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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

#201

Post by zbentley »

teleclimber wrote: post #55
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is still asymmetric upload/download speeds for many (most) home connections. Often upload is 10x slower than download.

And users expect their internet services to be fast. If every request involves leaving the backbone to go all the way into your home and then back out again, good luck with that. I think the better solution is to leverage cheap vms. At least performance stands a chance. It's just a matter of making cloud computers accessible and usable to non technical people.

> I think the better solution is to leverage cheap vms.

So...centralize many/most popular internet services on infrastructure that provides cheap, reliable VMs. At the risk of overdrafting my snark budget: that sounds familiar.

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

#202

Post by miguelrochefort »

Great article Ruben! I've been following Solid's progress for a while, and I think your article very eloquently summarize its purpose and relevance. I'm especially interested in the ability to circumvent the middle-men, and resolve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem once and for all.

Watching your TED talk in 2013 was one of the most influential moment in my life, and discovering the semantic web was perhaps my greatest epiphany. While the vision never left my mind, I never acted on it. Until now.

I'm dedicating 2019 to linked data. I'm going all-in.

Last week, I started to build a tool to convert unstructured input to linked data. Even after recognizing canonical literals (email, phone, url, color, gender, boolean, integer, float, date, time span, money, weight, distance, language, image, geo coordinates), I couldn't accurately infer predicates and guess classes. Before trying more complicated stuff like bayesian inference, I decided to try a simpler exercise.

This time, I want to aggregate structured data from different sources and map it to some existing ontologies. For example, I want to convert some JSON about comments and links from Reddit and Hacker News to RDF using the http://schema.org vocabulary.

- Can I feed the JSON into some ML system that automatically figures out the mapping? What if I provide some annotation or feedback?

- Can I manually turn the JSON into JSON-LD and use that as the mapping information? What about complex transformations (different structures and literals)?

- Should I implement the mapping manually using my favorite programming language?

- Should I use R2RML or RML?

What's the state of the art today for semantic data integration?

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

#203

Post by zbentley »

kkarakk wrote: post #187
cortesoft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious to how this could be solved. I mean, i guess you could have your browser ask before every request generated for a page, but that seems very cumbersome.

apps do it on first install, why shouldn't browsers do it on a website's first launch?

> why shouldn't browsers do it on a website's first launch?

Because users would riot, and would use browsers or plugins that suppressed these notifications.

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

#204

Post by eitland »

zbentley wrote: post #197
eitland wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an older Synology. It is already ready for the masses. Why: You only need one one for a family and most of the time there's already a person in the family who does "PC stuff". And even if there isn't there's always someone who'll learn it if a friend has one. The rest of this post is not targeted at you but rather on a whole attitude here at HN: ------------------------------- Anyone who can operate a web brow…

> most of the time there's already a person in the family who does "PC stuff". And even if there isn't there's always someone who'll learn it if a friend has one. That's not true at all. Confirmation bias is rough when you're technical; you keep spotting other technical people.

Was about to disagree strongly with your conclusion but you have a point. Not everyone had a web site.

But I'm not totally convinced either: email has been huge despite the configuration needed, also with people who had to take it step by step twice and make notes while doing it. Some figured it out on their own (or more realistically using the step by instructions that came bundled with their first modem). Other had a son or a grandson who'd picked it up at school. Others got it at work.

My grandparents where the youngest group of people I can think of that didn't have access to email somehow.

And my wifes grandparents have/had access to mail and used actual mail clients too, not just Hotmail or Gmail.

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

#205

Post by ndnxhs »

maccam94 wrote: post #200
TheOperator wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue such devices have in practice is upfront cost, compatibility, the need for port forwarding, and the lack of redundancy so you don't lose your data. Among other problems but these come to mind. Centralization solves those problems because you can connect to a server instead of port forwarding, your data might be stored across 3 servers, the cloud storage might be as cheap as free, and applications are design…

IPv6 will help by eliminating NAT (and thus port forwarding problems). IPFS might help with redundancy. But yeah the cost and complexity are major problems. I think the biggest problem is making open standards that can evolve quickly. All the big chat platforms have switched to proprietary protocols so they can iterate and roll out changes on their own.

Basically all home routers block incoming connection because so many shitty IoT devices were built to trust anything that is able to connect to it. My router doesn't even have an option to turn off the block. Can only unblock ports 1 by 1

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

#206

Post by ndnxhs »

chrisseaton wrote: post #153
kodablah wrote: post #38

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? 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…

> 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.

Desktops are used by almost anyone doing gaming or serious video editing. Obviously not everyone but still common for a lot of people.

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

#207

Post by ndnxhs »

wmf wrote: post #11
kodablah wrote: 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…

Try Sandstorm. Home servers are a very difficult sell (see $500 Helm) compared to VMs running in a data center and IMO the privacy difference is mostly illusory.

The apps on sandstorm are super out of date. When I checked a few months ago the gitlab version was from 2016

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

#208

Post by dmitriid »

anomie31 wrote: post #120
rubenverborgh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you. The confusion in your comment is…

By RDF did you mean RDF/XML specifically? JSON-LD is still RDF, it's just serialized differently, which is fine, I like RDF, but OP may have more specific concerns than the syntax.

The specific concern is that it's a 100th attempt at creating metadata for everything in the world. You can't create a non-ambiguous comprehensive catalog of the world.

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

#209

Post by buovjaga »

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…

IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

tmcw wrote: 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…

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