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Decentralized Web Primer

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Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

WJW wrote: post #82
TeMPOraL wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replication is cheap. When the data travels over the wire, it's being constantly "replicated" at every hop (data doesn't really "travel", it's just being copied over and deleted afterwards). When you send data halfway around the planet and back, you're doing a lot of copying. IPFS model makes it so that after you do that, other people around you don't have to do the same long roundtrip to get the same file.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#92

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

I think we ought to be distinguishing between "decentralized" and "distributed". The original web as we used to know it was decentralized. IPFS is distributed.

In social media: [Mastodon][0] is decentralized. [Patchwork][1] is distributed.

[0]: https://joinmastodon.org/ [1]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#93

Post by NoGravitas »

bababooey wrote: post #78

The biggest advantage of centralization is the ability to delete something from the normie web and have it deleted. Granted, nowadays you have things like the internet archive, but I don't see normal people going along with IPFS for dynamic content like social media as long as you cannot delete things.

Yeah, one of the problems with content-addressable systems like IPFS is that they don't support the "right to be forgotten". And I've heard a lot of big supporters of content-addressable systems arguing that's a good thing, because links never break. But I don't like a world where I can't take down my own blog post[0], only unlink it from my home page.

[0]: Yes, I'm aware anyone can host a copy of my deleted page. But it will be served on a different URL, and it takes extra work to do, unlike IPFS or similar.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#94

Post by bogomipz »

hedora wrote: post #59
bogomipz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So out of the one sentence that I wrote you decided to ignore the part where I wrote that decentralization was referring to centralization of content? Another word for centralization is consolidation. You might want to look up the term "walled garden": https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512316/facebook-and-googl...

I didn’t see the word “content” on first reading. I never have encountered Google or FB created content (other than open source code), and I also don’t use their news aggregators (or other services), so (with the exception of YouTube), I don’t think of them as being in the content game at all. Anyway, I’ve been happily ignoring their walled gardens for decades, and using the decentralized web for news, etc. Certainly…

>"Also, “Decentralized” is a technical term."

No “Decentralized” is not a technical term. "Distributed" is a technical term, Google runs a large, "distributed" architecture.

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#95

Post by aqsheehy »

thesagan wrote: post #38
aqsheehy wrote: post #35

Unless your project needs censorship resistance, you can probably ignore this.

Well, my personal project as a voracious reader and critical thinker does needs censorship resistance on behalf of a diversity of authors who wish to publish their thinking.

Who is trying to censor you?

Re: Decentralized Web Primer

#96

Post by thesagan »

aqsheehy wrote: post #95
thesagan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my personal project as a voracious reader and critical thinker does needs censorship resistance on behalf of a diversity of authors who wish to publish their thinking.

Who is trying to censor you?

Not me, authors I may read.
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