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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#141

Post by inopinatus »

ssalazar wrote: post #91
dTal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it's worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of th…

The barrier is from the tools, not NAT. Maintaining your own server is prohibitively difficult for pretty much anyone besides niche technology enthusiasts or IT professionals. > Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections NAT never stopped you from port forwarding 80 to your local server and many peo…

Protocols need not always be client-server. The barrier raised by middleboxes is mainly to peer-to-peer applications, whose progress may have been systematically inhibited as a result, in favour of server-based i.e. centralized applications. If that hadn't happened, then your personal micropublishing social media tool might today be a peer-to-peer application, rather than a centralized advertising behemoth. There's no intrinsic expectation that end-users must feel like they're running a server in that user story.

Consider this: the application protocols that arose in the early days of the Internet were decentralized/federated systems such as NNTP, SMTP, IRC. But application-level protocols that are developed with a P2P or federated architecture today are niche rather than mainstream (like BitTorrent), or dead because a major company killed their adoption (like XMPP).

The canary was the loss of old-school active-mode FTP, broken by middleboxes impeding connections. Plenty of people saw this coming.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#143

Post by anigbrowl »

harel wrote: post #24
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Of course not, but if you want to be an app, be an app. There's huge value for consumers in standardization, that was something people liked about paper encyclopaedias back in the day: a huge amount of information presented in a consistent format that's easy to navigate. By comparison, the web is a drugstore magazine rack with minimal functionality wrapped up in eye candy.

Way back in the early days of the web (said the old man) you also had control over how stuff presented int eh browser, you could customize fonts etc. to read stuff in a way that was comfortable for YOU. I absolutely hate everything being defined at the server end; large parts of the Settings page in my browser don't actually mean anything because nobody uses standardized html any more, and so client-side user interface development has stalled badly. I swear desktop Linux looked better 15 years ago than it does now because people took theming more seriously.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#145

Post by navls »

coding123 wrote: post #35

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search t…

Not sure if I am misunderstanding the problem, but are you aware you can exclude terms from the search results? For example with google "baseball cards -ebay" will omit pages where ebay is mentioned.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#146

Post by wott »

dTal wrote: post #80
dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

>How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it's worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of th…

I don't get this habit of always blaming every problem in the world on NAT.

NAT has (almost) nothing to do with that.

The real reasons are twofold.

1. As others mentioned, the work of maintaining a self-hosted service. Nowadays you can add two extra related problems: people expect reliability (which is difficult and costly to provide, for a hobbyist or a lambda), and Internet has become an hostile territory you must defend against all time (it's "cavemen meet Wild West" level of civility, all day long, no rest).

2. The main problem with self-hosting, is that the throughput is often asymmetric, and rightfully so. From 75/1200 bps modems to ADSL, we have always needed more download than upload so systems were designed that way. When we write one message, we read hundreds of messages from hundreds of people, when we upload one picture, we watch a thousand of them, and so on. When you self-host, you reverse the roles, and your access is very quickly saturated, it gets unsuitable as soon as you have a few connexions.

Just enable the port-forwarding feature of your Internet Box, and you can host what you wish on your server(s); it takes 2 minutes in its web interface and NAT 'problem' is solved. But the other two remain.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#147

Post by anigbrowl »

soared wrote: post #33
quickben wrote: post #28

Funny. 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.

Spam, scams, and bad ads have been around since the start, what internet were you using?

Since the start of the web, arguably. Usenet used to be really pleasant to use apart from the first few weeks in September when a new bunch of college students had to be integrated into the system. Spammers blew up something wonderful for a quick buck.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#148

Post by romaniv »

carussell wrote: post #134
romaniv wrote: post #10

The reason the Web needs rescuing is because it's not a particularly well-designed system that has been patched over and over again for the last quarter century. And now it has been degraded to a delivery layer for JavaScript apps, a poor RPC protocol and an overly complex UI rendering toolkit. It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and…

> It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing. [...] He was talking about the lack of protocol-level solutions for resilience of the Web. That's completely at odds with what Kay actually advocates for. His position is strongly aligned with the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy. That is, what he advocates for is less of what yo…

Having watched nearly every talk/interview of Kay I could find on YouTube (which includes the OOPSLA keynote) and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for.

Here is Kay talking about Internet's resilience in a bit more detail:

https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1472

>His position is strongly aligned with the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy.

I don't see how this opposes or contradicts any of what I wrote above.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#149

Post by mastax »

niftich wrote: post #85
cJ0th wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge. Sure, but why should we rely on a single middleman who at some point could abuse his power? Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

> Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion. How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judge…

BitTorrent presents a plausible (but not complete) replacement. Most torrents nowadays are disseminated through the DHT. User clients can query the DHT to search for specific content, which is then downloaded via its content hash through trackers. Many websites are also available which provide indexes and other features (comments, virus scans, ratings, etc.) on top of this DHT database.

It would be a technical stretch to expand this to replace Google, but if you did you'd have many competing "search engines" built upon an open decentralized database.

I don't think I've expressed this idea well, but you should get the gist.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#150

Post by barsonme »

gaius wrote: post #56
harel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same Designers generally vastly overestimate how much users actually want "design".

And developers vastly overestimate how much users really want bland websites like we had 10+ years ago.

Sure, _we_ like it because it can be great for "power users" like _us_, but 99% of the population aren't power users.

It reminds me of devs wondering why many people prefer bloated, slow GUIs to CLIs.

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