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How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

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Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#121

Post by fjsolwmv »

awakeasleep wrote: post #51
fjsolwmv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The popular communities (Twitter. Reddit, Youtube, email spam) are already toxic. The solution to that is good UX this puts users in control of which content is put in their face.

I'd suggest a bit of reflection on this comment. There is a bubble or perspective that derides everything popular as toxic, but I encourage you to think in degrees, and compare things. For example, visit voat.co, and then 4chan, and then compare them to the sites you listed. And hell! compare them to your family discussions, and what you see on fox/cnn/msnbc. I bet you can find a spectrum of toxic content, and I bet…

I agree that some places are worse, but I don't see value in accepting a more diluted poison. Bad apples spoil the bunch. In fact Reddit's I'll may be worse because the non toxic content is attractive enough that it draws users in only to be chronically sideswiped by the toxic content, while voat can be simply if ignored.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#123

Post by fjsolwmv »

hutzlibu wrote: post #113
jillesvangurp wrote: post #87

The man deserves credit of course for helping create the first browsers and promoting the early web and his work for W3C. However, Tim's track record is not great when it comes to backing new versions of the web. E.g. Semantic Web never happened and arguably this is his latest attempt at flogging that dead horse. So, my prediction is that this won't get very far. It seems the website is a bit hand-wavy on the actual…

"Mostly that never happens. " Might be because there are no decentralized competitors to facebook, who offer the same possibilities bugfree. Never seen that.

Same isn't good enough. You need a killer app to get people to switch.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#124

Post by mattlondon »

PhilWright wrote: post #23

The problem with your personal data store is that it will be impossible to stop the large companies like Google/Facebook from simply copying and caching a copy of all the data they need to access. You give them permission to handle your email and calendar information and bingo, they have a copy of your entire set of emails and appointments. If you use multiple services from Google/Facebook then they will end up with…

The datproject [1] had an interesting approach to this. Distributed data stores that you control and are addressable via hashes, with client-side apps that work 100% in browser just by pulling in the distributed copies of that data (via its hash) - no backend slurping it up.

Of course, it is not impossible for the client-side app to send the data back up to the server. Even if encrypted somehow once decrypted in the client for display to humans then its hard to protect that plain-text data. There were also some other open questions like if my distributed data is distributed, how can I "take it back?" I dont think there is a mechanism for that yet - some sort of TTL might work there though, if you can somehow bake it into the data/hash itself to avoid bad clients from ignoring TTL values before deleting/archiving.

1 - https://datproject.org/

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#126

Post by VBprogrammer »

tpxl wrote: post #110
yason wrote: post #102

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices…

>If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR GDPR does not prevent people from hosting forums

The new Copyright Directive may have that effect though.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#127

Post by pjmlp »

egonschiele wrote: post #20
zsck wrote: post #12

A lot of folks seem to think this kind of technology needs to be marketed or launched the way a hip Silicon Valley startup should be. I understand how the argument that critical mass is the necessary ingredient for success would appeal to people, but it’s not like the Internet succeeded that way. In fact, it’s probably better if foundational technology like this is developed and grown more slowly and deliberately. I…

> the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.

What developers?!

I really dislike this HN generalization that software developers are a big mass of people that think all the same way, which most of the time is actually a synomim for a thin subgroup of developers doing web applications with CLI tooling on UNIX like OSes.

There are many kinds of developers out there, some of us have experienced multiple kinds of platforms and development models towards the years, to make our business decisions how to provide our work according to points of view and related cost/benefit.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#128

Post by uncle_phil »

kopo wrote: post #116
Juliate wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let the King and nobles be educated, decide, rule them and govern the country." could have said many 3 centuries ago. Cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association . "Because freedom of association necessarily recognizes pluralistic sources of power and organisation, aside from the government, it has been a primary target for repression by all dictatorial s…

Well put. All the regulation and change Ralph Nader and co managed to make happen didn't take more than a few hundred motivated people - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE People are "lazy and don't care" is dialogue you hear from people who don't have the experience of getting things done.

People are lazy and don't care.

It's why we are now in a world where either Google or Apple have access to pretty much every piece of data that every person on the planet produces or consumes.

The Google Problem in particular is spawned by people wanting free or cheap stuff at any cost.

It will take more than a few hundred people to change this now. It's too entrenched.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#129

Post by pjmlp »

baq wrote: post #112
lelandbatey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, Linux owning the back end development space so completely is due to developer preference. But I think you do have a point. It's not just developer preference, there are other big factors like feature offered and ease of entry that determine likelihood of success.

> Arguably, Linux owning the back end development space so completely is due to developer preference. and why is that possible? it's because the backend is decoupled from where the users are.

Because commercial UNIX companies decided it was cheaper to commoditize UNIX on their hardware than keeping on investing on their own.

Linux would hardly be where it is without the help of Intel, IBM, HP, SGI, Hollywood studios, ...

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#130

Post by pjmlp »

flukus wrote: post #46
Aunche wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers love Apple. They don't have to worry whether their apps will work on a million different Android devices.

Some developers love them, but as a developer myself the idea that I need apples permissions to run my own apps on my own machine makes my skin crawl. If early computing was a walled garden environment like iOS I never would have been a developer.

Early computing was a kind of walled garden.

Each computer system was its own eco-system with special hardware features.

The PC was the exception to it, only because IBM wasn't too clever about securing the platform like everyone else.

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