Decentralized Web Primer

Sure your laser printer can serve a webpage. But nobody cares! They don't care to the extent that your printer-page will most likely not even be accessible, given the default settings on your or your ISP's routers.

In practice, most of your - and everyone else's - web traffic goes through the same few services. It doesn't matter that each of those services is made from a thousand servers each - logically, they form a single unit, and the web has mostly a star topology. This leads to ridiculously stupid amounts of waste at the endpoints - if you and me are sitting in the same room and both want to watch the same funny cat video, we both download gigabytes off youtube, even though after you downloaded the video I should be perfectly able to stream it off your machine via LAN. We use CDNs these days, which are literally top-down dictatorship style attempt at forcing some minimum distribution into this centralized system.

The web is centralized. Your comparison with writing a story would be more accurate like this: it's like someone writing a story about "modern slavery" that's really about wage slavery. Yes, the social phenomenon of actual slavery has pretty much disappeared, but we've replaced it with something similar with similar issues, only one level of abstraction higher.

The real problem there is the asymmetry of the bandwidth. If we had as much upload as we had download, we wouldn't have any reason not to shoot for a 1:1 ratio.

No they cannot. Here's an example: what if make a nice tutorial, put it on my web site and submit it here and r/programming? If the thing is well done, people will download the video, and the sheer amount of requests may be enough to render my site unresponsive, simply because I don't have the bandwidth.

So If I ever make a video, there's a good chance I host it to YouTube. Despite my reluctance to feed Alphabet. Even though I already operate a server.

> 1) people generally don't want to host anything

People want to publish stuff —that much is obvious. They want to avoid hassles if possible. And they rarely think about what centralised hosting entails.

That doesn't amount to "don't want to host anything". Granted, hosting stuff yourself is a major hassle these days. It doesn't have to be, though.

But as long as we have ISPs and a common communications architecture, if we start using a content-addressable system, doesn't that help censorship? As a censor, I jump from having to censor all domains that may serve one particular document (which is difficult, as we can see with pirate bay), to just having to force ISPs to block urls with the hash of the document that I want to censor.

So we go from having to jump among domains, to having to jump among content hashes, which seems much less practical, isn't it?

In my mind, until we have some sort of mesh network with efficient cache systems, the decentralization topic seems (to me) that is providing answers to the wrong questions.

I made a previous comment about this being a hard problem[1]. If competent ultra techno geeks can get hacked, the problem looks to be unsolvable for the general homeowner to safely run a p2p server.

Many recurring security+usability problems that nobody has solved in the general case. Examples... Heartbleed SSL bug that's undetected for 2 years before being fixed, social engineering, homeowner misconfiguration, p2p server data not being backed up, software updates as an attack vector for decreasing security instead of hardening security, etc.

If my grandmother asked me, "A friend said I can share cooking recipes if I install a p2p food wiki server, what do you think?" I would immediately say "No! Don't install it. I will find you a _centralized_ web recipes forum for you to log in to!"

I ran qmail on my home server in the 1990s to personally control my SMTP needs which should theoretically make me the biggest cheerleader for a "p2p food wiki server". Instead, it informs my position to stop my family members from installing p2p software. Think about why I would do that.

The "symmetric bandwidth" isn't the only underlying problem.

>That problem is never worse with P2P protocols.

Everything has tradeoffs -- including p2p. Otherwise, you have an incomplete picture that doesn't consider pros and cons. P2p is worse for latency, worse for analyzing a unified network landscape to identify and filter out hostile actors, worse for non-techie usability, worse for instantaneous propagation of software updates to fix zero-day exploits, worse for homeowner costs, etc. There isn't a "set & forget" p2p appliance you can build that solves all of that. BitTorrent gets around the negatives of p2p because the value of the data users transfer (pirated Star Wars movies or Adobe software etc) overrides the hassles.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11861683