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Decentralized Web Primer

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Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#41

Post by bitmadness »

da02 wrote: post #9
blunte wrote: post #2

Could be that I'm just really out of touch, but I need at least one paragraph saying "What is this?" (and ideally also, "Who is the target audience?" - or "Why would I be interested in reading this?")

I'm with you on this one. I had to Google all of this for a few minutes. This is my best interpretation below. I hope others will come in and correct my silly mistakes. (Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and English is my 2nd language): "So you know how people use BitTorrent to distribute big-budget Hollywood movies with occasional mediocre storylines? What if you could distribute your own data on a similar P2P networ…

Pretty good explanation mate! No need for that disclaimer ;)

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#42

Post by marknadal »

xrd wrote: post #30
marknadal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step after DAGs is CRDTs. They have a research page on this: https://github.com/ipfs/research-CRDT One of them is us ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), David reached out the other week, now we're trying to find time to discuss with Juan how to best integrate.

That's exciting that Gun is looking up adopt CRDT. Is that what you are saying? A real open source competitor to Google Firebase.

Thanks! GUN is already a CRDT (it is a generalizable CRDT on graphs), which is why IPFS is chatting with us. Our CRDT has an emergent property of composability though, which lets other specialized CRDTs be implemented on top in just a few lines of code (take this example, of a counter CRDT: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/snippets-(v0.3.x)#counter ).

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#43

Post by jkarneges »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #23
staunch wrote: post #18

"The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now. It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. This new IPFS-based decentralized web is interesting but it's not even a measurable percentage of web traffic today. Far from being "The". What we need more than anything is to actually realize the beautiful dream TBL had for the WWW. HN is one great example but there should…

No. The web as it works right now is naturally centralised, for a simple reason: the bandwidth costs on a server is proportional to the size of its audience. This is why we need YouTube to begin with, instead of millions of people posting their videos on their personal page. There are other factors of course: firewalls, asymmetric bandwidth, security issues, technical ignorance… But the client-server model does play…

> This is why we need YouTube to begin with, instead of millions of people posting their videos on their personal page.

People can post videos to their own hosted pages already. We "need" YouTube because 1) people generally don't want to host anything, and 2) it provides connectedness (search, related videos, subscribers, etc).

P2P makes the first issue worse. The second issue is a problem of data federation, not client/server systems.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#44

Post by bogomipz »

staunch wrote: post #18

"The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now. It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. This new IPFS-based decentralized web is interesting but it's not even a measurable percentage of web traffic today. Far from being "The". What we need more than anything is to actually realize the beautiful dream TBL had for the WWW. HN is one great example but there should…

>""The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now."

I believe the context of "The Decentralized Web" here is meant to contrast the increasing centralization of content from FB, Google, Medium, login walls pay-walls etc.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#45

Post by Waterluvian »

blunte wrote: post #2

Could be that I'm just really out of touch, but I need at least one paragraph saying "What is this?" (and ideally also, "Who is the target audience?" - or "Why would I be interested in reading this?")

Way too many project pages are like this. It really shows how nontrivial good documentation is to make.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#46

Post by bringtheaction »

mxstbr wrote: post #13
da02 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on this one. I had to Google all of this for a few minutes. This is my best interpretation below. I hope others will come in and correct my silly mistakes. (Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and English is my 2nd language): "So you know how people use BitTorrent to distribute big-budget Hollywood movies with occasional mediocre storylines? What if you could distribute your own data on a similar P2P networ…

While he doesn't touch on IPFS iirc, this talk by Mathias Buus is what got me excited about decentralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tf14VpeHlE He does a great job explaining e.g. Merkle Trees in a practical manner that made me immediately go "Wait, I could use this for X and Y?!" Recommended watch!

Thanks for the recommendation. Positively great talk and you are right it inspires a lot of usecases. Speaking as someone who had heard about Merkle trees but never looked into the details of what they were about, this talk was absolutely worth watching. Regarding IPFS there was a question at the end about the difference between IPFS and the stuff he talked about so it's briefly talked about by the speaker then.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#47

Post by hedora »

staunch wrote: post #18

"The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now. It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. This new IPFS-based decentralized web is interesting but it's not even a measurable percentage of web traffic today. Far from being "The". What we need more than anything is to actually realize the beautiful dream TBL had for the WWW. HN is one great example but there should…

Agreed. As cool as IPFS is, I only clicked on it because I thought it was going to explain how to scale my Tim Berners-Lee WWW server in a decentralized way (without relying on some big monolithic company). Has anyone seen a primer like that?

As for IPFS, I’d love to see them succeed, but as long as you have to know about merkle trees, hashing, etc for it, it’s not going to be any more mainstream than things like PGP or IRC.

Finally, they claim IPFS is good for archival. To me, that means it will be as good as putting a few hundred paper books in a few hundred different libraries around the world. With that in mind, how does censorship work with IPFS? If the government wants to rewrite history by deleting my archive, how do the mirrors avoid being tracked down, and told to selectively delete the undesirable blobs?

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#48

Post by lninyo »

How about you start with what in the F€>£ is ifps? Not everyone is clued in to whatever the FISH you spent the last four years of YOUR life working on.

A little intro section would be nice. I’m just sayin’

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#49

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

saurik wrote: post #28
staunch wrote: post #18

"The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now. It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. This new IPFS-based decentralized web is interesting but it's not even a measurable percentage of web traffic today. Far from being "The". What we need more than anything is to actually realize the beautiful dream TBL had for the WWW. HN is one great example but there should…

> It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. DNS is fundamentally centralized.

How so? I see how "the" DNS is centralized in ICANN's list of root servers, but from a technical standpoint isn't the use of that list just a convention?

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#50

Post by hedora »

bogomipz wrote: post #44
staunch wrote: post #18

"The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now. It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. This new IPFS-based decentralized web is interesting but it's not even a measurable percentage of web traffic today. Far from being "The". What we need more than anything is to actually realize the beautiful dream TBL had for the WWW. HN is one great example but there should…

>""The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now." I believe the context of "The Decentralized Web" here is meant to contrast the increasing centralization of content from FB, Google, Medium, login walls pay-walls etc.

Those sites are all part of the decentralized web. Port 80 on my laser printer, router and flower pot are too.

Using old well-defined terms to describe new concepts just leads to confusion.

It would be like writing a story called “the history of the industrial revolution” that’s really about 3d printers.

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