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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

#151
post #10

"A decentralized web would be very slightly inconvenient to the people so forget about your freedom and privacy who cares about that." More realistic title. It would make for a shorter article though.

Switching from Facebook to, say, Diaspora or something is more than just "slightly inconvenient". One of them has all of my friends on it and the other has none. -- Two ideas for how we can help decentralization win. 1. Don't just clone an existing app. The two decentralized protocols with the most adoption by far are Bitcoin and BitTorrent. Both of them have capabilities that no centralized system can match. Same wi…

It is behaviourally impossible to switch to Diaspora, when all your friends and family are on Facebook.

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

#152
post #60

The most advanced decentralized system Ive seen in web 3.0 is also the one Tim Berners-Lee talks about, solid. While still very new, I think it has more than sufficient power to take back your data from the large monopolies. One nice feature, as you'd expect from the inventor of the web, is that it's 100% backwards compatible with existing Web technology. https://github.com/solid/solid Link to github repo above

Have you seen our platform? We spent 5 years building it and it's also 100% backwards compatible with the Web. See my comment elsewhere in this thread about the Qbix Platform. If anyone here knows Tim Berners-Lee and can introduce us, please hit me up, that would be extremely helpful.

I hadnt, but thank you for the pointer. Please feel free to pop into the solid gitter channel. Tim is a participant when he has time.

https://gitter.im/solid/chat

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

#153

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…

The "People don't understand" is a condescending statement and is exactly the reason why the people who try to build these decentralized systems never succeed, because they don't even understand why people use information silos. If you really think that's the problem and you think you know better than other people, you should quit using every single centralized system out there, like your bank (they take your money a…

Or maybe both of you are on the opposite sides of a false dichotomy. Just sayin'...

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

#154

It seems to me that one significant barrier is that most people don't have a static IP. If we can move to IPv6, will ISPs start issuing static IPs for everyone by default?

Doesn't dynamic DNS solve this problem? I have used that for a service on a home server set up for friends. I haven't had any connectivity problems using the dynamic DNS address, although, to be fair my dynamic IP address has stayed remarkably static.

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

#155

The most advanced decentralized system Ive seen in web 3.0 is also the one Tim Berners-Lee talks about, solid. While still very new, I think it has more than sufficient power to take back your data from the large monopolies. One nice feature, as you'd expect from the inventor of the web, is that it's 100% backwards compatible with existing Web technology. https://github.com/solid/solid Link to github repo above

What is the difference/relationship between this and https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ?

Solid is a larger framework of which Activity Streams can be one component. Developers are free to choose the messaging format they prefer.

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

#156
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we're not talking about them. We're talking about the millions of people who don't want that deal, or wouldn't if they thought about it, but are currently being forced into it by network effects and lack of existing viable alternatives.

I'm talking about them because I disagree with the ideological sentiment that they are not a significant portion (perhaps majority) of the population. How did you quantify the "millions of people" who you claim are ignorant or unwillingly forced into it? It's easy for people to misunderstand others' values as being based on misconceptions and assume they are either ignorant or malicious. Members of identity groups (i…

You're making the argument from apathy. Sure, there are a ton of people who don't care. But what interest of theirs are you defending? "Don't care either way" is not an objection to change. Ambivalence about privacy is not the same as a preference to give it up.

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

#157
In my experience, one of the largest hurdles decentralization faces is agent identity. Or simply put, how do you determine who is who on the network. The original Internet failed to address this problem.

The successful solutions I have seen to this issue have employed centralization. SSL certificates from Verisign and login with Google Sign In so consumers can trust your website.

Don't confuse this with distributed authentication. They exist , but I would say difficult to use.

I am talking about identity.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "People don't understand" is a condescending statement and is exactly the reason why the people who try to build these decentralized systems never succeed, because they don't even understand why people use information silos. If you really think that's the problem and you think you know better than other people, you should quit using every single centralized system out there, like your bank (they take your money a…

Or maybe both of you are on the opposite sides of a false dichotomy. Just sayin'...

Yes.

E.g. centralized Snapchat has a multi-billion market value based on marketing of ephemeral messaging and a fun UX. Despite technical limitations of the marketing claims, they have reduced the audience for their "historical conversations" from "all customers" to "malicious actors", which is a big step forward.

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

#159
post #73

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.

my ISP blacklists some random ports on consumer contracts.

you could of course go with non-standard ones, its still another complication that they throw your way.

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

#160

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…

P2P filesharing is part of the "decentralised web", and people seem to have no trouble installing the software for those.

Now consider how complicated installing on a server is in contrast. Upload you files to a folder or directory, enable permissions, set configurations not just for your server but also the language the program is written in - the list goes on.

I think a lot of the difficulty is artificial, created by software that is far more complex than it needs to be, to cover far more use cases than most users actually need. In the "enterprise" space, a lot of this complexity probably also drives auxillary revenue in the form of training, consultancy, etc. In other words, it could be a deliberate barrier to entry. Building big, complex, immensely flexible, yet difficult-to-configure systems with plenty of dependencies just seems to be the norm.

Perhaps some in the tech field would like to keep it that way? Would Saas be less attractive if installing a self-hosted solution was simple, easy, quick and secure?

Indeed, the whole category of "enterprise software" often fits this business model.

But me and many others have written HTTP and FTP servers which do not require any installation at all --- they're just a single (often very tiny compared to most other software) binary, sometimes with an optional configuration file. If you're doing something like hosting static pages, this fits the use-case perfectly well.

Finally, a huge part of making the web truly decentralised is to abandon the notion of dedicated servers/clients altogether --- and thus also the notion that you must need a dedicated or "server" computer to host anything, or for that matter a dedicated Internet connection. Of course some machines will have more resources to serve, and a typical residential connection may be more limited, but the key idea as exemplified by P2P is that any machine can serve.

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