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

#171

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by walterbell » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:22 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.

Yes on incremental migration, e.g. the IndieWeb community targets content creators, allowing them to syndicate from decentralized to centralized, so that the content system of record and ownership is under the creator's control.

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

#173

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

dsacco wrote: post #162

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm defending the idea that they are disinterested in change not because they are ignorant, but because they are fully aware and accepting of what they're giving up. I am not arguing that they don't care either way. If they otherwise don't care, but they appreciate the usability and convenience features of these products, then that is an objection to change if they won't get the same features in more open, private al…

At which point you're in the minority because the set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is not larger than the set who either don't want to or don't care.

DuckDuckGo is not decentralized, it's just a worse Google with a better privacy policy. Actual decentralized search is hard. But this is not a one-time global binary decision. We can have decentralized YouTube and Facebook even if nobody has yet figured out how to have decentralized Google.

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

#174

Post by bogomipz » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

drvdevd wrote: post #167

bogomipz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. Probably the only way newer generations who've grown up in this context will come to embrace an alternative is if it at least looks like the centralized apps (on the centralized platforms) they're used to. So you have to create a system that's decentralized and yet has the interface of a centralized application and which is distributed on centralized, mostly monopolized platforms. So that's certainly an undert…

I completely agree, its definitely not impossible. I think just awareness would build some momentum.

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

#175

Post by eropple » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #173

dsacco wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm defending the idea that they are disinterested in change not because they are ignorant, but because they are fully aware and accepting of what they're giving up. I am not arguing that they don't care either way. If they otherwise don't care, but they appreciate the usability and convenience features of these products, then that is an objection to change if they won't get the same features in more open, private al…

At which point you're in the minority because the set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is not larger than the set who either don't want to or don't care. DuckDuckGo is not decentralized, it's just a worse Google with a better privacy policy. Actual decentralized search is hard . But this is not a one-time global binary decision. We can have decentralized YouTube and Facebook even if nobody ha…

I would suggest that having Facebook's userbase is a core part of having Facebook. If you don't have Facebook's userbase on your "decentralized Facebook", you have a strictly inferior replacement to Facebook. The set of people who care enough about the benefits (which do exist!) of decentralization is not and never going to be enough to overcome the downside of having nobody there.

That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. Haranguing people because they're not using it isn't the way. The way to do it is to figure out how to make it attractive by the users' metrics rather than your own.

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

#176

Post by LukeB42 » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

stevewilhelm wrote: post #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 a…

Does this contact come back with the same public RSA key each time? Could they sign a small piece of data with the key? It probably [is/isn't] them, then.

In Synchrony[1] this forms your address (like an email address but for editing web pages / chat / RTC teleconferencing / multi-user JS/WebAssembly applications), which contacts can then put a name to in the UI by mousing over.

The address has the form network_name/node_id/user_id, where network_name is an opt-in namespace (so Synchrony can select routing tables based on their overall trustworthiness), node_id is 160 bits based on the SHA1 of "ip:port:pubkey" which peer nodes can then verify, preventing one another from assuming node IDs that correspond to popular URLs, so no one can computationally inexpensively monitor popular URLs for financial gain[2].

Note that the RSA keypair is per-instance of the software and not per user-identity - that when we ask a node if it can sign for some data it's the installation rather than the individual user identity being checked.

[1] https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony [2] http://www.tm.uka.de/doc/SKademlia_2007.pdf

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

#177

Post by JohnStrange » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

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…

I don't think so. Decentralized services never took off very much because of tremendous technical difficulties with reliable NAT traversal/hole punching. Companies like Skype spent unbelievable efforts to get around these problems and kept them a closely guarded secret. There are a few more libraries now, but it's still surprisingly difficult to achieve reliable p2p connectivity without some external, centralized server to get the process started.

This in combination with a few other problems with ISPs, slow upload speeds and the "intellectual property" watchdogs prevented 1-click installation. Without extremely easy and fast setup that even the dumbest person can manage, no software will achieve wide popularity. Shareware authors have already realized this in the 90s and this hasn't changed since then.

So my verdict is: technical reasons, mostly, although I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there were some "dark forces" behind them in some countries. Genuine P2P has always scared the shit out of traditional companies and politicians.

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

#178

Post by ComodoHacker » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #160

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…

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…

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

We can't really call P2P filesharing today decentralized. It depends on trackers. And it's trackers who help users (often out of commercial interest) overcome all the troubles with software.

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

#179

Post by ComodoHacker » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:40 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…

>Most people have smart phones which are much more powerful than servers from 6 years ago. Why not just use that?

Not before we have breakthrough in power cells. Or some other breakthrough. Perhaps computer implanted in our body and powered by our food.

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

#180

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

JohnStrange wrote: post #153

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #140

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'...

If you want to say something like this, at least back it up with something. Anyone can say "You two are both wrong" and sound smart.

Also which part of "people don't understand" is not condescending?

Funny enough, I watched this movie called Barton Fink last night, and it's a perfect depiction of this nonsense.