91–100 of 218 posts
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 the point.
Disclosure: I'm working in this field.
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.
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'll mention Amaya here. https://www.w3.org/Amaya/ The original vision for the web was that editing/creation had the same status as viewing/consumption, and that websites were writable as well as readable. This is what Amaya implemented. It never gained wide adoption, but is served as a reference implementation of the W3C's vision of the web. (In my experience Amays is not particularly usable because it regularly cra…
A good recent podcast about the decentralized web, with a technical focus, is JS Party #42, https://changelog.com/jsparty/42 . Featuring Mathias Buus and Paul Frazee from the Beaker project.
Handshake.org is tackling this problem by decentralizing DNS and removing the need for (and vulnerabilities associated with) certificate authorities. Disclosure: I founded Namebase which is a registrar for Handshake
I'm using the Namebase beta right now, it's great!
It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…
> I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run You might be interested in checking the InterPlanetary File System [1] which attempt to tackle this among other issue. I can't find it now but I remember the doc mentioning the need for a future space network to be decentralized, so there is that too. [1] https://ipfs.io/#why
So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection of offline networks, and when the planets align -- quite literally -- those networks will exchange all their new blocks.
It's a neat concept.
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…
Am I correct in undesrtanding no consideration is being made for server-executed code? How is access control implemented? It seems like this basically only applies to web content you want to give everyone access to and can have 100% of application logic run client-side. That's a pretty narrow cross-section of the existing web...
Access control in Beaker is through that private key - you need it in order to edit the 'dat' (name for a synced folder). So, no, there aren't a lot of complex permissions available - but you can also separate an app into several dats and use a master one to manage the permissions of those. Not terribly complex, but it's actually surprising how much you can do. (It's tough to wrap your head around not having a server - but it's actually true.)
But help me out - I think alot of the Web falls into this category:
* User logs in to edit their data (has private key to their dat). * User shares their data (blog, photo feed, whatever) with others (who don't have the key). * Those others merge all incoming feeds into a single master feed.
You could replicate YouTube, Facebook, Twitter this way - usually there are not complex permissions in these apps, are there? (Not that you'd want to replicate them...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…