Poor name. The web is already decentralized.
Decentralized Web Primer
81–90 of 97 posts
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#82Unless your project needs censorship resistance, you can probably ignore this.
You can still consider learning about it and supporting it if you dislike the wastefulness/inefficiency of present-day web, or hate how fragile and ephemeral it is.
How would the inefficiency of the modern web be alleviated by replicating the same data on more nodes? That _increases_ wastefulness, not decreases it.
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#83Could 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…
Most of the seedbox providers already support a good subset of this.
You can view your files in a browser, you can stream with Plex. You also have full ssh and ftp access, but those are not reallt the points being made here.
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People can post videos to their own hosted pages already. 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 hos…
You can easily get more bandwidth though, it's not that it is somehow forbidden. You just don't want to pay for it. That is what youtube gives you: 'unlimited' video hosting bandwidth (and improved discoverability) in return for the opportunity to play their ads before your video. The bandwidth costs also don't magically disappear with IPFS, it is just a convenient way to make other people pay for it. In order of inc…
> You can easily get more bandwidth though, it's not that it is somehow forbidden. You just don't want to pay for it.
Exactly, I'd like my viewers to pay for it. There are limits to my generosity, after all.
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the problem is when someone relies on you I'm not sure what you're getting at. The problem is only magnified with the web: there's only one seed. If a site is down, it's down , and you can only hope Google cache or the web archive got a copy. That problem is never worse with P2P protocols.
That is only valid when all nodes have an equal chance of being down. Big websites have entire teams dedicated to keeping their site online, so even though it's centralized, youtube is actually a very stable website. A torrent with one seeding peer (or an IPFS object where only one node has it pinned) can potentially disappear if a single machine has a disk failure.
The basic assumption is independence, so I'm not even considering centralised hosting by Amazon or Alphabet.
I am also assuming that if someone cares at all about seeding something, they will make sure it's not down too often.
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Make secure software that is simple to implement, simple to use, and hard to misuse (it's not that hard dammit, just look at qmail). 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.…
> I made a previous comment about this being a hard problem[1].
That comment doesn't address the same problem. I'm fully aware that current software makes it virtually impossible to conveniently and securely host stuff ourselves right now. I am also fully aware that a general purpose computer can never be idiot proof.
What I was saying is, we should write special purpose software dedicated to a few chosen forms of hosting (mail, web, some P2P stuff for big files…). The software can be simple, secure, and easy to use. It just doesn't exist for the most part.
Also, one problem at a time. Wikis are great, but we're talking about allowing untrusted write access to the system, which is possibly the hardest problem of all. Let's start by single author publishing and build from there.
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#87Earlier 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…
Most of the seedbox providers already support a good subset of this. You can view your files in a browser, you can stream with Plex. You also have full ssh and ftp access, but those are not reallt the points being made here.
Thanks for pointing out all of this. But are some of the points being made that I missed?
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#88Not sure but didn't get any information about how the data is stored between the nodes. Does each node keep full state and synchronize when connected to the network(similar to blockchain), or is the data split between available nodes? Could someone clarify the storage part?
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 cli…
> People can post videos to their own hosted pages already. 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 hos…
>> People can post videos to their own hosted pages already.
> 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.
He was already stating he didn't think hosting videos on their own page was the best solution for most audiences, in fact, nearly every audience today. Why are you arguing anyway?
Re: Decentralized Web Primer
#90This looks really interesting and I look forward to reading it but IPFS is not the only player in the decentralized web game. One only needs to start typing "IPFS vs" in Google. Perhaps "An IPFS Primer" would be a better title?
I agree. IPFS itself has taken a very tacky Silicon-Valley-startup approach to marketing: "IPFS is the Distributed Web". IPFS is distributed and could be used as a web platform. But it's not "the" anything. For me, it's a really big turnoff. Most people involved in the decentralized web movement are very non-commercial. IPFS always seems to have a "shilling for VC funding" taste.