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Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

ruben.verborgh.org

81–90 of 295 posts

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#81
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when mobile devices were rare, skype used p2p and was very popular and novel. But then an increasing percentage of nodes were mobile with limited power, limited bandwidth, and much less storage. Even being a member of a DHT (a nice way for distributed peers to keep track of each other) is a prohibitive from a battery life and bandwidth perspective for phones. So Microsoft moved skype to a centralized service and…

> How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist. > Most importantly, why would users car…

Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations.

The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter.

Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, or companies allow their developers to do so.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#82
post #71

I skimmed this and see two big problems. First, this idealistic idea that "we" are going to take back our data. Who is this we? Only the smart, high-agency people who have time to spare. The commercial web is increasingly tuned to the normal user, who is low-agency and easily led around. Who will win a battle of user acquisition and retention? Facebook or the rebels? Facebook of course. So any solutions proposed here…

> Without centralization, wouldn't we still have filter bubbles as people self-select into their online communities?

Perhaps, but those would be self-selected, not imposed by the provider. Big difference.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#83
The W3C has a proven track record to produce overengineered shit when it comes to "the semantic web".

Just look at ActivityPub. It's essentially OStatus but instead of XML we slapped namespaces on JSON, wrote a bunch of overly complex preprocessing procedures so that everyone can output just the way they want[1] and still made half the spec ambiguous enough[2] that implements essentially follow the one rule that matters, maintain compatibility with Mastodon.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld-api/#algorithm-5

[2]: https://please-just-end.me/ap.html#block-activity-outbox (domain name relevant to content)

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument might sound stronger if you didn't use the name of a dead protocol. All use of SSL has been prohibited by RFC since 2015. I'm pretty sure there aren't better alternatives.

People tend to use "SSL" to mean "CA-based TLS" these days, as in "SSL certificate".

Yes I know, and it's wrong. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's great as a giant red flag that somebody doesn't know what they're talking about, but then other people start repeating it and the dumbness spreads.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#85
post #32
post #8

I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources. For the majority of use cases, we don't need distributed storage, compute, etc. Just start making these self-hosted "servers", "data pods", etc as easy to install as desktop software and make it clear that they are inaccessible when the computer is off. People that aren't already wi…

Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP? Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise. I also feel like people are proposing solutions based on technologies as they stand today. Chosen solutions to the decentraliza…

you've clearly not used any of the modern roaming-enabled encrypted overlay networks that people have been working on. one example is hyperboria. i connect to a handful of public relays (and one that i host myself) and no matter where i am my device is reachable at the same ip address. the address is an ipv6-encoded hash of the public key that is used for routing. its actually really neat, and you don't need to wait more than a few seconds for the routing tables to update if you change locations.

https://hyperboria.net/

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#86

The W3C has a proven track record to produce overengineered shit when it comes to "the semantic web". Just look at ActivityPub. It's essentially OStatus but instead of XML we slapped namespaces on JSON, wrote a bunch of overly complex preprocessing procedures so that everyone can output just the way they want[1] and still made half the spec ambiguous enough[2] that implements essentially follow the one rule that matt…

The Semantic Web does not require XML these days. JSON-LD (for JSON) and GRDDL/Microdata (for HTML) are widely-acknowledged standards. For simple text use, akin to a Markdown-formatted document, you can use Turtle. If you believe that JSON-LD is genuinely ambiguous, take it to the authors of that spec and contribute to getting it fixed.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#87

The web is decentralized, and we already have control of our data. The problem is, people keep giving it away. I'm fairly confident that 98% of the population of the earth doesn't give a crap that their data is collected, or that they don't "control" it. This whole "decentralized web" thing is just privacy nerds trying to convince us that we need this, when really no regular consumer is asking for it.

Technologically, yes. But centralization takes many shapes (as I explain in the article: https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web... ). I encourage you to read the article, where you'll see that I'm arguing from a permissionless innovation perspective, not so much privacy.

We can already do this - but it's a bad idea.

Plenty of services are API compatible with Amazon S3 (e.g. anyone can run their own S3 clone) so people can modify existing sites to use S3 with OAuth. Use OAuth to allow the user to delegate access to their S3 service link. No new protocols needed, no big innovations required.

But for this to work on anything other than the most rudimentary data (media files, blog posts, and serialized data) would require completely changing the way all modern applications are written. Databases would all have to change, APIs would all need to follow specific standards, and networks would need to become a hell of a lot more stable, higher bandwidth, and lower latency.

Assume you're Twitter, and you want to map-reduce all of the data of all your users to find out how many people retweeted a user, and then notify those users. Now you need to connect to every user's service provider, get their data, store it temporarily on your own servers, duplicate everything, do your processing, and then write changes back to all storage services for all users. Now do this every second. If you don't, you have to store this map-reduced data on your own service's storage, which violates the principle of only using the user's storage pod.

In fact, data would have to become more centralized to work in this model. Currently, application data exists across a range of services in a variety of networks, all of it being dynamically accessed in different ways before it is accessed by a user. There are dozens of different databases used just to open up the TV Guide on your cable company's set-top box. All of that would have to be centralized in one or two databases in order for the storage and processing to be disconnected.

Not only that, but a lot of data is useless to anyone but the original service provider or original application. Only a Facebook clone would be able to use Facebook's data, and only data relevant to Facebook's ad sales should stay on Facebook's servers, even if it contains "Peter clicked on ad X at Y time". Should there be a separation of what kind of data gets decentralized? Do we really want to go down the rabbit hole of what is my data, and what is data about me that a company has originated and created value from? (Is a picture mine because it's a picture of something I own, or is it mine if I took the picture?)

The idea that every component of every application could be completely decentralized from each other is unlikely. Now, what is more in the realm of possibility is doing a Google or Facebook, and creating features that allow exporting or importing all data. But that process is not perfect, and the procedure can take from minutes to days. And to use this data it would still all have to follow standards specific to a particular application.

And again, we already have a lot of these data standards. We have standards for most of the kinds of data that exist today, such as calendar, contacts, e-mail, instant message, voip, office documents, images, and so on. We have standards to synchronize and syndicate data feeds. We have standards to federate accounts and manage permissions. But commercial sites don't natively build these features as interoperable with each other - because, why would they?

Storage and processing of data are intimately connected with the specific applications that use them, and trying to decouple them will result in inefficiency and complication, with no clear advantages.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#88
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP? Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise. I also feel like people are proposing solutions based on technologies as they stand today. Chosen solutions to the decentraliza…

> Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP? Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on. But even without that, there is still value. The ISP tracking isn't much of an issue using an existing network like Tor. Software starts up, reads the locally encrypted Sqlite DB for y…

a desktop that is already on most of the time or an upgraded router would work perfectly.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#89
post #79

It puzzles me that the linked data future is still discussed, as if we didn't already try it, and didn't already discover that developers dislike arcane RDF standards and the academic-rooted designers of the specifications have a terrible track record of solving real-world problems. And that now they're presenting linked data as some critical component of the decentralized web while skipping out on the debates that e…

There's been a lot of effort to improve RDF ergonomics with JSON-LD, and ActivityPub is a widely used standard based on JSON-LD (though my experience with implementing it has been quite challenging).

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#90

"In order to regain freedom and control over the digital aspects of our lives" Nothing proves his point more than:

How does running analytics on my site impair my ability to talk about what Tim Berners-Lee wants to do for freedom and control? ;-) Yes, I track how popular what content is on my site. Motivates me to write more. Please feel free to block trackers; I do that as well.

It undermines your argument, is what it does.

You can talk about it all you want, but as long as you continue to participate in the very thing you rail against, you're going to struggle to be taken seriously.

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