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Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

theguardian.com

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Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#31

Post by skybrian »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #27

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

This seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#32

Post by hestefisk »

elvinyung wrote: post #10
jotm wrote: post #4

How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others? This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online. Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe. Fix the users - save the Internet! :)

I think a lot about this. In A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power fr…

Awesome to see others on HN loving D&G. But perhaps also power is cyclical. When the web was first popularised, it had the same potential as what DWeb has now. TCP/IP was written to be inherently distributed and provide resilient routing. Then, as soon as it starts to threaten existing power structures, forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’. It becomes part of the rhizome, the rhizomatic system of power, that the new system (in this case TCP/IP / www) set out to challenge, creating an even more complex, ever-evolving rhizome of power (surveillance, paywalls, censorship). The same thing happened with other revolutions throughout history — the power base they set out to challenge, transmorphed into a similar power structure as an unintended consequence.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#33

Post by antt »

orasis wrote: post #23

Large systems want to centralize for the sake of efficiency. I was among the first wave of P2P hackers in the 2000s and we learned the hard way that decentralization leaves a LOT to be desired.

Not to mention that back then we a performance ratio of edge to node that was order of magnitude better than the one we have today. A laptop today and one from 2010 don't have that much difference in performance, a data center from 2010 and one from today are day and night.

And who will pay for it? With experience Xanadu seems like the only solution. The reason why it's in development hell is because the problem it's trying to solve is so hard.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#34

Post by hestefisk »

peterwwillis wrote: post #14
jotm wrote: post #4

How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others? This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online. Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe. Fix the users - save the Internet! :)

It's not really technological or social, it's logistical. We've had all kinds of redundant network topologies that used independent networks for decades. The internet is decentralized, and it works pretty well, all things considered. The web is fairly decentralized, too: DNS is independent of a registrar is independent of a network service provider and all are independent of ISP's, and even those are independent of b…

HTTP is client / server (session) based, but TCP / IP certainly isn’t. I’m is act as a client / server protocol because we tell it to, but IP networking was written to be distributed / decentralised so as to provide better resilience, unlike other networking standards at that time (token ring, anyone?).

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#36

Post by kickscondor »

styfle wrote: post #26
kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

Can you explain what you can use beaker browser for, even without adoption?

Yeah, so in my case, I wrote a blogging thing that runs in Beaker. I can run it from any of my machines and it has no server. This is great because it is insanely portable - I can setup the software on a new machine by just going to the URL. It is just "software as a service" but there is no server. It's somewhat similar to TiddlyWiki but Beaker adds automatic synchronization. (I still manage the JS code itself in git, but the blog posts are managed by Beaker.) Thank you for the question, styfle.

Look up Tara Vancil's talk on "A Web Without Servers" if you need a crystal clear explanation - don't know if I'm doing adequately. And my blog is at kickscondor.com if you're curious why I had to write my own blog warez. Also, there is a resurgence in blogging happening right now with the shakedown of social media. It's great.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#37

Post by buboard »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #27

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#38

Post by lgierth »

hestefisk wrote: post #32
elvinyung wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot about this. In A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power fr…

Awesome to see others on HN loving D&G. But perhaps also power is cyclical. When the web was first popularised, it had the same potential as what DWeb has now. TCP/IP was written to be inherently distributed and provide resilient routing. Then, as soon as it starts to threaten existing power structures, forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’. It becomes part of the rhiz…

> forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’

Which is ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/AFRINIC/LACNIC and the DNS root zones, and ICANN on top.

Not to say that's only bad, just trying to illustrate that in this case, D&G's point is actually pretty tangible.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#39

Post by antpls »

When we think about decentralization, we sometime think about uncontrolled extreme decentralization. That's the ideal : no single point of failure, with everyone hosting their data where they want, and deciding who access what about them.

Practically, as pointed in the article, there are laws to comply with and those are IMHO the biggest lock to decentralization.

The fair middle ground between extreme centralization à la Facebook/Twitter and total network anarchy is something based on federation, like emails and Mastodon. With federations, there are several providers for the same end-user application, with native data exchange and interoperability. The idea is to give the power to anyone with hosting capabilities to compete with the Giants, even if only a few domains will actually survive (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc because of network effects and funds, probably).

What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#40

Post by gsich »

buboard wrote: post #37
sheeshkebab wrote: post #27

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again

I wouldn't say it's a "decline". Most people just don't need an upgrade. You can use a PC from ~7 years ago for most stuff today. Gamers are not the majority here. The best performance boost you get from an older machine is a SSD.
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