Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

ruben.verborgh.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 295 posts

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

#211

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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.

But IPv6 routers will continue to block incoming traffic.

Which NAT/PAT/port-forwarding issues are you thinking of?

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

#212

Post by pizzazzaro »

TuringTest wrote: post #80
thsealienbstrds wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, if people could buy a 'personal cloud box' that is as user friendly as an iphone, for less than a 100 dollars, a substantial number of them might possibly do that.

A 'personal' cloud box is not enough. We need a 'social' cloud box which can talk to the equivalent boxes at the homes of our relatives and acquittances, and which are as easy to set up as logging into a centralized social network.

Mastadon meets Dropbox, with a content navigation interface thrown on top?

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

#213

Post by TuringTest »

pizzazzaro wrote: post #212
TuringTest wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'personal' cloud box is not enough. We need a 'social' cloud box which can talk to the equivalent boxes at the homes of our relatives and acquittances, and which are as easy to set up as logging into a centralized social network.

Mastadon meets Dropbox, with a content navigation interface thrown on top?

Yes, that's the thing. We know how it should be used because people are already using such systems. We need that no part of the system is owned by a single organization.

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

#214

Post by apatters »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #151
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. Doesn't exist anymore (often enough). > Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos. Things like identity management and data storage make these barriers pretty deep. “I can delete my post and it basically won't be accessible anymore” (there can be physical exceptions so long as they're legibly exceptions to…

> Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient

It seems to me that Mastodon gained traction in a way that wasn't much different from email. In both cases there was a communication network which anyone could add a node to pretty easily. Your node could have local moderation policies and you wouldn't have too many issues with getting blocked as long as you acted nice. For both email and Mastodon this enabled a few motivated administrators with some influence to onboard thousands of users quickly, and benefit from a network effect bigger than just their node.

The similarities to email end when you consider _why_ people migrated to the network in question. With Mastodon the waves have been culturally/politically motivated people running away from something (ex-Twitter users fleeing abuse, Japanese loli enthusiasts trying to avoid embarrassment, sex workers seeking an alternative to SESTA/FOSTA regulatory deplatforming). Whereas with email people were running _to_ something - the first free, global communications network of its kind.

It's also interesting to note that email nowadays has lost these advantages (running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others). Sure enough email is now on the decline.

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

#216

Post by smarx007 »

dmitriid wrote: post #208
anomie31 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This concern can't get less specific.

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

#217

Post by msamwald »

mbrock wrote: post #192
xipho wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, there are a lot of academics that like the idea of a semantic web, it rings true to a lot of scientific principles. There are also a lot of ideas and far fewer day-to-day applications. Science ticks a long a lot slower than startup culture, however, so it's not suprising that a) understanding of the issues comes slower, but also b) some "experiments" that would utilize semantic data have not yet been fu…

I’ve been learning about Barry Smith’s project for a scientific base ontology, Basic Formal Ontology, and it’s really fascinating stuff.

I always found that in introduced unpragmatic, counterintuitive roadblocks for actual knowledge integration. The most annoying thing is how it carves up reality into representations of different granularity, which are then made disjoint.

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

#218

Post by walterbell »

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…

> skipping out on the debates that everyone else in the space is having - like whether decentralization can be fast, or how to ensure data authenticity, or whether a 'local server / pod' can be built that doesn't get hosed by hole-punching through a home Comcast connection

Where is a good place to participate in those debates, especially data authenticity and local server pods?

FreedomBox didn't go anywhere. FreeNAS with ZFS is reliable but not designed to be exposed to the public internet. Many local services are using a centralized rendezvous server for NAT hole punching.

On the shiny commercial front, MyAmberLife has $13M in funding for a home server but it's mostly controlled by a central cloud service. Do Western Digital, Synology, QNAP, Drobo, etc care about decentralization?

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

#219

Post by pnut »

kjetilk wrote: post #106
Sargos wrote: post #2

Solid looks to be trying to reimplement what platforms like Ethereum are already building. The same ethos is there and this is very well written but I wonder if the Solid project just missed that when doing their research. Hopefully all of their efforts don't go to waste and they can extend some of their work to the broader decentralized web community.

Not really, it is pretty much the other way around. :-) We're basically building the simplest thing that could possibly work, they are rebuilding a lot of infrastructure that they have to use, but we can use where it makes sense. So, they are kinda trying to implement the Web, which is a much bigger task than adding access control and identity... :-) There's also been quite a lot of overlap between people working on…

Just FYI, it is unclear from your comment, which of these organisations you associate with.

Is "we" Solid or Ethereum?

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

#220

Post by sonnyblarney »

All of this is very academic.

Regular people and businesses are always going to make the decision in front of them.

'Decentralization' unto it's own, is not something anyone directly cares about. People care about privacy, somewhat, but there are other paths to privacy, or at least, consumers may very well believe there are.

Decentralization will only happen with a real impetus: a product or service that facilitates it, that people want, either for issues related to decentralization, or, more likely for some other reason that just happens to facilitate decentralization for some other, related reason.

Post reply on HN