31–40 of 126 posts
The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. This doesn't seem like it's true. I feel like it came from the unix culture. Unless they got it from drug dealers...
I've been working on an essay for quite awhile now on a similar topic: what does a decentralized web actually look like? If Big Cloud is an empire-sized industry and Blockchain is a wildly re-engineered approach to solving the centralized app problem, then the simple dark-horse is just more folks running server software (at home or just on computers they own). TCP/IP and HTTP as-is decentralize just fine - we have an education and tooling problem, not a technical problem.
> The spiders that sit at its centre waiting to suck you dry are Big Tech people farmers like Facebook, Google
Look, Big Tech doesn't have to be evil for there to be advantages to running your own software. There are _much more immediate_ benefits to every day people, like owning all the rights to all the pictures of their children, seeing fewer ads when consuming media, or having a way to host a website without paying a fortune 10 company a monthly stipend. Melodrama and angry politics aside, we at least agree that it's time to fix the internet :)
The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. This doesn't seem like it's true. I feel like it came from the unix culture. Unless they got it from drug dealers...
"Users" was a common term for people at PCs in my early networking days (Novell, early '90s), so it's actually much older than the Web. We made jokes about it being the same term used for junkies, but we certainly never meant it in that context. The people who were "addicted" were the ones running the network; the users were happy to leave it all at the end of the day.
What would be the small web equivalent of "greenwashing" (when a company talks up how green a product is as a sales pitch)? It's a bit like rules for being a punk rocker, no?
What if I want no server, and websites I want to read is not about people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "Big Web" is a profile hosted on "cloud infrastructure" owned by a company with public stock. Whereas "small web" is a website you build/create yourself and host on your own server?
But what is "your own server"? Yeah I host my personal site on my raspberry pi, but most people aren't going to do that. They're going to host on a server owned by a company with public stock.
This image could have some smarts to either punch the right holes through the the router's firewall or do something even more clever with a peer-to-peer mesh network.
At the end of the day, what one would have is a website of their own that they control within their residence. It would foster a lot of this small web spirit and be very cheap to bring to market and maintain.
Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you.
I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech).
One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machine or container.
This is how "LAMP" / PHP works! But these days it works with Python too. Either way it's perfect for static and JS-only sites.
A single computer is often more reliable than a cloud. The cloud has single points of failure that are less reliable than a commodity machine.
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I mentioned that here:
What's the Fastest Way To Get a Page on the Web?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006
http://www.oilshell.org/share/question.html
http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#wha...
I think the problem is that shared hosting has a shell interface (this used to be a desirable feature!!). And many users no longer know shell. Hopefully we can make it easier to learn!
Don't people understand that the original Internet was/is built for exactly this(?); end to end connectivity between any two hosts. This is still mostly possible, but you do now have to get a public/routable ipv4 address. IPv6 gets back to the E2E ideal, without any overlay.
P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc.
Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind. It's not corporate vs. individual as the seem to argue, it's just pro Blockchain, or pro Ethereum or something else.
This article seems to just be framing this same non-argument in a slightly different way. Get a static, public IP and run your microhttpd blog for pennies. Don't act like hosting it on an overcomplicated overengineed Blockchain network is going to decentalize the web. It's already decentralized, but nobody wants to go to your hidden service...
This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight.
We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is not something that can be solved with software: it’s a political and economic problem.
We have large corporations who have the power of small countries with little (if any) oversight on the stuff they build. Apple is attempting to scan users’ photos. Amazon is using software to exploit their workers and treat them like shit, and to stalk their users around the web into buying more shit. Facebook is giving teens eating disorders and trying to create a version of Instagram for children.
The problem we’re having now is fundamentally a political problem. We have to work together as a society, collectively instead of individually, to decide what the limits of these corporations should be. That happens through boring political processes and debates that nobody likes, which isn’t appealing to us programmers. But it’s the reality we face.
Individualistic ‘solutions’ like this only cause more harm because they don’t address the actual problems at hand. It’s like when Shell introduced the idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ to shift the conversation from us as a society holding corporations accountable to individuals being held accountable. The focus *must* be on political solutions to these problems, because there is no technical way this can be solved.
Probably the same sentiment as many of the comments already present, but I haven't read all of them. Don't people understand that the original Internet was/is built for exactly this(?); end to end connectivity between any two hosts. This is still mostly possible, but you do now have to get a public/routable ipv4 address. IPv6 gets back to the E2E ideal, without any overlay. P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved t…
Is this redoing it? I don' get that impression. It seems ther're just making it easy, as easy as installing an app and signing up for Facebook.