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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

#221

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

svachalek wrote: post #103
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…

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…

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem.

There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

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

#222

Post by yati »

rubenverborgh wrote: post #50
wmf wrote: post #10

I can't escape the feeling that SOLID will be at best neutral but likely will make things worse. Some of the diagrams show more companies having access to your data where it will continue to be mined, sold, etc. If you control storage but not execution it seems like you control nothing.

You control access permissions too :-)

An application with access to bits in your pod can always copy that data to its own storage right? e.g., a Facebook built on Solid can still grab all the data it needs (with the requisite perms) and store it away, build a profile per WebID, continue serving "cached" copies of changed content, etc. What are your thoughts on this?

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

#223

Post by repolfx »

flixic wrote: post #99
gerbilly wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when I got on the internet in 1988, we were all 'smart, high-agency people who have time to spare' Supposing we manage to solve this problem, what's to say average people can't participate in 10 years or so or so when the tech has been made easier to use?

Early web was quite decentralized already. Many separate Bulletin Boards, later forums. Many people writing there had an idea how to create their own. It didn't start centralized. Centralization happened. I might be more cynical than I should be but as a designer I struggle to see the future in which we have social dynamics that favor decentralization instead of convergence into a less self-managed system (i.e. all c…

No it wasn't. Vast reams of content were hosted exclusively on GeoCities. In fact almost all "home pages" were on GeoCities or AOL back then. There has never really been a time in the history of the internet when a few small providers or companies didn't have outsized dominance - DARPA early on, then Netscape, AOL and GeoCities, then Microsoft, Blogger, WordPress.

This sort of discussion looks often like rose tinted spectacles. The past wasn't so different to today.

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

#224

Post by repolfx »

deevolution wrote: post #168

The people dont care about decentralization or centralization. This is all a big generalization, but humans are lazy and when it comes to making a moral choice, they're going to pick the path of least resistance and completely ignore all moral consequences. Its looks like at the moment centralized services are what the people want and it's what they deserve.

Why is "decentralisation" even the moral choice to begin with. A lot of projects claim to be decentralised, but when you ask "ok, who has the power in this project" it turns out that a small cabal of developers has most of the same rights and powers a corporate, centrally hosted service would have. It takes very careful analysis to discover whether a thing is really meaningfully decentralised or is just claiming to be.

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

#225

Post by dcbadacd »

TuringTest wrote: post #213
pizzazzaro wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the biggest issue of them all, keeping it absolutely secure while doing all that. It would be a killing blow to the venture if someone got their data stolen.

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

#226

Post by nialv7 »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #221
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…

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.

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

#227

Post by danso »

nialv7 wrote: post #226
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.

Which was enabled in large part from their centralization of email.

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

#228

Post by xipho »

msamwald wrote: post #217
mbrock wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the proposed selling points of representing your data semantically is that you can infer across it, disjoint assertions are pretty important in this regard. How disjoint assertions are used (Smith) is another issue.

A related beef though, is that with any reasonable size dataset ontology-based inference is computationally very difficult, you have to cut all sorts of corners and know all sorts of tricks to actually infer across your data. In other words- if semantic data are going to truly become ubiquitous we need to infer in real time across them. Inference takes everything in your dataset into account, so adding a single axiom means if you want to be complete, you have to compute all over again -> slow.

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

#229

Post by pickpuck »

rubenverborgh wrote: post #97
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…

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…

I've been thinking someone with the expertise and influence should write "RDF: The Good Parts"

AKA instead of "Eval is Evil" we might instead say "XML is Evil"

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

#230

Post by dasyatidprime »

apatters wrote: post #214
dasyatidprime wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

I think email evolved when people had more digital-identity ties to their ISPs though. I remember having an email address tied to your university or your dial-up provider or whatever being pretty common in the 1990s, and pre-eternal-September the same protocols already existed among a more closed crowd (which is kind of like Facebook, now that I think of it).

Then “free email” providers on the early consumer Internet were able to compete on things like storage, because that was something it was still acceptable to expect people to pay attention to. One of GMail's original big draws was “lots and lots of storage”.

Email being in decline for social purposes feels partly related to changing feedback expectations and UI inertia, but I'd guess also some relation to a “mental association with uncool things” including both spam and stressful/boring transactional email; it's become more of a business thing. The spam side of that is related to the gradual federation lockdown, and something similar could happen to Mastodon, but at least there's some discussion about it happening in advance now.

I'm not sure what this all adds up to.

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