common deployment strategy so if you build a new thing, however unique, it will be just as easy to deploy from the point-of-view of somebody not very well-versed in technology. So... Me. I'll do it. With some help. If you care, here is my gittip (I only need $250/wk to squeak by): https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/ https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/

damian2000 13y ago

I agree with the message behind this post, but it comes across as hyperbole. The thing that irks me on his website is that the sole payment method for his eBook (Deploy Node) is PayPal. Nothing wrong with this of course, but in the context of this post, well it seems a bit off.

xtc 13y ago

Shameless self-promotion while also using the same service you denounce. Why did you post your criticism of Medium on Medium? You wanted a larger audience to hear your opinion. That's what the majority of writers on services like Medium are aiming for. Plenty of people currently joining Medium in troves are probably just as capable of creating their own blog, and I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of them use both. Syndicated sites are where people come to have their voice heard. Just like how this was posted on Hacker News, a central site where like-minded individuals enjoy viewing pertinent information and have a larger discussion about these matters. Isn't that one of the primary functions of the internet? Plus, using names like 'Shitter' and 'F*book' made me discredit your argument rather quick, personally. What's next, is 'Micro$oft' also keeping you down? Or would you rather everyone create their own OS? On another note, IRC is a safe-haven? That's fascinating news.

sergeykish 13y ago

You want people to give away so much and propose what?! > start by learning some Internet basics. HTML5 and CSS3 Isn't this a bright future? People all around saving the world by typing HTML tags and CSS rules. Let me clarify something: HTML is a DOM serialization. It's editing by hands is as stupid as typing UTF-8 byte by byte. Our tools are weak. Consuming and publishing are disconnected. To publish information one has to convert it and push on server. Now it's copy, not original document. Modern web tries to solve this problem by making web the only place. Sure it requires resources and for sure it's centralized. I'd like to have all hypertext goodness on local computer. Make interconnected notes, publish them by clicking button and don't worry about synchronization or file name. Interconnect with web, know that every page I'm interested in is cached locally, edit these pages in place. It would be nice to use 320MHz 16MB RAM wireless router as always present server. > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore Can you write HTML WYSIWYG editor? Can you write tooling to query interconnected data? Maybe at least some users would not need to store data outside

bryanchen 13y ago

Okay, this is kind of off-topic to the main gist of the article, but I'm a Singaporean living in Singapore, and I believe that the article is rather mischievous (or the author genuinely does not know/bother to know the facts). First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people. Next, I'm tired of people saying that free speech is limited in Singapore. It is not. There are rules in place to prevent over-zealous extremists (of any kind or nature). I urge anyone who feels otherwise to take a look at Singapore's short national history - about mass inter-racial riots that caused massive turmoil in the country. This is why the laws have been enacted. These laws simply say that we aren't allowed to publicly denounce another religion, or another race. And before you start jumping up and down saying "that's limiting my freedom to speak!", let me clarify. It's not what you think. It's not that I can't complain or even speak badly about someone else's race or religion in public. I can. But the moment I start shouting these insults, that's when the authorities would take action against me. It's only civilised, and the government has formalised this civility. On one hand, people ignorant to historical events in Singapore can simply surmise that they are tools by the government to inhibit freedom of speech. On the other hand, however, and this is what I personally feel, these laws exist to keep the peace. Think about it. Singapore is a small island filled with people of different races and religions. Yet we don't have religious wars and we certainly don't have racial riots. And finally, the claim of, "I suspect at some point the Singapore intelligence agency may have hacked into my email while I was there (another IP was registering on my Gmail account). Also I believe I was interviewed by a Singaporean spy." I seriously doubt it. Do you really think that if a highly trained spy wanted to covertly interview you, a technical writer and web developer, that you would know? And if they did want you to know, you would have known that you're being interviewed. I doubt (and here I'm assuming) that spending hours reading conspiracy theories online would make one an expert in counter-intelligence. Again, like what I said, this ill-constructed idea that the author has is probably due to the lack of understanding of the so-called "blogging license". And again, I repeat: one DOES NOT require a licence to blog. Over the last couple of years, I've seen an increase in the number of people (mostly foreigners) writing articles about Singapore, saying that citizens' liberties are curtailed and limited. Again, as a citizen, this isn't true. Just like how Americans value their "freedoms", sometimes till the point of absurdity (absurd at least to foreigners like myself, and with regards to "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"), we Singaporeans value the peace and harmony within our tiny island-state. We put this, sometimes, even above our own personal liberty - like the freedom to shout racist remarks in a coffeeshop. Is that wrong? Only someone who has seen the bloody effects of racial and religious unrest would be qualified to answer the question.

dschiptsov 13y ago

Why so many points? Does this considered a good writing nowadays?)