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A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

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Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#81

Post by sukilot »

EGreg wrote: post #47

The example of GitHub they use is actually telling. Git is decentralized, so why use GitHub? The answer may be surprising: It's because social has not been decentralized. Yes, status.net existed for a while but it was just about publishing short updates. Also, a few years ago several guys from my college raised money to make Diaspora. That didn't fulfill the promise of a decentralized social web either. Bitcoin is de…

Don't forget that for email to get popular, it had to be mostly centralized (Hotmail, Gmail, etc), we are lucky it's still at least federated.

Bitcoin, same story -- mass adoption turns out to be dependent on service providers hosting the wallet, and most users are not miners, eroding many of the decentralization benefits.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#82

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

api wrote: post #73
CalRobert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm is awesome. Of course, it would help if ISP's weren't so keen to make sure nobody actually uses the internet to make computers talk to each other, instead of just having Amazon, FB, and Google's computers talk at you.

ISPs don't do that. That's your NAT/firewall. Has anyone ever actually seen an ISP network that filters local traffic to other ISP endpoints? I'm not even sure why they would do that. DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud so it would not help there. Here (SoCal) traceroute to a host in the same local neighborhood is three hops.

It's pretty common to have outbound traffic to port 25 blocked as an anti-spambot measure. Sometimes you can call them and get them to remove the block, other times it's non-negotiable.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#83

Post by jacquesm »

api wrote: post #73
CalRobert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm is awesome. Of course, it would help if ISP's weren't so keen to make sure nobody actually uses the internet to make computers talk to each other, instead of just having Amazon, FB, and Google's computers talk at you.

ISPs don't do that. That's your NAT/firewall. Has anyone ever actually seen an ISP network that filters local traffic to other ISP endpoints? I'm not even sure why they would do that. DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud so it would not help there. Here (SoCal) traceroute to a host in the same local neighborhood is three hops.

> DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud

That isn't true. Those are the ones that you'll hear about in the media but there are plenty of DDOS attacks on smaller sites both for extortion purposes and to force them offline.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#84

Post by ryanmarsh »

gtirloni wrote: post #63
Gys wrote: post #56

To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want. So they do not feel a need for getting the 'power back'. It all comes down to perceived (!) value. Once people use one thing, they will only switch if something else offers a clear higher value. At that point offering the same value is not enough anymore. This higher value has to be something that makes every day life in a very obvious…

The public zeitgeist is finally catching up with the realisation that being entirely dependent on massive siloed community platforms is not entirely in the users’ best interests I see zero evidence this happening.

Indeed people have been saying this since AOL. This is a tired argument. Nobody is forced to use anything and you can still buy a domain and run your own Wordpress in like 15 min. Hell you can set up your own social network on Wordpress on your own domain in like 15 min.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#85

Post by clydethefrog »

Arathorn wrote: post #37
dredmorbius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they were similar, but showed variation. Now all we need to do is introduce selection, and the articles can write and evolve themselves!

I have no idea where the mangled paragraphs came from - they weren't in the version I sent TechCrunch :(

Maybe inform them? Several comments on (centralized ;) ) social media are criticising the article because of the way it's written instead of discussing the message of the article, sure TC doesn't want that.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#86

Post by DrJid »

lj3 wrote: post #76
gtirloni wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public zeitgeist is finally catching up with the realisation that being entirely dependent on massive siloed community platforms is not entirely in the users’ best interests I see zero evidence this happening.

I see it in some places. For example, my sister now avoids facebook and instagram because she doesn't want pictures of her kids on those services. Unfortunately, none of the decentralized and distributed services are easy enough for her and the rest of the family to use without help.

And just because it's decentralized may not necessarily solve the problem of pictures of kids on those services. That problem could still be solved with a centralized photo sharing platform.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#87

Post by JonnieCache »

api wrote: post #73
CalRobert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm is awesome. Of course, it would help if ISP's weren't so keen to make sure nobody actually uses the internet to make computers talk to each other, instead of just having Amazon, FB, and Google's computers talk at you.

ISPs don't do that. That's your NAT/firewall. Has anyone ever actually seen an ISP network that filters local traffic to other ISP endpoints? I'm not even sure why they would do that. DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud so it would not help there. Here (SoCal) traceroute to a host in the same local neighborhood is three hops.

A lot of ISPs have (probably unenforcable) clauses in their ToS saying your can't run services.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#88

Post by adekok »

chestnut-tree wrote: post #35

A real barrier to a decentralised web is the difficulty of installing software on a server. I know that sounds really mundane and inconsequential in the broader debate about a decentralised web, but consider the following... Imagine if installing a server-side chat app, message board, project management app, or CMS were as easy as installing a desktop app. In a desktop app, it's usually one click to start the install…

> A real barrier to a decentralised web is the difficulty of installing software on a server.

Also, economies of scale.

If people used a decentralized service called "UnFaceBook", the total cost of servers, administration, etc. would dwarf the cost of Facebook running their data centres. From a business perspective, it's just not feasible.

Hmm... perhaps everyone running their own systems is, in fact, doable. Most people have smart phones which are much more powerful than servers from 6 years ago. Why not just use that?

Have the content at the edge, and controlled at the edge. Scalability can come from lots of caching at the core.

Not a startup I'd want to do, but it's technically feasible.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#89

Post by adrusi »

dannyrosen wrote: post #18

The nature of the net us to centralize and then decentralize, it's a cycle. See 90s AOL vs the open net as an example. At this point it's more about usability than it is about access. The open tools that are being built still have a ways to go towards fluid user on-boarding and compelling retention experiences.

There's very little evidence to support this claim. Some things were decentralized in the past, now most things are centralized. That does not establish a cycle.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#90

Post by userbinator »

Does anyone remember the "decentralized web" of the early 2000s? Varous P2P protocols existed that allowed everyone to share content freely, and they did. Content that was not even originally in digital form was digitised and nothing but a search away. It was amazing. The copyright/media industry didn't like that. Security paranoia (possibly assisted by the industry) also heightened its demise.

I really do hope we see another "rise of P2P", but there seems to be strong commercial interests against it. (Bitcoin itself is rather commercial in nature, as it deals specifically with currency.)

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