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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

#211

Post by pessimizer »

dgudkov wrote: post #15

I believe the internet is naturally drifting to "governed countries" (e.g. Google or Facebook) and one of the biggest drivers is not just convenience, but decreasing security of the web in general. Just like the wild West eventually became a number of states with borders, police and government. It became especially relevant in the recent years, when harvesting exploits en masse has become a huge industry. Yes, centra…

Very cynical, but I tend to agree. I think the idea of the libertarian individualistic decentralized web is a non-starter for the general public. If you see the decentralized web as a matter of degree of centralization of individual services, however, a continuum where you can have a web for your family, a web for your job, your own personal web, a web run by your neighborhood, a web for your government etc. and conventions/interfaces to allow strictly regulated communication between those levels, I think you see it as an inherent quality of the web.

The problem isn't that Facebook mediates the relationship between you and the people you went to high school with, or that twitter mediates the relationship between you and Washington Post reporters; it's that once those relationships have been well-established and don't need any more protection (or need protection from Facebook itself), there's nowhere to take them to on the web. It shouldn't be easier to send baby pictures to my mother and aunts through Facebook. If one of us wants to make the effort to get some off the shelf appliance (or appliance that needs Debian installed and apt-get run periodically) and hook it to the web, and establish a hub for the family that provides most of what facebook provides, it would be better if it were both possible and easy to create and access.

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

#212

Post by Animats »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #206
Animats wrote: post #194

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.

Networks don't tend to stay siloed. Very quickly members move on to graduate schools and then jobs. The social network boundaries expand beyond their original fraternities and sororities. You end up with one large social network.

That's the point. As Zuckerberg taught us, you have to onboard the cool kids first. Then you grow. The federated network people don't get this.

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

#213

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

zer0gravity wrote: post #209
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…

1 . > It is these "decentralized" people who are out of touch, not the ordinary people. This statement seems a bit condescending, just saying.. 2. In my post I'm not trying to make value judgements, but just offer a possible explanation why things are the way they are, and who may have better chances to change them. 3. I don't think that we should/can decentralize everything, but I do believe there is a worrying tend…

> 1 . > It is these "decentralized" people who are out of touch, not the ordinary people. > This statement seems a bit condescending, just saying..

I don't think that's what condescending means.

Decentralization/Centralization is nothing new. In fact the entire history of humanity is about pendulum swinging back and forth between centralization and decentralization. And in 100% of the cases when this happens it's not because of some elites convince people to switch, but because it makes sense for people. "Normal" human beings are not as dumb as these elites think. So we don't have to worry about decentralization never happening. It will happen. And probably back to centralization. And then back to decentralization again. Just not through these efforts to "educate" people. It's because these elites are so out of touch with how real people think that their attempts at convincing people don't work.

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

#214

Post by pessimizer »

powera wrote: post #139
jshen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something from the first part of the install which is not something a normal person would ever do: Configure the EC2 security groups (firewall) to let you reach Sandstorm By default, Amazon EC2 protects your virtual machine from being reached over the Internet. In the above tutorial, we allow the virtual machine to be reached on port 80. By default, Sandstorm uses port 6080, so look through the above tutorial…

Uh, if you can't figure that out from the directions, maybe you shouldn't run your own server? It's ludicrous to suggest that everyone should run their own server. It's like saying they should all build their own cars.

It's more like suggesting that they should drive their own cars, pump their own gas, or change their own tires in an emergency. Nobody is suggesting that people should be able to program a webserver.

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

#216

Post by dsacco »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #181
eropple wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

> That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. We already know that. It's not trivial but there is a clear path. You make something that will become popular for reasons unrelated to the thing it should replace, it just happens to also be able to replace it. Once you have something that everybody already uses for other reasons and can do everything Facebook does, anyone can start us…

I would say it's not trivial and there isn't a clear path.

YouTube is not just a web server for videos. You can't set up a decentralized, P2P real-time streaming network (like webtorrent) to replace YouTube. Many of the features that make YouTube virally successful and a continuing platform are developed based on research produced by its analytics which sacrifice privacy to improve insights into what users care about.

YouTube also has a profitable business model, which provides a capitalist incentive to improve the product according to user demand. To make a comparison - which are you betting on in 2016 - IRC or Slack? Even if you set up a successful open source project to replicate YouTube, how will you develop it as well when your best employees are poached because they aren't paid as well as centralized companies?

How about the analytics features? How do you design an anonymous or decentralized recommendation engine with the same or similar utility? How do you power search relevance in a meaningfully private and decentralized way? How do you add the social networking features that people care about without a centralized social network?

The fact that you can technically make product clones with distributed graphs does not on its own constitute a feasible replacement. The basis of modern product research and improvement is data tracking and analysis. You can argue that it can be curtailed or scaled back to improve some privacy, but we haven't even started talking about the performance constraints of decentralized search, streaming, etc. Where will the primary files (e.g. videos) and supplementary files (e.g. recommender models, analysis features, graph, infrastructure, etc.) be hosted? How will you guarantee similar uptime and performance rates to AWS and GCP with a decentralized network of seeders?

You strictly cannot replace products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix or Google with decentralized counterpoints. The demand and feasibility is not there.

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

#217

Post by mark_l_watson »

witty_username wrote: post #133
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…

> tools for sharing locally hosted copies of Wikipedia, Why? It's much easier for the ISP to peer with Wikipedia/etc. Why would you want a low bandwidth gateway to the web? I don't understand the advantages.

Valid question. I was thinking about maintaining local copies of useful information for emergency use. Most things are going well in the world right now, but it is possible that there could be long term outages in infrastructure.

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

#218

Post by inopinatus »

zer0gravity wrote: post #116

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…

We're all choosing centralised silos despite having personal preferences otherwise. This is a systems outcome, and not one we'll change individually.

A distributed social network may arise, we just haven't yet seen the initial conditions, value chains, and systems structures that will bring it about.

This article gets excited about blockchain cryptocurrencies as the substrate, since money is a ubiquitous need. Well, it's worth pursuing. I'm still angry with Google & Facebook for killing off federated chat, which was the other nebula in which a new star protocol might've been born.

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

#219

Post by 35bge57dtjku »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #205
35bge57dtjku wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also which part of "people don't understand" is not condescending? How is asserting a fact like that in any way condescending?

Because it's not a fact

It is a fact. Some people don't understand. And even if it were false, that doesn't make it condescending. People are wrong about things all the time without it being condescending.

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

#220

Post by jshen »

powera wrote: post #139
jshen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something from the first part of the install which is not something a normal person would ever do: Configure the EC2 security groups (firewall) to let you reach Sandstorm By default, Amazon EC2 protects your virtual machine from being reached over the Internet. In the above tutorial, we allow the virtual machine to be reached on port 80. By default, Sandstorm uses port 6080, so look through the above tutorial…

Uh, if you can't figure that out from the directions, maybe you shouldn't run your own server? It's ludicrous to suggest that everyone should run their own server. It's like saying they should all build their own cars.

I agree, but people aren't going to pay someone to run a server for them when Facebook, twitter, snapchat, etc are free.

It's also hard to argue that it's fundamentally different if you don't run it yourself.

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