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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

#51

Post by magila »

dcposch wrote: post #44
tannhaeuser wrote: post #35

I'm all for decentralized apps, but before venturing into that kind of complexity, how about getting back control over the Web? It was created as decentralized net (if not in the blockchain sense) and is the work of an entire generation.

That's what this is about. Current web tech is inherently centralizing. Say you want to create an experience like Instagram or Twitter, delivered via HTTP. You have to pay for bandwidth, CDNs, storage, app servers, DB servers, etc etc. At scale, it's millions a month. So only corporations can do it, and with a few exceptions (eg Craigslist, Stack Exchange) they end up monetizing and "growth hacking" in user hostile w…

The hosting cost for things like Facebook and Twitter are a pittance compared to the cost of employing all of the engineers/designers/etc who enhance and maintain those services. That IMO is the biggest economic challenge facing decentralized applications.

You can make some nice proof-of-concepts with a group of volunteers, but the effort required to provide a UX comparable to centralized services is going to take more than a handful of people working evenings and weekends.

Decentralized services generally do not afford the same monetization opportunities as central services. Decentralized proponents consider this a feature rather than a bug, but it leaves open the question: Who is going to pay for all of this?

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

#52

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

earenndil wrote: post #19
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a digital locker for your password that can only be decrypted by the password of 3 out of 5 friends.

Nah, what if your friends conspire against you? A better idea, imo, is you have three physical keys. If you lose one, then you can use the other 2 in order to revoke it and generate a new one.

There are already multisignature services being developed with a third party being one of the holders. I'd have to read up again on how it works but it makes sense when you hear it.

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

#54

Post by wslh »

There is an easy contrarian view about decentralization: even if a decentralized protocol wins, at the end it is all about the UI/UX/Aggregation which clearly cannot be decentralized. For example, OpenBazaar can be great but the one who develop the best UI and search engine will win.

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

#55

Post by cityzen »

I think the web is still so new that people will really struggle to understand a decentralized web. Even 20 years on and .com still reigns supreme as the best TLD around.

I'm in tech and I'm interested in a decentralized web but I also feel that throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a great idea. The article says, "The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms." To me it sounds like we're basically saying, "ok Facebook/Google/Twitter/Instagram... you're all too big to regulate so we're going to build A WHOLE NEW INTERNET". If they're smart enough to pollute the current system, they're smart enough to pollute a new system. In fact, these corporations are so big that you'll find out eventually that they've funded quite a bit of this decentralized web.

As a parent, I would feel at least a little better seeing some bankers, Pharma bros, tech execs, etc. actually go to jail and have their lives ruined for their blatant disregard of pretty much everything. I don't want to tell my kids, "well, we're too dumb to regulate the internet so we made another one.. and that one got messed up too... herp derp"

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

#56

Post by lgierth »

dfee wrote: post #53

Is there anywhere we can track the growth of these platforms though? For entrepreneurs, we need to understand the opportunity, not to menation OS developers adding support to their browsers to make this mainstream.

Just the other day, Chrome declared their Intent-to-Implement-and-Ship for more URL schemes in registerProtocolHandler(), which is a small first step: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

Firefox has been supportive of the effort for some time already, working on libdweb: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

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

#57

Post by voxadam »

na85 wrote: post #45
lbriner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the logic is that instead of everything going via a handful of servers at the big companies, it goes through many more thousands of individual PCs but of course, that depends on the technology used. Torrents should be faster but only if lots of people seed and don't simply download and disconnect.

Torrents themselves are often faster but it destroys the speed of anything else on the same pipe.

I found that configuring Smart Queue Management (SQM) on my OpenWrt router drastically improved this issue.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/...

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/...

https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/

https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechnica...

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

#58

Post by elvinyung »

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…

Well, I think this cyclical pattern shows exactly exactly why the thinking around the war machine is so important. Thinking about this very naively, to get closer to the kind of smooth space that D&G conceptualize, it is necessary to have some kind of homeostatic system that recognizes abstractly when power (and I'm using this term in a very naive, non-Foucauldian way) is being disproportionately concentrated in any one body, and corrects accordingly.

That said, as from my previous comment, I'm not totally confident that this kind of decentralization is even optimal, but that's a story for another time.

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

#59

Post by adventured »

magila wrote: post #51
dcposch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what this is about. Current web tech is inherently centralizing. Say you want to create an experience like Instagram or Twitter, delivered via HTTP. You have to pay for bandwidth, CDNs, storage, app servers, DB servers, etc etc. At scale, it's millions a month. So only corporations can do it, and with a few exceptions (eg Craigslist, Stack Exchange) they end up monetizing and "growth hacking" in user hostile w…

The hosting cost for things like Facebook and Twitter are a pittance compared to the cost of employing all of the engineers/designers/etc who enhance and maintain those services. That IMO is the biggest economic challenge facing decentralized applications. You can make some nice proof-of-concepts with a group of volunteers, but the effort required to provide a UX comparable to centralized services is going to take mo…

> The hosting cost for things like Facebook and Twitter are a pittance compared to the cost of employing all of the engineers/designers/etc who enhance and maintain those services.

Facebook had $20.4 billion in operating expenses in 2017. Less than 1/3 of that was the cost of its 25,000 employees (at the end of 2017). Facebook is spending more on its infrastructure than it is on all of its employees combined (and that much more when you reduce it to just engineers). Engineers are maybe 1/5 of its operating costs, including their all-in costs.

Both Facebook and Alphabet had roughly $15 billion in total capex for 2017. Data centers, networks, electricity, et al. cost a lot at that scale. It's not a pittance. Facebook spent ~$7 billion in 2017 on capital expenditures related to their network, data centers, etc.

Facebook's first Asia data center is a billion dollars to just start up.[1] When they put up new data centers in places like Henrico County VA, New Albany OH, or Newton County GA, it's similarly nearly a billion dollars a shot to start those up. Once you have dozens of those operating, it's billions of dollars per year to operate them all.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/06/technology/facebook-singapo...

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

#60

Post by zmw »

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…

I checked out Beaker Browser, and apparently it's based on the Dat project [1], which seems to be very similar to IPFS. Then apparently it follows that, just like IPFS, you can't throw random things onto the network and expect it to stick; you need to pay someone for hosting and bandwidth (that someone could be yourself) to have it pinned, and in order to have it available worldwide at all times you still need to pay for a CDN of sort — the Linux box in your closet, or worse, your laptop that sometimes goes offline just won't cut it. Eventually it's just another protocol to copy stuff around, where stuff originates from various servers (your browser basically embeds a server, capable of serving stuff), with the possible benefit of popular stuff may be p2p'ed (but if you're a business you probably can't rely on that anyway). I fail to see how it's radically different.

(Also, I'm not even sure how you could p2p private user data, unless you expect everyone to carry around one or more yubikeys, or implant chips into fingers or something; plus all devices need into buy into that. But I haven't given that much thought.)

[1] https://datproject.org/

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