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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

#191

Post by 35bge57dtjku »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #180
JohnStrange wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

How is asserting a fact like that in any way condescending?

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

#192

Post by ryukafalz »

Arathorn wrote: post #189
melvster wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why on earth are you using a centralised chat product for Solid?! Please at least give https://riot.im a go - you can bridge it straight into Gitter for people who like the gitter UI :)

>why on earth are you using a decentralised chat product for Solid?!

Assuming you meant centralised here? ;)

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

#193

Post by wybiral »

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!

It seems reasonable to me that indexing and search could be decentralized just as well as the documents themselves.

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

#194

Post by Animats »

So far, nobody has a federated social network that 1) doesn't suck, and 2) has a worthwhile user base.

Someone in college should take one of the federated systems, polish it up, and market it to fraternities and sororities at name schools as FratNet. This would give all the cool kids a private social network that they controlled.

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

#195

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dsacco wrote: post #182
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>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. The set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is in the majority if most people don't care about privacy but want privacy reducing features. Sure, in a perfect world they'd take both, but we're talking about which is mo…

OK, so let's actually talk about those people then. The theory is that there is an unavoidable compromise between privacy and features and some people will legitimately choose features. That can be true, e.g. to do "people like you also viewed ..." you need the data on what people like you also viewed.

But those things are relatively rare and can be separated out. You can layer them on top of a decentralized system -- run this separate program that tells The Cloud everything you click on and in exchange you get the benefit of data from other people who make the same choice. That is still possible even if a video from your family gets downloaded P2P directly from your actual friends and no corporation automatically finds out about it and stores it in a database forever.

The problem currently is that the decision of whether to give up privacy is not tied only to the few features that legitimately require giving it up, it's also tied to participating in the same networks as the majority of people and many other features that don't inherently require privacy invasion.

Decentralization doesn't take away the choice whether to share data from the people who want to do that, it gives it back to the people who don't.

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

#197

Post by Paul-ish »

One area that may be ripe for the picking is video chat, as this article starts out describing. I think everyone is sick of having half a different applications to talk to their friend. Why can't this be a protocol like email?

I think the technologies exist and have existed for a long time; RTC, SIP, ICE, etc... The hurdles are social and political.

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

#198

Post by ComodoHacker »

ryukafalz wrote: post #190
ComodoHacker wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Some torrents depend on trackers, yes. Others use magnet links, which aren't dependent on trackers at all. The data typically served by a tracker is instead stored in the DHT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT

DHT helps with downloading, but content discovery depends on tracker. You can't search for, rate or review content in DHT.

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

#199

Post by xj9 »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #178
userbinator wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every peer to peer system requires bootstrapping, often this is achieved with some central or federated nodes/trackers. Once you have peers, you can forget about trackers and use the DHT.

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

#200

Post by skybrian »

The problem with this plan is that it doesn't really tackle the first rule of the Internet: spam and abuse make everything suck.

The last really popular decentralized service was email, and users migrated to large providers because they had better spam filters. Also, setting up your own mail server has become increasingly difficult, due in part to anti-spam measures. As a side effect, email has become pretty lossy.

Centralized services are far from perfect on this, but they have a somewhat easier time of it. They can fund dedicated teams to deal with abuse. So, the result is feudalism, where you join a larger organization that provides some measure of protection. (Not enough protection, according to many people.)

I'm hopeful that Sandstorm (or something like it) will make it easier for people to run their own server-side software, but it seems more for private use; you can publish a blog but it's not designed for large-scale sharing like a social network. That still seems like an unsolved problem.

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