8 ms·

Redecentralize: Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net again

368 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

LucilleJKing 13y ago
my roomate's sister makes $69/hour on the internet. She has been out of work for 6 months but last month her pay was $16756 just working on the internet for a few hours. go to website============================== http://www.works23.com http://www.works23.com
BUGHUNTER 13y ago
There seem to be a lot of discussions going on inside each of these projects. There should be some central hub for research and exchange ;) Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of scattered communities. Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides - creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain to connect all available information. Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways of thinking about everything could be the results. The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency) to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and oppression. But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the internet exists and it will not want to go back. This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect. It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these possibilities to connect to the global information pool. The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead to social changes - it does already. Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people misusing the system just for their own profits. Most probably "profit" will be an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves. Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
This is the way forward. If most all internet services can be implemented with open source, and processing and data storage is all virtual, then the logical place we're headed is either 1) big, centralized services that treat the details of our lives as fodder to sell products, or 2) renting cycles and storage out and decentralizing everything. For anybody concerned with privacy and not looking forward to becoming part of some hivemind, option 2 seems most logical. I don't think cost would be prohibitive, and looks like this site is interviewing guys working in the problem area on new product development, which means that there is a future there. Anybody's bet if it actually happens, though.
adamnemecek 13y ago
Does anyone else dislike the sentence 'Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net again'?
- nwh 13y ago
  Yep.
- dbond 13y ago
  Yea, seems like it would sound a little menacing if you didn't know what it meant...
- vertis 13y ago
  Also, it's a third party site interviewing geeks about what they're doing, so 'Quietly' might not be the correct word. That aside, the site is a good idea and covering projects of this nature is important.
  - frabcus 13y ago
    Yep - the idea was that it isn't generally known about. There's lots of interesting stuff going on that we wanted to highlight - hence the site!
- Wicher 13y ago
  I don't dislike it. I think that what's intended is that instead of just orating (loudly) about the sorry state of affairs, as any of us can do, these people actually walk the walk and go out of their way to make things better. Quietly, by hacking away at great projects, and not by occupying capitol hill or something. But for some people 'quietly' hints at 'sneaky'.
zobzu 13y ago
decentralizing is the only way to scale everything - from privacy to security, from resilience to performance. concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists. I think the way forward is actually to create standardized, easy ways to decentralize. The idea is shared by many and there's several attempts, although none seems to have matured enough yet. Basically, those boxes and all allow you to store your data on your end. The part that's missing is that you need the devices you use today to be compatible. That means ios, android, etc.. have to be able to sync your pictures, movies, contacts, emails, what not there. That's the hard part.
- Locke1689 13y ago
  Performance per watt is almost never good when decentralized.
- bbq 13y ago
  > concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists. To this end, I'm optimistic about lightweight containers, especially a la docker.io[1]. Releasing an application as a container can help solve dependency hell. Nesting containers for a complex application (i.e. with multiple disjoint services) looks promising to me, as well. [1] Not that LXC and/or docker are ready out-of-the-box for non-specialists (yet) - but that seems achievable. A friendly wrapper around vagrant might do the job.
  - grogenaut 13y ago
    It solves simple dependency problems. It does nothing for your interdependent "decentralized" services which are talking to each other. That's where the real hard work is.
    - bbq 13y ago
      You're right. There is hard work in managing a system of services where any service endpoint can change at any time. It appears to me protocols for negotiating upgrades between services are important and there's no widely deployed solution for that yet.
Nux 13y ago
One of the first things we need is p2p/webrtc/blah video conferencing so all those cool geeks can get off Google Video and Skype.
- PhearTheCeal 13y ago
  From the list given, looks like that would be Tox. It's got IPv6 and everything. https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core
  - rossj 13y ago
    Unfortunately http://tox.im http://tox.im says "Tox isn't ready yet, downloads will be available soon!"
- Locke1689 13y ago
  Hole punching is becoming more and more nightmarish. I think we need ipv6 addition first.
- frabcus 13y ago
  We tried using WebRTC, unfortunately the recording stuff isn't rolled out yet. So we're doing the interviews using Google Hangouts still, for now.
Su-Shee 13y ago
Quietly, some geeks never stopped having their own services and didn't even get centralized in the first place... ;) That's not really "the way forward", that's actually quite back to the roots. :)
cromwellian 13y ago
Obligatory self promotion link: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...
frabcus 13y ago
I'm one of the founders of Redecentralize.org. My own main motivation wasn't just privacy, but also resilience (against, say, hurricanes) and fun (the web doesn't have the same joy it once did). So my favourite interview so far is the mobile mesh network one http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-serval.html http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-serv... I also think it is important that new algorithms like DHT (Kademlia), BitCoin and GFShare get known and used to their full extent. Please get in touch if you've a project that would like interviewing!
- Gertrude12 13y ago
  my buddy's mom makes $82/hour on the internet. She has been without a job for seven months but last month her check was $15448 just working on the internet for a few hours. Get More Information ======================== http://www.works23.com http://www.works23.com
- lancewiggs 13y ago
  Please see and respond to the comments above about the ineffectiveness of using only videos to communicate your messages. Whatever they are.
  - frabcus 13y ago
    Yep - have filed a bug and replied with link to it. Thinking about what we should do!
    - pavanky 13y ago
      Excerpts and full transcriptions of the interview might me helpful.
  - antocv 13y ago
    Yeah, its very annoying, I want to get into this and see what its all about, but Im not gonna turn on a video just for that.
jamesblonde 13y ago
Wireless community networks are where there is much research going on for fully decentralized systems. Check out Guifi.net, the world's largest wireless community network with over 20,000 nodes. All the protocols are decentralized, from DNS to routing to HTTP Proxies for internet access.
EGreg 13y ago
I wrote this about 2.5 years ago: http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21
- zobzu 13y ago
  keep writing, this stuff its picking up a lot better these days
nwp90 13y ago
While this is a subject I would be interested in, I took one look at the front page, saw that it appeared to be video-only, and gave up. This is precisely the reaction that news sites get from me when I click on a link to a story and find video-only content. Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of the interviews?
- skylan_q 13y ago
  Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of the interviews? No, there are at least a few of us.
- frabcus 13y ago
  I feel the same, and have filed a bug https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website/issues/22 https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website/issues/22
- serans 13y ago
  I stopped doing Coursera courses because of this.
  - NoodleIncident 13y ago
    The only thing that saved coursera for me was VLC. It all makes such more sense at double speed; if I miss something I can always pause.
    - mayanksinghal 13y ago
      You should use their HTML5 player instead of the Flash one. The former has speed controls.
      - ics 13y ago
        It's good that you mentioned it, but it should be said that the experience is far from perfect (at least in FF). Playback speed resets at every question break, each new video, etc. Audio drops out of sync frequently and seems to have more issues when sped up than in VLC.
csense 13y ago
It's quite ironic that a website about decentralization is using Github [1]. Gitlab [2] would is an alternative with similar functionality that's more consistent with the ideology they're trying to promote. [1] https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website [2] http://gitlab.org/ http://gitlab.org/
- frossie 13y ago
  Is it that ironic? Git is inherently decentralised, github is just a publication method. Everybody's repo is still good if github gets nuked and can be used as the new public. It's nothing like, say, Facebook where They Have All The Data And You Don't. Self-hosting with Gitlab is no different, except to have the public repo sit on a different server.
  - phaer 13y ago
    Its not just a publication method. If you loose your github repo for some reason you loose * the issues * the wiki * the community because your local repo is fine, but nobody knows any other remote than github.
    - amirmc 13y ago
      Good points. However: Issues - I'm sure these can get recreated, even the discussions. In many cases, people will have those threads in their email. Wiki - In Github's case, this is also a git repo. Community - GitHub is rarely the only mechanism used to manage a community. There's likely a domain name and mailing list of some form. Losing all of the above is certainly painful but I'm trying to point out that it's not irrecoverable. A better question might be how painful would it be to lose that (and the likelihood of losing it) as compared to other options.
      - phaer 13y ago
        Yes the wiki is a git repo, but the percentage of people who have a (current) checkout of their project wiki is probably below 0.1% of all users. Larger project have a domain and a mailinglist but github hosts thousands of small projects which do not exist outside of it, and in theory it should be trivial to keep a second remote and put it in the readme or sync it over git in some way.
oridecon 13y ago
so to decentralize we would need to host everything ourselves? PC turned on 24 hours and awful gaming latency since you'll be using lots of upload traffic. please tell me I'm wrong, this would never work for lots of reasons.
- deathanatos 13y ago
  Do you need to distribute things when you're gaming? For most interactions, I imagine that when the user says "save", replication of the user's data can start at that point, and for most things, ought to finish within a minute or two, freeing up the network/CPU, at least if you're doing it across a private cloud. I imagine that for most of my data, 3 copies in disparate locations would more than suffice. How long does that take? Having a machine on 24/7 is perhaps a bit wasteful, but what is the electrical use of a mostly idling machine? If you really cared, you could perhaps get something with less power, like a raspberry pi.
  - oridecon 13y ago
    Oh I got the wrong idea, I wasn't able to check the video and the "about" is really bad. But now that I'm home I opened the Github page. So it's just not giving control over the data for a central corporation, but we're still using datacenters. I thought it was the same folks that wanted us to self-host diaspora (as in OUR home pc/network). If this works, the *aaS market will explode even more.
shevski8 13y ago
The idea behind the site is to make decentralised, privacy preserving, resilient (and fun!) tech more accessible to people who don't already know about this stuff. Hence videos and user focused questions. We want to expand the appeal and plan to do podcasts and meetups too. We hope to engage digitally literate people and show them that there are concrete existing software and app options they can use now that aren't selling your data, are interesting, easy to use and open. However, we also need to be pragmatic - aiming to use decentralized open software ourselves when it works for our use case, but not if it stops us doing this quickly. Please do sign up to the mail list or email us because we have ambitious plans that could use help and would love feedback (esp on stuff like if videos are really much less useful to people etc) :) Cheers, Ira
VeejayRampay 13y ago
Celluloid, Cryptosphere, it seems like Tony Arcieri has found a way to bypass the 24-hour/day limit. Awesome.
BUGHUNTER 13y ago
What are the best channels to follow discussions on decentralized social networks? I see too many alternatives coming up and it is getting too time-consuming to follow all of them. Friendica (BTW this one is missing on the list in wiki), Buddycloud, Diaspora, to name just a few - where do they coordinate their efforts and how can an interested developer follow discussions of these projects? Also it would be interesting to exchange experiences made with these new apps, so that not every developer has to check every network, what is not possible in one life - the already existing listings of alternatives are of great value, but a more systematic approach in collective knowledge gathering and exchange would be even better. Hey, that´s what the internet was built for, wasn´t it? Still does no software for this exist? :)
- danielsiders 13y ago
  Honestly there isn't a lot of coordination, but many of the people most interested in decentralization participate in one or more of these networks. As one of the architects of Tent (https://tent.io https://tent.io) I spend a lot of time talking with others on Tent about similar projects.
  - BUGHUNTER 13y ago
    I can not see what I am looking for there, sorry. The Tent protocol certainly is interesting, but I was asking for an open place where it is possible to share / exchange / collect and extract knowledge and experiences about decentralized social network software. I was hoping for an open, easily available information source that can be followed.
    - w0rd-driven 13y ago
      I would hope this project could be that hub. Propose an interop data exchange format where information can be freely shared among all "exchanges". I'm definitely not seeing this as an easy problem to solve but it would make all of this more accessible to the grandmas of the world. The major problem I see is geeks always think their idea is perfect and have a hard time justifying the technical cost of implementation when it doesn't directly affect them ("You mean I have to make feature x to help my competitor that's actually doing way better than I am at this? Psh!") Openness shouldn't only be about the ability to export and keep that information but to also interop and play nice with others. I think it sucks that Disapora didn't have the traction it should have and I would hope that a data exchange format among all social networks would be beneficial to all. Unite against the Facebooks of the world. I believe united we can do this much better but its clear we haven't found the perfect disruption yet. I'm glad we haven't stopped trying because it's out there. Somewhere.
oridecon 13y ago
I think this idea would be even better if instead of recommending services (since people will be divided anyway), they would recommend protocols/standards, for each case. OFC cases like bitcoin, that is really stablished, should just be named as the only suggestion. "Oh you're on Diaspora? Too bad, I'm on Kune and they don't talk with each other." You get the idea.
foobarqux 13y ago
In the Cryptosphere talk the author says that you can use a cryptosphere address to reference the latest version of a git repository but I thought cryptosphere was content addressable. How does this work?
PLejeck 13y ago
We still have huge user experience issues with decentralized systems which make it more awkward for the average person. It's sad, because I (like most programmers) want a distributed system, but it's rather hard to get it right.
- jewel 13y ago
  BitTorrent Sync seems to have done a really good job of making a decentralized system easy to use. Their pre-shared-key method of connecting computers is really simple for people to understand, and supports a wide variety of potential use cases. Incidentally, I'm working on an open-source competitor to btsync called clearskies (https://github.com/jewel/clearskies https://github.com/jewel/clearskies).
- oscargrouch 13y ago
  I think i have a good plan to solve those issues and some more.. i hope i will throw it to the lions here at HN real soon.. so the hackers can validate the reasoning behind it, and play a little bit with it .. but you are right... it was hard to get it right..
dredmorbius 13y ago
There's both an "About" link (text) and a list of alternative internet projects: http://redecentralize.org/about/ http://redecentralize.org/about/ What's this all about? Over the last few years, we've noticed quite a few people trying to spread the Internet out again. Back to the edges, like it used to be. Sometimes they do it for privacy. Sometimes they do it for resilience against disaster. Sometimes they do it just to bring playfulness back to computers and how we use them. We've a list of the kind of projects we mean (any missing? send a pull request). On this site, we interview one of those projects each month. https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet
wyck 13y ago
For those of us (probably most of us) that would rather read quickly. Links from talks, http://www.servalproject.org/ http://www.servalproject.org/ https://arkos.io/ https://arkos.io/ http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/ http://cryptosphere.org/ http://cryptosphere.org/ https://www.zerotier.com/ https://www.zerotier.com/ http://drogul.us/ http://drogul.us/
gima 13y ago
Couldn't find writups about the mesh networking in Serval. How scalable is this? Last time I did some digging around mesh networks, they didn't scale too much. Every message has to be broadcasted to every node (and every client had to maintain a list of all nodes and their routes), or something along those lines.
Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
Retroshare is missing, it's actually quite good project and it's usable, it's not just talk. http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
- rossj 13y ago
  It's on the list - https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet#retroshare https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet#retroshare
volokoumphetico 13y ago
This really is the future. As coders and hackers we need to strive for software that produces the best possible welfare of maximum number of humanity in all possible aspects such as social, economic, cultural, optimizations in governance thus shifting political power away from filthy politicians and to people who actually care and have the brains to execute and implement and bring about change in society.
CookieMon 13y ago
Great interview (the one I listened to). This stuff interests me, but how to choose a project to get behind? For example Diaspora and Gnu Social might be two scattered groups both trying to build the same thing separately, or there might be important design/philosophy differences that neither of them felt the need to explicitly state. FreedomBox sounds perfect for me but the last news/release was more than a year ago - have most of the developers moved on? What other projects are similar to it? A redecentralizing hub is a great idea, can the list be more cross-referencable like a wiki - allowing project descriptions to be linked to similar projects, with information about what makes the "similar project" different. Appraisals of how projects are going etc. Judging from the existing list, cross-referencing would have to be introduced by the redecentalize guys before we could start adding the info. * gnusocial is another project that can be added to the list.
frank_boyd 13y ago
If you're looking for a decentralized & encrypted communication platform (messaging, chat, file tranfer, etc.) to get behind, head over to http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ and consider developing plugins for any missing features.
BUGHUNTER 13y ago
"That's why we don't think the network will be taken over by child porn. You have to have someone accept what's on your node in order for them to pass your traffic around," he says. [1] So instead of a guaranteed right to access information freely we make every mesh node a potential censor. I do not want to depend on the likes or dislikes of mesh participants to be able to access or distribute information. Here seems something fundamentally broken by design. I hope, I am misunderstanding the concept. [1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-activists-rebuilding-the-internet-from-scratch.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-a...
minikites 13y ago
There's also Steven Frank's http://decentralizer.com/ http://decentralizer.com/

368 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

my roomate's sister makes $69/hour on the internet. She has been out of work for 6 months but last month her pay was $16756 just working on the internet for a few hours. go to website============================== http://www.works23.com http://www.works23.com

BUGHUNTER 13y ago

There seem to be a lot of discussions going on inside each of these projects. There should be some central hub for research and exchange ;) Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of scattered communities. Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides - creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain to connect all available information. Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways of thinking about everything could be the results. The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency) to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and oppression. But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the internet exists and it will not want to go back. This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect. It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these possibilities to connect to the global information pool. The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead to social changes - it does already. Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people misusing the system just for their own profits. Most probably "profit" will be an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves. Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

This is the way forward. If most all internet services can be implemented with open source, and processing and data storage is all virtual, then the logical place we're headed is either 1) big, centralized services that treat the details of our lives as fodder to sell products, or 2) renting cycles and storage out and decentralizing everything. For anybody concerned with privacy and not looking forward to becoming part of some hivemind, option 2 seems most logical. I don't think cost would be prohibitive, and looks like this site is interviewing guys working in the problem area on new product development, which means that there is a future there. Anybody's bet if it actually happens, though.

adamnemecek 13y ago

Does anyone else dislike the sentence 'Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net again'?

nwh 13y ago
Yep.
dbond 13y ago
Yea, seems like it would sound a little menacing if you didn't know what it meant...
vertis 13y ago
Also, it's a third party site interviewing geeks about what they're doing, so 'Quietly' might not be the correct word. That aside, the site is a good idea and covering projects of this nature is important.
- frabcus 13y ago
  Yep - the idea was that it isn't generally known about. There's lots of interesting stuff going on that we wanted to highlight - hence the site!
Wicher 13y ago
I don't dislike it. I think that what's intended is that instead of just orating (loudly) about the sorry state of affairs, as any of us can do, these people actually walk the walk and go out of their way to make things better. Quietly, by hacking away at great projects, and not by occupying capitol hill or something. But for some people 'quietly' hints at 'sneaky'.

zobzu 13y ago

decentralizing is the only way to scale everything - from privacy to security, from resilience to performance. concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists. I think the way forward is actually to create standardized, easy ways to decentralize. The idea is shared by many and there's several attempts, although none seems to have matured enough yet. Basically, those boxes and all allow you to store your data on your end. The part that's missing is that you need the devices you use today to be compatible. That means ios, android, etc.. have to be able to sync your pictures, movies, contacts, emails, what not there. That's the hard part.

Locke1689 13y ago
Performance per watt is almost never good when decentralized.
bbq 13y ago
> concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists. To this end, I'm optimistic about lightweight containers, especially a la docker.io[1]. Releasing an application as a container can help solve dependency hell. Nesting containers for a complex application (i.e. with multiple disjoint services) looks promising to me, as well. [1] Not that LXC and/or docker are ready out-of-the-box for non-specialists (yet) - but that seems achievable. A friendly wrapper around vagrant might do the job.
- grogenaut 13y ago
  It solves simple dependency problems. It does nothing for your interdependent "decentralized" services which are talking to each other. That's where the real hard work is.
  - bbq 13y ago
    You're right. There is hard work in managing a system of services where any service endpoint can change at any time. It appears to me protocols for negotiating upgrades between services are important and there's no widely deployed solution for that yet.

Nux 13y ago

One of the first things we need is p2p/webrtc/blah video conferencing so all those cool geeks can get off Google Video and Skype.

PhearTheCeal 13y ago
From the list given, looks like that would be Tox. It's got IPv6 and everything. https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core
- rossj 13y ago
  Unfortunately http://tox.im http://tox.im says "Tox isn't ready yet, downloads will be available soon!"
Locke1689 13y ago
Hole punching is becoming more and more nightmarish. I think we need ipv6 addition first.
frabcus 13y ago
We tried using WebRTC, unfortunately the recording stuff isn't rolled out yet. So we're doing the interviews using Google Hangouts still, for now.

Su-Shee 13y ago

Quietly, some geeks never stopped having their own services and didn't even get centralized in the first place... ;) That's not really "the way forward", that's actually quite back to the roots. :)

cromwellian 13y ago

Obligatory self promotion link: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...

frabcus 13y ago

I'm one of the founders of Redecentralize.org. My own main motivation wasn't just privacy, but also resilience (against, say, hurricanes) and fun (the web doesn't have the same joy it once did). So my favourite interview so far is the mobile mesh network one http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-serval.html http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-serv... I also think it is important that new algorithms like DHT (Kademlia), BitCoin and GFShare get known and used to their full extent. Please get in touch if you've a project that would like interviewing!

Gertrude12 13y ago
my buddy's mom makes $82/hour on the internet. She has been without a job for seven months but last month her check was $15448 just working on the internet for a few hours. Get More Information ======================== http://www.works23.com http://www.works23.com
lancewiggs 13y ago
Please see and respond to the comments above about the ineffectiveness of using only videos to communicate your messages. Whatever they are.
- frabcus 13y ago
  Yep - have filed a bug and replied with link to it. Thinking about what we should do!
  - pavanky 13y ago
    Excerpts and full transcriptions of the interview might me helpful.
- antocv 13y ago
  Yeah, its very annoying, I want to get into this and see what its all about, but Im not gonna turn on a video just for that.

jamesblonde 13y ago

Wireless community networks are where there is much research going on for fully decentralized systems. Check out Guifi.net, the world's largest wireless community network with over 20,000 nodes. All the protocols are decentralized, from DNS to routing to HTTP Proxies for internet access.

EGreg 13y ago

I wrote this about 2.5 years ago: http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21

zobzu 13y ago
keep writing, this stuff its picking up a lot better these days

nwp90 13y ago

While this is a subject I would be interested in, I took one look at the front page, saw that it appeared to be video-only, and gave up. This is precisely the reaction that news sites get from me when I click on a link to a story and find video-only content. Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of the interviews?

skylan_q 13y ago
Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of the interviews? No, there are at least a few of us.
frabcus 13y ago
I feel the same, and have filed a bug https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website/issues/22 https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website/issues/22
serans 13y ago
I stopped doing Coursera courses because of this.
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  The only thing that saved coursera for me was VLC. It all makes such more sense at double speed; if I miss something I can always pause.
  - mayanksinghal 13y ago
    You should use their HTML5 player instead of the Flash one. The former has speed controls.
    - ics 13y ago
      It's good that you mentioned it, but it should be said that the experience is far from perfect (at least in FF). Playback speed resets at every question break, each new video, etc. Audio drops out of sync frequently and seems to have more issues when sped up than in VLC.

csense 13y ago

It's quite ironic that a website about decentralization is using Github [1]. Gitlab [2] would is an alternative with similar functionality that's more consistent with the ideology they're trying to promote. [1] https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website [2] http://gitlab.org/ http://gitlab.org/

frossie 13y ago
Is it that ironic? Git is inherently decentralised, github is just a publication method. Everybody's repo is still good if github gets nuked and can be used as the new public. It's nothing like, say, Facebook where They Have All The Data And You Don't. Self-hosting with Gitlab is no different, except to have the public repo sit on a different server.
- phaer 13y ago
  Its not just a publication method. If you loose your github repo for some reason you loose * the issues * the wiki * the community because your local repo is fine, but nobody knows any other remote than github.
  - amirmc 13y ago
    Good points. However: Issues - I'm sure these can get recreated, even the discussions. In many cases, people will have those threads in their email. Wiki - In Github's case, this is also a git repo. Community - GitHub is rarely the only mechanism used to manage a community. There's likely a domain name and mailing list of some form. Losing all of the above is certainly painful but I'm trying to point out that it's not irrecoverable. A better question might be how painful would it be to lose that (and the likelihood of losing it) as compared to other options.
    - phaer 13y ago
      Yes the wiki is a git repo, but the percentage of people who have a (current) checkout of their project wiki is probably below 0.1% of all users. Larger project have a domain and a mailinglist but github hosts thousands of small projects which do not exist outside of it, and in theory it should be trivial to keep a second remote and put it in the readme or sync it over git in some way.

oridecon 13y ago

so to decentralize we would need to host everything ourselves? PC turned on 24 hours and awful gaming latency since you'll be using lots of upload traffic. please tell me I'm wrong, this would never work for lots of reasons.

deathanatos 13y ago
Do you need to distribute things when you're gaming? For most interactions, I imagine that when the user says "save", replication of the user's data can start at that point, and for most things, ought to finish within a minute or two, freeing up the network/CPU, at least if you're doing it across a private cloud. I imagine that for most of my data, 3 copies in disparate locations would more than suffice. How long does that take? Having a machine on 24/7 is perhaps a bit wasteful, but what is the electrical use of a mostly idling machine? If you really cared, you could perhaps get something with less power, like a raspberry pi.
- oridecon 13y ago
  Oh I got the wrong idea, I wasn't able to check the video and the "about" is really bad. But now that I'm home I opened the Github page. So it's just not giving control over the data for a central corporation, but we're still using datacenters. I thought it was the same folks that wanted us to self-host diaspora (as in OUR home pc/network). If this works, the *aaS market will explode even more.

shevski8 13y ago

The idea behind the site is to make decentralised, privacy preserving, resilient (and fun!) tech more accessible to people who don't already know about this stuff. Hence videos and user focused questions. We want to expand the appeal and plan to do podcasts and meetups too. We hope to engage digitally literate people and show them that there are concrete existing software and app options they can use now that aren't selling your data, are interesting, easy to use and open. However, we also need to be pragmatic - aiming to use decentralized open software ourselves when it works for our use case, but not if it stops us doing this quickly. Please do sign up to the mail list or email us because we have ambitious plans that could use help and would love feedback (esp on stuff like if videos are really much less useful to people etc) :) Cheers, Ira

VeejayRampay 13y ago

Celluloid, Cryptosphere, it seems like Tony Arcieri has found a way to bypass the 24-hour/day limit. Awesome.

BUGHUNTER 13y ago

What are the best channels to follow discussions on decentralized social networks? I see too many alternatives coming up and it is getting too time-consuming to follow all of them. Friendica (BTW this one is missing on the list in wiki), Buddycloud, Diaspora, to name just a few - where do they coordinate their efforts and how can an interested developer follow discussions of these projects? Also it would be interesting to exchange experiences made with these new apps, so that not every developer has to check every network, what is not possible in one life - the already existing listings of alternatives are of great value, but a more systematic approach in collective knowledge gathering and exchange would be even better. Hey, that´s what the internet was built for, wasn´t it? Still does no software for this exist? :)

danielsiders 13y ago
Honestly there isn't a lot of coordination, but many of the people most interested in decentralization participate in one or more of these networks. As one of the architects of Tent (https://tent.io https://tent.io) I spend a lot of time talking with others on Tent about similar projects.
- BUGHUNTER 13y ago
  I can not see what I am looking for there, sorry. The Tent protocol certainly is interesting, but I was asking for an open place where it is possible to share / exchange / collect and extract knowledge and experiences about decentralized social network software. I was hoping for an open, easily available information source that can be followed.
  - w0rd-driven 13y ago
    I would hope this project could be that hub. Propose an interop data exchange format where information can be freely shared among all "exchanges". I'm definitely not seeing this as an easy problem to solve but it would make all of this more accessible to the grandmas of the world. The major problem I see is geeks always think their idea is perfect and have a hard time justifying the technical cost of implementation when it doesn't directly affect them ("You mean I have to make feature x to help my competitor that's actually doing way better than I am at this? Psh!") Openness shouldn't only be about the ability to export and keep that information but to also interop and play nice with others. I think it sucks that Disapora didn't have the traction it should have and I would hope that a data exchange format among all social networks would be beneficial to all. Unite against the Facebooks of the world. I believe united we can do this much better but its clear we haven't found the perfect disruption yet. I'm glad we haven't stopped trying because it's out there. Somewhere.

oridecon 13y ago

I think this idea would be even better if instead of recommending services (since people will be divided anyway), they would recommend protocols/standards, for each case. OFC cases like bitcoin, that is really stablished, should just be named as the only suggestion. "Oh you're on Diaspora? Too bad, I'm on Kune and they don't talk with each other." You get the idea.

foobarqux 13y ago

In the Cryptosphere talk the author says that you can use a cryptosphere address to reference the latest version of a git repository but I thought cryptosphere was content addressable. How does this work?

PLejeck 13y ago

We still have huge user experience issues with decentralized systems which make it more awkward for the average person. It's sad, because I (like most programmers) want a distributed system, but it's rather hard to get it right.

jewel 13y ago
BitTorrent Sync seems to have done a really good job of making a decentralized system easy to use. Their pre-shared-key method of connecting computers is really simple for people to understand, and supports a wide variety of potential use cases. Incidentally, I'm working on an open-source competitor to btsync called clearskies (https://github.com/jewel/clearskies https://github.com/jewel/clearskies).
oscargrouch 13y ago
I think i have a good plan to solve those issues and some more.. i hope i will throw it to the lions here at HN real soon.. so the hackers can validate the reasoning behind it, and play a little bit with it .. but you are right... it was hard to get it right..

dredmorbius 13y ago

There's both an "About" link (text) and a list of alternative internet projects: http://redecentralize.org/about/ http://redecentralize.org/about/ What's this all about? Over the last few years, we've noticed quite a few people trying to spread the Internet out again. Back to the edges, like it used to be. Sometimes they do it for privacy. Sometimes they do it for resilience against disaster. Sometimes they do it just to bring playfulness back to computers and how we use them. We've a list of the kind of projects we mean (any missing? send a pull request). On this site, we interview one of those projects each month. https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet

wyck 13y ago

For those of us (probably most of us) that would rather read quickly. Links from talks, http://www.servalproject.org/ http://www.servalproject.org/ https://arkos.io/ https://arkos.io/ http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/ http://cryptosphere.org/ http://cryptosphere.org/ https://www.zerotier.com/ https://www.zerotier.com/ http://drogul.us/ http://drogul.us/

gima 13y ago

Couldn't find writups about the mesh networking in Serval. How scalable is this? Last time I did some digging around mesh networks, they didn't scale too much. Every message has to be broadcasted to every node (and every client had to maintain a list of all nodes and their routes), or something along those lines.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

Retroshare is missing, it's actually quite good project and it's usable, it's not just talk. http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

rossj 13y ago
It's on the list - https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet#retroshare https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet#retroshare

volokoumphetico 13y ago

This really is the future. As coders and hackers we need to strive for software that produces the best possible welfare of maximum number of humanity in all possible aspects such as social, economic, cultural, optimizations in governance thus shifting political power away from filthy politicians and to people who actually care and have the brains to execute and implement and bring about change in society.

CookieMon 13y ago

Great interview (the one I listened to). This stuff interests me, but how to choose a project to get behind? For example Diaspora and Gnu Social might be two scattered groups both trying to build the same thing separately, or there might be important design/philosophy differences that neither of them felt the need to explicitly state. FreedomBox sounds perfect for me but the last news/release was more than a year ago - have most of the developers moved on? What other projects are similar to it? A redecentralizing hub is a great idea, can the list be more cross-referencable like a wiki - allowing project descriptions to be linked to similar projects, with information about what makes the "similar project" different. Appraisals of how projects are going etc. Judging from the existing list, cross-referencing would have to be introduced by the redecentalize guys before we could start adding the info. * gnusocial is another project that can be added to the list.

frank_boyd 13y ago

If you're looking for a decentralized & encrypted communication platform (messaging, chat, file tranfer, etc.) to get behind, head over to http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ and consider developing plugins for any missing features.

BUGHUNTER 13y ago

"That's why we don't think the network will be taken over by child porn. You have to have someone accept what's on your node in order for them to pass your traffic around," he says. [1] So instead of a guaranteed right to access information freely we make every mesh node a potential censor. I do not want to depend on the likes or dislikes of mesh participants to be able to access or distribute information. Here seems something fundamentally broken by design. I hope, I am misunderstanding the concept. [1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-activists-rebuilding-the-internet-from-scratch.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-a...

minikites 13y ago

There's also Steven Frank's http://decentralizer.com/ http://decentralizer.com/