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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

#121

Post by 013a »

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…

There's too much evidence to support the conclusion that companies like Facebook are far more bloated than they need to be for their core experiences. The reason is all about laws of diminishing returns, in every cross-cutting concern of the business.

Two engineers can't do twice as much as one engineer. Perfecting the ordering of the news feed is significantly less valuable to users than just having a news feed in the first place. Building a speech-to-text engine that works 99% of the time costs hundreds of millions of dollars more than one that works 95% of the time, but is it worth that much to users? Think of the number of engineers at Facebook or Twitter who just work on infrastructure, or supporting other engineers, or perfecting ad placement to improve CTR by 0.5%. All of these are tangential to the core experience, in many cases required or at least valuable only because Facebook is so big.

I can't just pick on Facebook here; this is why all companies will always get disrupted. Massive layers of scale behind the scenes to support products that are fundamentally simple, combined with advancing publicly available technologies helping newcomers.

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

#122

Post by mrtnmcc »

Just use WebRTC? Built in to most browsers (Chrome 28+, Firefox 22+, Edge 12+). Main hurdle is the UDP hole punching of NAT for users behind it needing a third party to help initiate the peer to peer connection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching

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

#123

Post by dcposch »

st26 wrote: post #101
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…

You have to pay for bandwidth, CDNs, storage, app servers, DB servers, etc etc. Decentralized serving has just as much bandwidth, storage, and iron (if not more). Does it somehow make those resources cheaper?

It simply distributes those costs to users. For the users perspective, it's free (zero additional cost) assuming they already own a computer and pay for monthly flat rate unmetered internet.

For example, in 2016 a friend of mine and I made an electron app called WebTorrent Desktop. It has over a million downloads. The total bandwidth transfer so far is probably a lot--wild guess, maybe a few million dollars worth?

But it is free and open source and costs roughly $0 to run--just enough to keep the website up. That's the magic of decentralization--you're simply writing software. You're not running a service.

--

Consider the total monthly internet bill of all Twitter users combined. Extremely rough guess, 500 mil montly actives * $40/mo for Comcast or something = $20b per month.

The crowd has more than enough bandwidth, disk space, and CPU cycles to run services at any scale. That's another magical aspect of dapps: the total resources available to the system automatically scale with the number of users. It's up to us to figure out how to harness it.

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

#124

Post by codeka »

vlovich123 wrote: post #111
frio wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a conference I attended years ago, the key motivator is that request/response networking is pretty much already broken when we get to the moon; once Mars comes into the picture, it'll be even more so. When each TCP packet requires an ACK, and an ACK takes minutes to arrive... things break down a bit. So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection o…

Each TCP packet does not require an ack, at least not as a "receive TCP packet send out ACK". They're returned collectively as a bitset for the last N packets instead based on your transmission window (which TCP stacks already tune based on your RTT). Can't see how you'd get rid of that if you're looking for reliable real-time transport medium. Additionally you can layer in forward error-correction above TCP to reduc…

None of that really matters if Mars is on the other side of sun from Earth. You'd need relay satellites to direct the signal around the sun, and even at the speed of light that's going to take tens of minutes, one way.

As the parents suggest, even at Earth-Moon distances, we need to completely rethink things.

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

#125

Post by d--b »

The web has some parts that are decentralized, and I think it’s worth noting the bad aspects of what exists today.

Perhaps the most decentralized part of the internet today is BitTorrent. It’s a very efficient way of sharing files and has a lot of success. One can see how BitTorrent could become the backbone of a decentralized web. However:

1 BitTorrent “naturally” throttles popular files over anything else. Niche items which are hosted by fewer people will be slower to download => BitTorrent makes a cultural echo chamber

2 BitTorrent needs some kind of centralized search engine: it’s not possible for everyone on the network to host a copy of the entire index of files on the network. The only way is to have a search engine, much like Pirate Bay. In fact one could say that google was this in the first place.

3 decentralized social media would be much more polluted with fake accounts since no “authority” would be able to fix it.

People have been excited by decentralized web for at least 5 years. The technology has existed for at least 10 years. If it was to happen, I think it would have happened already...

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

#126

Post by int_19h »

frio wrote: post #98
m3at wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

From a conference I attended years ago, the key motivator is that request/response networking is pretty much already broken when we get to the moon; once Mars comes into the picture, it'll be even more so. When each TCP packet requires an ACK, and an ACK takes minutes to arrive... things break down a bit. So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection o…

It's called "delay-tolerant networking", and we've been doing that for a long time - think Usenet.

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

#128

Post by gsich »

rspeer wrote: post #107
gsich wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would count Laptop to the PC category. Same year span - have a Laptop/PC from 2012 and you are good to go.

But the key difference remains: there aren't many personal computers that we leave plugged in and turned on 24/7 anymore.

This was never the case.

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

#130

Post by int_19h »

nine_k wrote: post #69
sixdimensional wrote: post #48

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".…

The "Fire upon the Deep" describes an interstellar communication system which is very email-nntp-fidonet like. I'm afraid it's more realistic that we could imagine.

It was written during the time that was the peak of those systems (the endless September would happen a year after the book was published), so there's no surprise there.

But I think it's not particularly accurate, in that, while latency would be extreme, that doesn't necessarily translate to bandwidth - and bandwidth constraints shaped Usenet and especially FidoNet as much as latency.

I think a more likely primary mode of operation would be WWW-like, but only your local part is actually real-time; everything else is synced in bulk as and when possible, with some creative approaches to update conflicts for writable resources.

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