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It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own mac

• dspillett 13y ago
  > housed on our own machines in our own homes I for one do not want to be lumbered with maintaining my family's collection of micro services, making sure they are working OK, not compromised, and fully patched security-wise, and so forth. Its bad enough being expected to disinfect their laptops every other time the fail to follow my advice on being careful what they browse.
• rakoo 13y ago
  > There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines You know, this is exactly how the internet works, today. You can do it if you want. You will find that you're gonna have to spend some (some would say a lot of) time to amass enough knowledge to become self-sufficient. But there's no big technical issue, there only is a mindset issue. Do you actually want to spend the time, face downtimes and low speeds that having a real internet would incur, or do you want to remain in your comfy walled garden ? I'm sure what you really meant was "It's time to decentralize the services we use". > We put a man on the moon "We" as in "The government and countless private contractors, all with an unlimited budget", not as in "We the people". The centralization you see today is just the same thing.
• netcraft 13y ago
  This is an interesting idea, although as an alternative analogy: in an apartment complex, you would go down to your mailbox and insert a key to authenticate you to retrieve your mail. I think the biggest challenge to having on-premises software for all of this stuff is the maintenance of it - but a decentralized social media platform certainly sounds interesting.
• userbinator 13y ago
  Two main reasons I can see: * ISPs discouraging or even prohibiting servers, due to bandwidth or other concerns. * Laziness/generally complacent attitude. I think this is a deeper issue than the first one, since a change here may make ISPs reconsider. A lot of people just don't want to learn about how to setup their own server for email/webpages/etc. and would willingly give control to someone else despite the privacy/freedom implications of doing so. In other words, they value "easy" over control, privacy, and freedom. The same reason walled-garden DRM ecosystems have been so successful. I'm strongly in support of a decentralised and more "user-centric" Internet, where almost everyone has their own servers and websites, and knows more about how things work, but I think there has to be a huge shift in social attitudes first.
  • Houshalter 13y ago
    Don't some ISPs already block port 80? I looked into setting up my own server and almost everything I read recommended not doing it.
• fidotron 13y ago
  Decentralization is absolutely necessary, it's just completely counter to the way the economy on the Internet currently works. SAAS falls apart if everyone is hosting their own stuff, let alone the do it for free and sell ads in it model. Unless people are willing to start paying software developers directly en masse for decentralized locally run versions of products we currently get for free it isn't going to happen. We're even getting to the point where platforms where you could conceivably do that are being killed off. What would be a game changer is the equivalent of Android for servers. A proper standard environment with app interoperability, and potential to create app stores, just for server code instead.
  • plg 13y ago
    It's funny isn't it. The current state of affairs and the direction we're moving in reminds me (since I'm old enough to remember) of the early days of server based computing and dumb terminals. VAX's in some room somewhere and DEC terminals for the people. Now it's google server farms and chromebooks
• k2enemy 13y ago
  > It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). I think there is a good reason. Who wants to spend the time setting up and running a server? I happen to run my own, but it is definitely not something I would recommend to my friends and family. Maybe someone will come along and create a super easy to install and low maintenance server platform, but if everyone uses that then it is still "centralized" in the sense that everyone is running homogenous setups. I think the key is that everything should be based on open protocols and formats. Email and the web are already there. Tent.io might be a good place to start for the social media stuff. That seems far more important than geographical dispersion of physical servers.
  • plg 13y ago
    "Maybe someone will come along and create a super easy to install and low maintenance server platform" that's the idea
    • stingraycharles 13y ago
      How would you ensure operational continuity for my mom who only has an ipad? Since that's the direction the world seems to be taking.
      • Zikes 13y ago
        Server/router hybrids.
      • nawitus 13y ago
        You can cache the data. I mean just think about how Git works. You can sync the information at random intervals between peers, and you don't need a direct connection all the time. A well-designed P2P decentralized network solves all these problems. A can send to C through B, if A and C are not currently connected and so on. In fact, these are solved problems, and implemented in e.g. Freenet as far as I know.
    • 13y ago
• pwg 13y ago
  > It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). This is how the internet is designed, and you can already do this today. In my case, I host my own dns, email, and my own webpages, locally on my home connection. You just have to be willing to learn, and willing to do. Once you've learned, the actual "do" is rather trivial. [edit: forgot to list dns in the first version]
  • knowledgesale 13y ago
    Why would you need your own DNS?
    • dspillett 13y ago
      Most people don't need it, but there are reasons it can be convenient. And some just like to do everything in-house either as a learning exercise or for control freakery reasons. Control of TTL values is on example. Most registrars use 4 hours these days but it used to be that 24 hours was the value used by most (with not option of anything else). That can be a minor convenience if you expect to move things around much. I have all mine set to 5 minutes (not a great idea for anything high traffic, but nothing of mine is). If you know what you are doing running a small DNS service is no great hardship at all (though it is surprising how many people don't get it right). Custom dDNS is another reason you might want this (though I think some registrars and specialist DNS hosts offer this for little or no cost these days). In my case it costs nothing as the three bind instances I run live on geographically separate machines that I already have for other reasons (home line, external web service, backup location) - if you have no external resources already then you'd need to pay for somewhere to host a secondary server of course (cheap, reliable enough, and fast enough VPS services are common so that needn't be much cost - though a specialist DNS services needn't any more expensive these days either and will likely be more scalable than anything we setup manually).
    • dobbsbob 13y ago
      To avoid DNS censorship, my ISP filters pirate bay, plenty of other sites.
• idlewan 13y ago
  There is good reason: it's bad for software businesses. Even if you had a turnkey solution (it doesn't exist yet) to self-host emails & stuff, the companies selling it wouldn't be able to get good search engine rankings. The web giants have no interest in solutions that don't require them to host your data (so they can serve you advertising or hosting plans). Even small shops are usually based around a Service As A Software Substitute (SaaS) business model and don't give a crap about you not depending on them when you start their application.
• Spooky23 13y ago
  I think it's time to stop cooking up technology solutions to political problems. It's a lazy hack and a distraction. The counter-parties that encryption will supposedly neutralize are commercial entities doing monitoring for advertising (or other purposes) and government surveillance. Commercial entities have all sorts of ways to collect said information (ie. by compelling you to opt-in in exchange for services). The government has a long history of successfully breaching encryption when it's motivated to do so. The solution is to leash these powerful entities with regulation. Elect Senators with the courage to curb the intelligence community -- it was done before after the excesses of the Vietnam Era.
  • forgottenpass 13y ago
    I think it's time to stop cooking up technology solutions to political problems. It's a lazy hack and a distraction. I very much agree with this philosophy in general, but when government and corporate interests are fighting their political battles with tech by designing software to exploit you, there is no option but to push back on multiple fronts.
• peterwwillis 13y ago
  This is a completely specious argument. Of course there is no reason why we can't do a thing. We can do basically anything with computers. That does not mean that anything we do is a good idea. People who don't understand how systems work often jump to decentralization as a solution to any problem. I'm not sure why. Maybe they've been burned in the past by a centralized service, and think the best solution is to remove what they perceived as their roadblock: the centralization. Our current situation is nothing like traveling. You sit in your home, or in your car, or at your work, or in a park, or on an airplane, and you can access anything you want anywhere in the world, instantly. There's virtually no time between wanting to read your letter and receiving it. It's fast, it's easy, and it's uncomplicated. And you don't have to prove your identity if you've done it once in the past 30 days. Do you realize how that is possible? None of that is due to decentralized services. Every single service you use on the web is provided via centralized services. And they work beautifully. Your wireless card listens for access point probes. It hears one from the AP it wants, and it connects. The AP begins the process of creating an encrypted connection. It checks that your credentials are valid, or passes the request up to a RADIUS server, that holds all the valid credentials of all the users. It then establishes the connection. Your host polls for a DHCP server asking for a lease, and the DHCP server, diligently making sure no leases have a conflict, gives you all the local network information you'll need. Your client sends a DNS request to the DNS server, which resolves, caches, and returns your request by polling the closest possible upstream DNS server, giving you a result that's geographically closest to you. Your browser initiates a connection, across your AP, across the cable modem, across the DSLAM, across the POP, across the MAN, across the many myriad routers, switches, traffic filters, interlinks, to finally get to the load balancers that maintain a balance of requests between the web servers of your destination. The HTTPS session is established after you verify the server is who they say they are, and then you tell the server who you are over HTTP, finally asking for your letter, and receiving it. And each route long the way has its gateway configured and routing tables filled with curated BGP tables so that they know exactly where to send your data to get you from a cable modem in Indiana to a datacenter in Brazil. What would happen if we replaced every one of those centralized services with a decentralized model? For one thing, you'd have less bandwidth and higher latency. All the devices on the internet would be constantly communicating, trying to find consensus, trying to update routes, trying to search distributed rings (my personal favorite topology) to find peers, connect services, authenticate trust relationships, query data, update indexes, etc. To say nothing of the potential for disruption of networks by various attacks or the difficulty of troubleshooting a random network failure in a massive decentralized network. For another, storing data on your own host in your own home is taking 100 steps backward. As a very simple comparison, it's like taking your valuables out of a safe deposit box in an FDIC-insured bank and putting them on the front dash of your car. Even besides the security concerns, if you have a fire in your house, there goes your data! It's just a really dangerous idea to put data you care about in a place that's easily available to thieves and isn't backed up to an offsite location and maintained by professionals. That's what centralized services were meant to provide. It makes no sense to try and support those scenarios in a decentralized way, because the very idea of decentralized services is contrary to high-availability data. Final thought: we put a man on the moon with centralized services. If we had done it using decentralized services, it would have taken a lot longer than it did with a lot more work, for exactly the same result. Sometimes it just makes more sense to be centralized.
• dm2 13y ago
  Why is it impossible to trust someone? With sufficient transparency and checks/balances, wouldn't a partially centralized internet be acceptable? It's not an easy solution by any stretch of the imagination. If you can come up with a realistic solution then please let us know and we will help implement it. Nothing is stopping you from hosting servers at your home or place of business (except maybe specific ISPs), isn't this how the internet was originally?
  • forgottenpass 13y ago
    Why is it impossible to trust someone? It's not impossible, its just very very unlikely in the context of current economic realities. Those that are currently begrudgingly trusted have time and time again proven themselves so untrustworthy that debates on Hacker News are about not about if, but how thoroughly they should be able to fuck the end user over and justify it with "because money". With sufficient transparency and checks/balances, wouldn't a partially centralized internet be acceptable? Finding an alternative seems like the path of less resistance. The people running the checks and balances have proven themselves only interested in the money of the untrustworthy above and their own intrusiveness.
  • pdkl95 13y ago
    While trust is unlikely given the current state of politics, there is a better reason to not trust anything: the same reason you give up unnecessary privileges in a server jail. Limiting trust doesn't just protect against malicious or targeted attacks - it also helps with plain old bugs. In general, limiting access and trust to what is actually needed is a good engineering practice. Or, simply: we gave up on /etc/hosts.equiv (and .rhosts) a long time ago, and it would be a bad idea to repeat that kind of design mistake.
• testing3212 13y ago
  Decentralizing sounds a lot like a peer-to-peer based web. Doesn't this already exist through the tor network and the onion browser?