I think if you add some cryptography to Solid and use JSON-LD and pick some schemas and not expect everyone to implement OWL and then get a usable naming scheme for IPFS (or replace IPFS with something similar with names that work) and then create some P2P Solid servers then this could work pretty well.
Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
141–150 of 295 posts
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#142I went to the Decentralized Web Conferece a few years ago and really liked it. In spirit, I am onboard.
In practice, I am satisfied with just using my own domain for email, my web site, and self-hosted blog. For communication I like FaceTime so I can see people while I am talking with them, phone, and email.
I still use social media, very occasionally, to see what people are doing and sometimes advertise my new open source projects and updates, and any books I write. Most of the problems people talk about with Facebook/Twitter don’t bother me as long as I only use the systems infrequently. I am not tempted to cancel my accounts.
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#143Other people here have said this general idea here, the large centrealized services like Google and Facebook have succeeded in becoming so big through a lot of effort and a lot of cost, which was paid for by all the money they make. At a minimum they have to pay for their server use.
From what I understand the proposal here seems to not allow for the advertising model. I don't think a services can grow and survive making people paying because people are too cheap.
There might be a better chance for something like this is they allow for the economics. - Maybe the data host can provide a "advertising" profile which the user has control of. This can be exposed to the application hosts to allow for advertising. - Maybe you also throw micropayments into the mix, along with bartering for information or micropayments.
Another issue is complexity. A number of comments have talked bout over-engineered solutions and protocols. This decentralizezd idea could be started with something small like an open social network standard. I think I saw something similar to this on HN not too long ago: - You have a web site, which is your profile. A provider could give you a nice editor for it. - You have a feed, where you can put pictures, short posts, long posts, whatever. This is distributed with RSS. (The host makes this all seamless for you.) - Identity is controlled with OAuth, used only to give an identity to visiting users. The owner users can manage permissions for certain remote users (his "friends")
Such a service could be managed on your own web server, or there could be different cloud providers that make this arbitarily easy, with arbitrary levels of functionality on the "profile" page, the "feed" and the "friend" permission management.
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates. Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. The software itself might evolve to an hands-off, evergreen-type of approach, but for now just a desktop daemon is fine. The reason keeping servers updated seems so non-trivial is that we visualize it in an ops sense like we're at work.
> Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. As confirmed by the lack of complaints about auto update in Windows 10. I mean, its not like updates ever break anything anyways.
I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. Automatic security patches make a lot of sense in the current security climate, but once that infrastructure exists it is irresistible to use it for random feature creep and marketing.
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have ever seen any attempt by any government to regulate software you would know this to be a Lovecraftian nightmare, and not a solution.
If you have ever seen any attempt by any volunteer-run FLOSS team to solve nationwide social problems with technology you would know this to be a Lovecraftian nightmare, and not a solution.
But you aren’t legally mandated to use it.
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and…
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream,…
> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example.
Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”?
Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell.
I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not at all how argumentation works :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886753
That's exactly how argumentation works...
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and…
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream,…
Eh. I sympathize, but if you were to implement the same as a client-side app rather than a hosted service, AFAIK there's little history or legal precedent for shutting such a thing down. Well, there was the kerfuffle between Microsoft and Google over Windows Phone access to YouTube, but other than that... Admittedly, a client-side app might not be allowed into walled-garden app stores, limiting its reach if targeting mobile operating systems. Still, mobile isn't everything. I find it strange that after the long history of multi-protocol IM clients back when it was still called "IM", there are so few attempts to do the same for modern protocols. I think the barriers are partly technical – e.g. better encryption/obfuscation, more features and faster pace of changes making it harder to keep up. But even that can't explain everything: many APIs are not obfuscated at all, and many services can be boiled down to pretty simple functionality. Part of it, I think, must be social – like people aren't even aware that it's a possibility, or worth spending effort on.
Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and…
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream,…
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Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
#150It 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…
Why does it matter the last time anyone consumed RDF? If it's a good fit for the problem at hand (I don't know if it is), then there is no reason to not use it. It doesn't matter how old an idea is, just how it gets used.