A decentralized web would give power back to the people online • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

sukilot wrote: post #75

infodroid wrote: post #65

Decentralized services have not been able to compete with their walled garden counterparts due to lack of resources and access to capital, as well as the coordination costs of federation. It's a structural and not a technical problem. I can't see how this will ever change. Most decentralized services are open source projects maintained by volunteer developers. They are competing with centralized commercial projects w…

It has to use the existing gardens as scaffolding: embrace , extend, extinguish. Your new service has to interoperate/sync with Facebook (using screenscraping or API) in order to access your friends and feed, and then it's up to the users to choose to migrate, edge by edge, to the alternate network.

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by bogomipz » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

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…

I also think there is a generational component to this as well. You have an age group who don't know an internet prior to this centralization grab. So there is not much in the way of a standard of comparison for them.

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

#113

Post by lisper » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:25 PM UTC

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…

I dunno, there are an awful lot of server apps that I can install by simply running apt-get install. Achieving nirvana might be a simple matter of packaging.

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

#114

Post by grondilu » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

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 web server is not that hard to set up. I personally have one on my local network. I'm sure many people do.

It seems to me that a more difficult part is to make this server public, that is with a fixed IP or domain name. I've never quite went this far.

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

#115

Post by TaylorAlexander » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #88

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 pe…

I like the idea of smartphones as servers feeding content to a CDN... Combined with IPFS [1] that should work well.

I was going to make a different comment though. You suggest that, because it would have higher infrastructure costs, a decentralized network is "not feasible" from a business perspective.

I'm wondering a) whether infrastructure costs are currently a limiting factor in the growth of social networks, and b) if a decentralized social network needs to be a business at all.

But more to point a, what if it cost 10x more, but the current costs were $0.10 per user per year. Do you think a service with a cost of $1 per user per year would be too expensive to operate?

[1] https://ipfs.io/

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

#116

Post by zer0gravity » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

So nobody can "give the power back" to anybody, but people can stop giving their power away to others. We all have power, and we manifest it through our actions and choices.

Some say knowledge is power, but in order to gain knowledge you have to make that choice. One can try to educate people about the benefits of hosting their own data, but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing.

I tend to agree with others that posted here, that in general, people are just not interested. It may be too hard for them to grasp the real implications of giving all those informations about them to third parties.. They may also consider that it's too hard to handle all those problems by themselves so they're willing to pay the prices...

I don't think that the change can happen unless the people who do understand, do something about it, but usually these people are more interested to cash in on the ignorance of those who don't...

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

#117

Post by the_common_man » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

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…

See cloudron.io. they make it easy to self-host.

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

#118

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

aw3c2 wrote: post #68

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…

You mention Google which is a search machine to gazillions of websites. Surely people actually want to be able to visit those sites!

Google has been much more than "a search machine" for a long time now. I assume they were referring to Google Docs, Google+, etc.

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

#119

Post by jasode » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #103

jasode wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, but the start date was February of 1860, when The Atlantic accepted its first print ad Can you explain the criteria for "advertising" such that 1860 is marked as the significant date? There were paid ads in newspapers/pamphlets in the 1600s: https://www.brent.gov.uk/media/387509/Newspaper_advertising_... That said, I think it's reasonable to set boundary date of when newspapers switched the majority of their susta…

Consider what it takes to have a substantial advertising market: you need goods, you need buyers, you need sellers who are providing a great deal of a good (or are selling very high-ticket items for which buyers are thin), and you need means for transporting both the advertisments and the goods to buyers. Hamilton Holt, a publisher himself (of The Independent magazine) starts off the linked work by detailing this. Th…

>substantial advertising market [...] thriving advertising industry, [...]

Whenever I see that "newspapers were always ad supported", I take it to mean the mainstream press and not the early financial papers that went to subscribers on Wall Street or the political news that was paid for by wealthy patrons. (Mainstream == readership of working class people.)

The "penny press" in the 1830s[1] is an example of lowering the price from 6 pennies to 1 which enabled a wider readership. Advertising made those economics of mainstream publishing possible 30 years before Holt's focus on an "advertising industry". I understand Holt's logic but to me, the idea of advertising quantity is not relevant to how the earlier advertising created the financial support for mainstream newspapers.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press

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

#120

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #70

mark_l_watson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for bringing up mesh networks. I have been reading about mesh network projects in Germany and other places. What I think is needed to increase adoption is something like the raspberry Pi, a cheap and open mesh router that would allow setting up community networks, with hooks for volunteers to provide low bandwidth gateways to the web, tools for sharing locally hosted copies of Wikipedia, projects for local social…

There are many millions of people who don't have the problems, that can be solved by mesh networks. They live in countries, where ISPs are not overregulated and are very competitive, bringing cheap high quality high speed internet to every household. In fact, those ISPs and the whole broadband market there emerged from similar communities of local networks you describe, except they weren't mesh networks, but wired ne…

Thanks for your comment. I see mesh networks as an alternative to be used alongside the web. Also, in the USA, local mesh networks were useful in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, as another example of utility of mesh networks.