Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by bobm_kite9 » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:34 AM UTC

This seems to miss the problem completely to me. The internet essentially solved the problem of _distribution_. That meant disintermediating away from publishers, and allowed anyone to publish.

The problem then moved onto being one of _curation_. Companies such as google, facebook, amazon are in the business of providing curation: i.e. taking away the leg-work of what we should attend to.

A de-centralized web doesn't appear to decentralize the problem of curation at all, which means we are going to still end up with centralized curation and the same or similar monopolies on attention that we have now.

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

#162

Post by dangerface » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

zmw wrote: post #60

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…

You are right, a p2p web wont solve the barrier to entry, but web hosting costs $20 a year, so its not much of a barrier.

The real cost is scale, $20 year will cover a few thousand users but if you want googles scale it will cost you in bandwidth and complexity. p2p like torrents radically reduces the cost of bandwidth by distributing it, but more importantly it reduces complexity by standardising it.

Once the complexity is standardised budget web hosting can provide google scale for dirt cheap, and there are millions of budget hosting companies too many to shutdown them all giving you censorship resistance.

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

#163

Post by gui67gk » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 10:09 AM UTC

The next big step?

The fundamental technologies were designed with decentralization in mind

Mastodon is just peered IRC all over again

The ISPs have poopooed running shared services from home connections.

DNS and the core protocols can run in decentralized ways no problem

It’s the social order that doesn’t enable it

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

#164

Post by dangerface » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 10:41 AM UTC

zmw wrote: post #85

pfraze wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things in p2p hypermedia (dat) that's not possible with http/s: * You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites * Integrity checks & signatures within the protocol which enables multiple untrusted peers to 'host'. This also means the protocol scales horizontally to meet demand. * V…

Thanks for the list. > You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites. Not entirely sure what you mean, - We can generates HTTP sites at will (all you need is an IP address); - We have existing protocols for mirroring sites (not implemented universally, but nor is dat://); - When you tal…

Its not a higher level of http, its more like lets use torrents instead of http because they are distributed and scale better. But the web is more than http, its dns and email and logins and all of that stuff, it all scales poorly, it can all be improved with distribution, lets not replace http with torrents lets replace it all with distributed stuff.

As an example you talk about needing a special device to manage keys which presents problems. It centralises your identity to your yubi key (instead of email), lose your yubi key and you lose your identity, what if it gets wet, crushed, corrupted, your fucked. Instead we encrypt the key and distribute it across the net, if a copy is deleted or corrupted there are other copies and its available to you anywhere anytime. Currently your identity is centralised to your email, if your email goes down you lose your identity, if its distributed and a copy goes down you just use it like normal.

Distribution solves pretty much all the problems centralisation creates, its just really complicated so we generally don't bother.

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

#165

Post by drasticmeasures » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 11:06 AM UTC

This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P...

...feels, to me, like a huge mistake.

How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom ends where another's begins, and hate speech, toxic content, illegal content, not being able to have what you said or did forgotten online, all these things curtail someone's freedom.

And by making it decentralised, they're just making it harder for people who are the victims of these problems to hold the people responsible accountable and to stop them. These technologists want freedom of speech at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

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

#166

Post by zzzcpan » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 11:15 AM UTC

drasticmeasures wrote: post #165

This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P... ...feels, to me, like a huge mistake. How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom…

> How would one eliminate

You simply make your own choices and don't follow/subscribe/view all that illegal, toxic, hate content. You know, the same way you do today by not visiting all those illegal, toxic, hate websites. They still exists though for those who don't share your views on policing content for other people.

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

#167

Post by drasticmeasures » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 11:21 AM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #166

drasticmeasures wrote: post #165

This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P... ...feels, to me, like a huge mistake. How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom…

> How would one eliminate You simply make your own choices and don't follow/subscribe/view all that illegal, toxic, hate content. You know, the same way you do today by not visiting all those illegal, toxic, hate websites. They still exists though for those who don't share your views on policing content for other people.

Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away for the victims.

The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them...

You can choose to ignore this when you see it, but the victims can't, and it's for their freedom that I'm concerned for.

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

#168

Post by zzzcpan » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 11:26 AM UTC

drasticmeasures wrote: post #167

zzzcpan wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would one eliminate You simply make your own choices and don't follow/subscribe/view all that illegal, toxic, hate content. You know, the same way you do today by not visiting all those illegal, toxic, hate websites. They still exists though for those who don't share your views on policing content for other people.

Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away for the victims. The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them... Y…

But you are advocating exactly that - ignoring the problem by blocking content instead of dealing with people engaging in those behaviors.

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

#169

Post by buboard » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 11:38 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #67

buboard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website. But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA. It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opp…

> The security and maintenance requirements

thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours.

I don't get why you think cloud solution is so much better. Glorified CDNs are a clumsy intermediate solution until internet connections get fast enough for everyone, that running a sharing node will have negligible impact. E.g. no cloud provider can compete with Popcorn Time in speed, despite billions of dollars of effort.

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

#170

Post by buboard » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 11:47 AM UTC

gsich wrote: post #128

rspeer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was and still is the case. We just have forgotten about it. In the past it was SETI/napster/torrents/kazaa etc. Someone else mentioned minecraft servers. There are also lots of people running similar opensimulator servers at their home. Unfortunately laptops/tablets have thinned that crowd and the possibility of having such arrangements is smaller overall now.