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 problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware. Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Win…
And don't forget to add obfuscation and deniability to the lib, like Tribler and Perfect Dark did.
there is a "deprecated?" server software. i use it daily, its called Pichat, and so far it seems to be deleted from the internet. it is a chat server/webserver/fileserver. it comes in linux, and win version it is on horde as well as the SDK for it. Tell me if you would like to know more. this is not my software, if you [whomever that may be] are the person or part of the team that created this [pichat] please chime i…
https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat is this not it?
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…
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.
Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.
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.
The existing centralized systems set a pretty low bar for that, to be honest.
I don’t think it would be that hard to build an update system where not everyone gets updates at once, and you wait for consensus among early adopters before forcing it on the remaining users.
You still need a company or foundation stable and competent enough to maintain it and not ruin it for 50 years...
I wish home appliances all used the same form factor for controller boards for these smart appliances. Like a socket for a raspberry pi (instead of a hat).
Had to replace my dishwasher because the controls shorted out.
A motor or the display could just as easily burn out, but this article is about software problems, which you could fix with a workalike board.
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…
NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical. I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.
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 problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware. Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Win…
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…
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.
It's not about UX, it's about how awful people are. Hacker News is an amazing place, and it's not because of the UX, which is certainly of a piece with the Old Internet. It's because there are people who put a lot of effort into making it a not a giant cesspool. And even then, it can be incredibly difficult to discuss some topics here because discussion becomes overrun by bad actors. If you want to get a sense of what the Internet would be like without an amazing amount of curation, go read the comments on basically any story run on a local newspaper or TV station, where they don't have the resources to do content moderation. Read up on the people who get PTSD having to filter content off Facebook so that an unsuspecting user doesn't run across child porn or a snuff film. The walled gardens exist because the places outside of the walls are awful. And they're a lot more awful if you exist outside of the band of college-to-middle-aged white men who makes up the bulk of the people who experienced the old Internet or who post here on HN. If you're in a lot of more socially vulnerable positions, Twitter is far more a fenced garden than a walled garden. But that fence is still a lot more protection than you'd get on a platform that doesn't have to do that kind of moderation to be viable to advertisers. Monetizing the Internet has had a lot of knock-on effects, but one of those effects is that it's really really hard to monetize open neo-Naziism and a lot of other awful things, so the big players clean up their platforms. Recent years have shown that it's easy to monetize a lot of racist dog-whistling, though. It's not perfect. But an alternative to what we have now needs to start from a point of how do you reduce harassment and social harms, not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.
Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations. The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter. Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, o…
> The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter),... And even there, imho Bob (iirc) from the video was right - I hate font awesome 5, and always install either version 4 or "fork awesome" in my projects.