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The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

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Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#61

Post by michaelfeathers »

pessimizer wrote: post #57
michaelfeathers wrote: post #37

The deep learning is that there are forces that lead to centralization: generally they are variations of human choice and seeking economies of scale. For instance, it's no accident that we started with hundreds of thousands of small websites and ended with most traffic going to a few. Ask yourself how the internet could have been constructed that would have prevented sites like Facebook or Twitter winning the popular…

> The deep learning is that there are forces that lead to centralization: generally they are variations of human choice and seeking economies of scale. The reason that some airports are hubs and some are not is due to the the fact that it's a system spanning large areas of varying densities. Distance doesn't exist much on the internet, other than firewalls. The goal of most internet companies is to create that distan…

I think it's more graph theory than distance. A fully connected graph costs more than an minimal spanning tree.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#62

Post by walrus01 »

Animats wrote: post #10

The Web has already been reinvented, but not in the direction that Bernars-Lee wants. We have HTTP2 running everything through one pipe to big sites. We have Javascript that puts the site in control of the user's machine and makes web pages display-only, like PostScript. More than half of all traffic is coming from the top 10 sites. The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have been replaced by Gmail, WhatsApp,…

> The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have been replaced by Gmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook

Ease of use by the vast hordes of hundreds of millions of completely non technical endusers and thousands of person-hours by highly paid UI/UX designers have trumped decentralization and autonomy.

point, click, drool.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#63

Post by textmode »

Can the "Fathers of the Internet" offer a financial incentive or even a stipend to nerds that want to work on these projects?

I was reading a book a while ago on peer-to-peer technologies written some years ago and there was a chapter by a very talented, well-known programmer.

Today, like Cerf, he's on the Google payroll. Needlesss to say he will not be working diligently on releasing finished projects that help to decentralize the web.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#64

Post by nine_k »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #56
pfraze wrote: post #40

Ok, a lot of people don't know the context for this. Last week, the Internet Archive ran the Decentralized Web Summit. It was an opportunity for new projects [1] to gather with prominent people in the industry [2]. It was productive and very fun. It also resulted in a bunch of news pieces, like this one, which have been hitting the HN FP for a week. Some of those articles have been better than others; a lot of them f…

> "Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?"" To me the answer is obvious. Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your u…

Interestingly, Urbit seems to target squarelyat this space.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#65

Post by losteric »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #56
pfraze wrote: post #40

Ok, a lot of people don't know the context for this. Last week, the Internet Archive ran the Decentralized Web Summit. It was an opportunity for new projects [1] to gather with prominent people in the industry [2]. It was productive and very fun. It also resulted in a bunch of news pieces, like this one, which have been hitting the HN FP for a week. Some of those articles have been better than others; a lot of them f…

> "Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?"" To me the answer is obvious. Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your u…

> home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure.

People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers.

I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's laptop, desktop, or cellphone. Something with a distributed/peer-to-peer file system for ubiquitous content, and peer-to-peer RSS.

The harder question is (complex) querying. How do we avoid the centralization of Google, while still retaining the functionality? I don't see how such a new service could survive if there's a regression in search.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#66

Post by merkle_tree »

pfraze wrote: post #40

Ok, a lot of people don't know the context for this. Last week, the Internet Archive ran the Decentralized Web Summit. It was an opportunity for new projects [1] to gather with prominent people in the industry [2]. It was productive and very fun. It also resulted in a bunch of news pieces, like this one, which have been hitting the HN FP for a week. Some of those articles have been better than others; a lot of them f…

The context for this is that it's Father's Day.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#67

Post by hanniabu »

doublerebel wrote: post #60
hanniabu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting idea about simple home servers used to eliminate the middle men. I have to admit, this actually seems like a viable option if it could be done right. Good idea that I think deserves more thought and should be looked into. I'm curious what the opinions of others are on this idea.

This is what I'm working on at Optik -- but forget the idea of a server. All we need is a device, a writing program, and a sync program. Everyone already has these tools in their pocket, they just have a bad interface and therefore nobody knows how to use it in this manner. Identity is solved by real-world trust. Facebook has proven most of us are separated by less than 5 degrees.

The only thing I don't like about it being in a phone is what happens when you change phones? How's that transfer made easily? How can v you guarantee everything will be removed when they get rid of their old phone?

Also, I have only about 15 apps, 300 pictures, and 10 sorry videos and I'm constantly running out of space even with half the stearate being on an SD card. I can't imagine puerile having enough storage to run something like this on their phone.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#68

Post by jokoon »

Whatever the solution is, I really believe data must be on user's devices, not on proprietary servers.

Open source won the battle of software. The next battle will be about data itself.

It surely implies very hard problems when it comes to standardization and how data is exchanged. It might involve something like flatbuffers. How data is exchanged, what rights you have on it, how it is made secure, there are no ubiquitous idea or software that can reinvent the web because network programming is just hard and it wont change soon.

What I think could really be relevant is a database that syncs itself like the kinds of bittorrent sync and syncthing. Once you have atomic data that is spread across users, nobody needs to rent servers, and the data belongs to the users. That is a true and real way to reinvent the web, it also solves some of the controversial problems of the internet: advertising and surveillance.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#69

Post by doublerebel »

hanniabu wrote: post #67
doublerebel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I'm working on at Optik -- but forget the idea of a server. All we need is a device, a writing program, and a sync program. Everyone already has these tools in their pocket, they just have a bad interface and therefore nobody knows how to use it in this manner. Identity is solved by real-world trust. Facebook has proven most of us are separated by less than 5 degrees.

The only thing I don't like about it being in a phone is what happens when you change phones? How's that transfer made easily? How can v you guarantee everything will be removed when they get rid of their old phone? Also, I have only about 15 apps, 300 pictures, and 10 sorry videos and I'm constantly running out of space even with half the stearate being on an SD card. I can't imagine puerile having enough storage to…

We could easily fit more storage (and more battery) on phones, there just isn't the market demand for it. With such a decentralized system, demand may increase.

Most knowledge as we use it now is ephemeral and can be somewhat centralized safely. The permanent knowledge or at least the trusted hashes of that knowledge can travel with us.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#70

Post by niftich »

pudo wrote: post #42

The argument to re-decentralise the web wildly confuses economic, technical and political concerns. The reason that Facebook runs a centralised system isn't that it cannot figure out a technical alternative, it does so for economic reasons. To assume that making incremental advances in decentralised technologies will somehow fundamentally alter those economics is wishful thinking. Instead, we need to recognise the fa…

This, but also, they run a centralized system for intellectual property reasons. Facebook Inc. offers a product, called Facebook, where you post content and make connections with other nodes in a large graph. It was built on prior art, but arranging and packaging them together in their particular way was novel.

You could wholesale copy Facebook's public APIs and implement your own "Facebook-compatible clone", in the sense that a third-party unofficial Facebook client could connect to you instead and operate 100% identically. Of course, you can't actually do this, as you'll be threatened with legal action.

Gmail, another frequent example of decentralization overcome by centralization, isn't nearly as egregious in its domain. Gmail is simply an Email-as-a-Service with a bundled webmail client, albeit with a very large market share of email traffic. You can get (most of) your data out of Gmail, and use another email client instead. But Facebook operates over the "Facebook protocol", and no one else can do so. These proprietary protocols are the real threat, not 'centralization'.

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