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Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

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Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#101

Post by thrwwycbr »

For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2].

But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things.

A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server.

Does anybody know whether there's a decentralized (static/generated) blog for ipfs or similar? Maybe that would make a nice starting point.

[1] https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker

[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#102

Post by godelski »

andoando wrote: post #94

Im confused. You can already set up your own fediverse server, just as you can host your own personal blog. Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.

The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized.

This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be good at times. But an example might be like browsers. Technically anyone can run their own. But since the ecosystem is so Chrom{e,ium} based, Google can exert a lot of control over what standards are set on webpages and how to process data. You might have heard about them trying to destroy the cookie. Which in part I feel is great, but at the same time it's not like they aren't still tracking people. Either way, the point is that a singular (or even a few) compan{y,ies} shouldn't get to dictate critical infrastructure. This can actually even lead to fragmentation, especially when we consider that more than one country exists.

So it has to be easy, near trivial, to run your own server, and must also be cheap, if you want a highly decentralized platform. If it isn't, there's always a strong pressure for centralization.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#103

Post by bigiain »

egypturnash wrote: post #63
logicprog wrote: post #3

Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that people are only going to see comments and reactions on their posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone outside of that list commented, since you can't get notified of content sources you don't already…

In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways: Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay. Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on…

Hmmmm. Now I'm wondering it Askimet are selling every blog comment they scan to OpenAI (and Palantir)?

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#104

Post by theamk »

This schema relies on "third-party aggregators / crawlers / search services" for critical parts like comments and content discovery. They are going to be responsible for things like spam filtering, misinformation removal, and blocking accounts which violate TOS.

And those crawlers _have_ to be expensive - after all, you need to check every participating server to see comments. So instead of everyone running mastodon instance on $10/month machine, it's only going to be a few centralized services doing all the work.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#105

Post by theamk »

thrwwycbr wrote: post #101

For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2]. But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things. A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server. Does…

I actually can't imagine what are the possibilities the personal web server gives me, compared to github pages or cloudflare pages or tons of other super cheap web hosts.

Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems.

Free domain names? Plenty of existing systems exists, and many of them are actually compatible with existing browsers.

Availability? Any real server will be way more reliable than your home machine that will go to sleep when unused, get updates, etc. And if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service to pin your site, so might as well sign up for webhost instead.

Illegal content? P2P exposes your IP, so your local police has access to it. And if it's kind of the content that is not actually illegal, just heavily frowned upon, there would still be plenty of hosters willing to host you.

Unlimited media storage? That could be a legitimate reason, but most people would want to store their video using dedicated system anyway (youtube / peertube), and modern storage is so cheap, the photos are not going to be a problem (Cloudflare free plan gives you up to 20,000 files up to 25 MB each for free for example)

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#106

Post by culopatin »

thrwwycbr wrote: post #101

For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2]. But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things. A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server. Does…

How do you handle outdated pages? A p2p file sharing is one thing. A file is pretty static, but websites change very often. By the time your file got shared all the way across the planet you might be already displaying something else. Do they all have to keep track of the original file?

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#107

Post by sureglymop »

samatman wrote: post #69
theK wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how this will work out positively for the project in the long run.

Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is physically impossible, unless there were a need for every atom in the observable universe to have many addresses. The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of th…

Why does it have to be so obscure? Why planets, moons, etc? It doesn't serve any purpose other than confusing anyone not familiar with it and making those familiar with it seem like the "all knowing" in group.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#109

Post by theK »

theamk wrote: post #105
thrwwycbr wrote: post #101

For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2]. But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things. A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server. Does…

I actually can't imagine what are the possibilities the personal web server gives me, compared to github pages or cloudflare pages or tons of other super cheap web hosts. Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems. Free domain names? Plenty…

> if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service

Ipfs actually has some inbuilt cashing, so visitors to your site also take part of the load and can serve your assets when your PC/internet is down. All without pinning, purely based on GC timing. So as long as you are online reasonably often and your content has readers you will be fine. Another idea has been to make it so that bookmarking works a bit like pinning so by using the decentralized web you actually archive it (sort of)

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#110

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

s9df898r32h wrote: post #108

To be more decentralized you could use radio waves outside of the Internet like LoRa to broadcast whatever you need to... maybe it could be combined with the Internet if it's available to increase distance.

Not having any LoRa hardware, I've been imaging just using Bluetooth to gossip updates with people in the same elevator, at the same stoplight... I'd love to build something useful that could tolerate a transport layer like that
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