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Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

ruben.verborgh.org

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

#171

Post by deevolution »

taohansen wrote: post #124
ArtDev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my Synology NAS server :) Though its not really simple enough for non-technical people to set up.

I also love my Synology DS-218+. I'm hosting my own Spotify (Airsonic [1]); music tagged to perfection with Beets [2]), an IRC bouncer because Matrix is still not ready, my own Netflix (Synology's Video Station [3]), and my own mailserver (Synology's MailPlus Server [4]). I've been giving out access to this pod to close friends. It's empowering and community-building. This is the kind of social network I desire: clos…

Sick, now turn this into a product that can be adopted by the masses!

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

#172

Post by ericflo »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #161
hypothete wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you on implementation - every time I make an attempt to try out ActivityPub I get intimidated by the combo of JSON-LD and the verbosity of Activity Streams vocabulary: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/

I've been working on an ActivityPub implementation and there are so many edge cases and SHOULD vs MAY recommendations, it's ridiculous. I'm planning a separate blog post on the intricacies of the standard.

I banged my head against this issue quite a bit last year. Specifically the thing that tripped me up, is how many fields can either have single value or be a list of values, and figuring out what is meant semantically when it's a list or a single value.

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

#173

Post by chrisseaton »

hossbeast wrote: post #165
chrisseaton wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on. I literally do not know anyone who owns a desktop computer any more.

And yet, we continue to exist.

The point isn’t non-existence -it’s rarity. You cannot ‘just’ do something as a general solution when it only applies to one in a hundred.

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

#174

Post by peteforde »

This essay is in radical need of a TL;DR. If something is this important, you owe it to the subject matter not to bury the lede under a mountain of history and flowery exposition.

Ask yourself: who is this for? People who are not already deeply passionate will stop reading unless they are engaged in a minute of reading. Note that a minute is being extremely generous; on a commercial consumer site, it's apparently an average of 7 seconds before someone will click away.

I recommend that you check out this video and reconsider how you might reframe your message as a call to action that speaks to a better future we can create together.

https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4?t=121

I even jumped you to the good part.

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

#175

Post by sliken »

hathawsh wrote: post #53
kodablah wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious problem with in-home edge compute like that is the shittyness of router implementations, combined with the shitty software out there, combined with the lack of common interfacing with the router by a human just begs to open up a world of devices to botnets. Needs to be interfaced with by humans regularly.

Right. Whoever does this needs to be competent at building a safe, stable, and usable router OS.

Ubiquiti makes decent hardware, and now has an upgrade to go from their flavor of linux to debian stretch.

I wonder if Ubiquiti would consider selling a "developer" module of the Edgeroute-X or similar with more ram.

Or maybe look for a raspberry pi clone with dual ethernet (not connected by USB). Add a 128GB microsd for $20-$25 to have some room for video, photos, email, chat logs, etc.

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

#176

Post by sprayk »

peteforde wrote: post #174

This essay is in radical need of a TL;DR. If something is this important, you owe it to the subject matter not to bury the lede under a mountain of history and flowery exposition. Ask yourself: who is this for? People who are not already deeply passionate will stop reading unless they are engaged in a minute of reading. Note that a minute is being extremely generous; on a commercial consumer site, it's apparently an…

I definitely scrolled around, looking for some kind of summary. I wantee to figure out if I was gonna be wasting my time reading another recap of what I lived through or if there was gonna be a proposal for some way to get back to decentralization that I could evaluate and keep in mind when designing my own apps. Couldn't figure it out from scrolling so I bailed.

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

#177

Post by cwyers »

cookiecaper wrote: post #125
svachalek wrote: post #103

Earlier 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 walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.

E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage).

And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?

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

#178

Post by scottlocklin »

cwyers wrote: post #177
cookiecaper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that t…

I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.

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

#179

Post by zzo38computer »

scottlocklin wrote: post #178
cwyers wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that t…

I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.

I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.)

And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.

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

#180

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ericflo wrote: post #172
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on an ActivityPub implementation and there are so many edge cases and SHOULD vs MAY recommendations, it's ridiculous. I'm planning a separate blog post on the intricacies of the standard.

I banged my head against this issue quite a bit last year. Specifically the thing that tripped me up, is how many fields can either have single value or be a list of values, and figuring out what is meant semantically when it's a list or a single value.

This is exactly what frustrates me the most and what most of my logic checks. I'm writing tests for each of these semantic cases, but it seems silly to me that a standard leaves something so ambiguous.
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