People were sounding the same alarm in the '90s with AOL. History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.
Who says it'll be a company?
A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
21–30 of 220 posts
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#22There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density]( http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ ) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you…
Good observations about the need for the Internet to handle long-distances. I wrote on scuttlebutt that telecommunication channels could become multi-modal like public transportation is often in Europe: https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25OryfD6hGpjiqwFkKyFnhVPZMPsZF...
Another way of bridging the gap in that white map is through data gossip: the person who leaves a village and comes back can bring data updates with them and share that with the village. Sneakernets in Cuba (as far as I know) work like that, but shouldn't be as fast as mesh gossip.
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#23Content-addressed overlay networks work pretty well over the Internet, and they could work equally well on mesh networks (as the article posits), if not two rather awkward problems: storage at rest, and liveliness of a storage node.
These two factors even interact to make the situation worse. Because at any point, nodes can drop off and you never know if this condition is temporary or permanent, a distributed datastore has to redundantly store everything. This needs much more space than just storing everything at its origin, as is done in location-addressed networks like Web.
These are not insurmountable problems, of course; it's just that right now, conditions like storage on nodes, link asymmetry, traffic distribution asymmetry still favor centralization.
And fundamentally, the operators of individual nodes (i.e. ordinary people) are often not very selfless, and not enough of them contribute to the health of the mesh even if they discretionarily choose the mesh: seeding ratios on BitTorrent networks that are not user-adjustable (e.g. old World of Warcraft downloader, Facebook patchsets) are much, much higher than seed ratios where the peer can bow out at any time, despite all of latter users choosing BitTorrent voluntarily.
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#24I'm all for p2p (really), but how about taking back control (sorry) of the Web by actually developing and enforcing declarative/markup technologies and standards instead of praising JavaScript because "it's not half bad" and adding procedural features to the Web (APIs, WASM)? With the current state of affairs wrt privacy and self-proclaimed standardization bodies, I'm not sure the Web is worth preserving.
HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…
Sorry, but I wouldn't like to lose the ability to build fully custom solutions. I don't want to rely on defaults. One person's sensible default is another's insane one. JavaScript is what it is today because it serves a purpose and frankly, I think it does it well enough for now. And without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same, and stuck in someone's idea of a sensible default.
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#25scuttlebutt is my main social media these days... oh and in case you're looking for git that's not wedded to github via your comments and issues, scuttlebutt plays really well with git - you push comments and code into your gossip-cloud together
What is it?
It's a community of people trying to build better tech to communicate with each other.
"""
If I were to write an internet health guide, it would start with:
“THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU ARE INCREDIBLE. THESE COMPANIES ARE BAD AND THEY'RE RUINING EVERYTHING. BUT YOU? YOU'RE WONDERFUL.”
Then the guide would say that it's alright to want to be online, because connection through the internet is good-as-hell. I'd only ask for one thing from the reader: to stop waiting for these companies to get better. Instead, learn enough technical skills so that you're no longer reliant on them.
“You already have all the tools you need, so let's sharpen them!,” the guide would say.
"""
— https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#26Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#27There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density]( http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ ) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you…
How does a mesh cope with most end-user Internet-connected devices (phones) running on battery power, especially in less developed areas? Would we be back to needing infrastructure nodes with wall power, or solar, or whatever?
This is what's keeping me from being over-the-Moon thrilled about stuff like IPFS—it's a bad fit for cell phones, which are most devices.
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#28Funny.
Before DRM, spam, i-have-to-monetize daily 5 minute of bloging into a full time pay, unskipable 30s YouTube ads, profiling every possible user behavior and other shady shit like that:
We wondered how can we improve the web.
Now, we wonder how to save it.
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#29People were sounding the same alarm in the '90s with AOL. History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.
Yes, the history of the early, open web, which now is in danger of being... history.
Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…
Sorry, but I wouldn't like to lose the ability to build fully custom solutions. I don't want to rely on defaults. One person's sensible default is another's insane one. JavaScript is what it is today because it serves a purpose and frankly, I think it does it well enough for now. And without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same, and stuck in someone's idea of a sensible defau…
> And without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same, and stuck in someone's idea of a sensible default.
That'd be amazing. I wouldn't have to manually kill awful anti-user elements on half the pages I visit, learn how some special snowflake interface works yet again, and so on. I'd know exactly when server communication was going to happen. I could set custom user styles to whatever I like, or, probably, select from the most popular user-submitted ones on some settings screen.
Write applications if you want that stuff. It's not like the current Web would go away, if you wanted to write exceptionally bad applications in e.g. Electron or write "web apps". I'd just like a program I can open to browse a document-centric web that I know won't spy on me, or use stupid amounts of resources to show me some text while hijacking scrolling, or show me popup ads, or auto-play video, make me adjust zoom levels per-page for the best reading experience, or any of that stuff that makes the Web worse and that we cannot get rid of without ditching (or crippling) Javascript and CSS. An enormous percentage of the Web would be vastly better under such a system, and most of the rest would be better as a real, native application.