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Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

blog.datproject.org

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Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#11

Post by staltz »

woah wrote: post #3

The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I’ll use SSB as an example. If you install the software and make an identity, you’ll soon find that you have to sign up with something called a “pub server” to actually get any of your friend’s updates. Where do you fin…

In SSB, pubs seem like an essential (and flawed) part of the network, and this may be true at the present time, but not forever. I'm working on a few alternatives to pub servers, one of them is a server that has no storage of data, it just acts as a meeting point for clients, and sets up tunnels between them. The other is a 1-feed pub, where the idea is to setup a mirror for your data in case you are a feed that has many thousands of followers. In both cases I want to make it easy (as in Heroku one click installer button) to start a server. The idea is that the easier it is to start a server, the more servers there will be in quantity. Off from the internet, SSB already has good mechanisms for sharing data (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), which other protocols don't seem to have. Its hard to grok how good this is unless you're living in poor internet environments. SSB on the internet is not as well designed as SSB off the internet.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#12

Post by fenwick67 »

newscracker wrote: post #10
fenwick67 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon has this. SSB doesn't, because your identity is just your message chain and key pair on your computer.

Mastodon doesn’t seem to have a way to move a user account and still have others message or tag one in the same way as before. When you switch from, say mastodon.social to mastodon.xyz, it’s almost like switching from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. There seems to be a way to export one’s following list and move that to the new instance, but this does require informing others of the address change on one’s account. See https://…

If you've moved, your followers don't automatically follow you to your new home. But IMO that is fine. If I was following someone on cat.photo.space I might not want to follow them if they move to callgirls.xxx .

IIRC, you get a warning if you try to interact with someone who has moved.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#13

Post by fenwick67 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #7
fenwick67 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hosting cost problem becomes acceptable if the pub server is fast enough and hosting is cheap enough. Look at IRC.

The cost would be zero if residential ISPs issued static ipv6 and allowed servers.

Yeah, the more I look at P2P applications the more I realize our infrastructure is not set up to support them without some serious work on the application side.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#14

Post by lukasb »

fenwick67 wrote: post #12
newscracker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon doesn’t seem to have a way to move a user account and still have others message or tag one in the same way as before. When you switch from, say mastodon.social to mastodon.xyz, it’s almost like switching from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. There seems to be a way to export one’s following list and move that to the new instance, but this does require informing others of the address change on one’s account. See https://…

If you've moved, your followers don't automatically follow you to your new home. But IMO that is fine. If I was following someone on cat.photo.space I might not want to follow them if they move to callgirls.xxx . IIRC, you get a warning if you try to interact with someone who has moved.

Is it possible to operate a lightweight forwarding service, so my address is portable across servers?

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#15

Post by dredmorbius »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #7
fenwick67 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hosting cost problem becomes acceptable if the pub server is fast enough and hosting is cheap enough. Look at IRC.

The cost would be zero if residential ISPs issued static ipv6 and allowed servers.

The hosting cost would be negligible.

The policing costs less so. Hygiene matters.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#16

Post by Animats »

woah wrote: post #3

The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I’ll use SSB as an example. If you install the software and make an identity, you’ll soon find that you have to sign up with something called a “pub server” to actually get any of your friend’s updates. Where do you fin…

That should be automated. Look at the way Bitcoin nodes find peers. (Which has nothing to do with the blockchain.) There are a few well known nodes, but they mostly redirect new nodes to other nodes.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#17

Post by zrm »

woah wrote: post #3

The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I’ll use SSB as an example. If you install the software and make an identity, you’ll soon find that you have to sign up with something called a “pub server” to actually get any of your friend’s updates. Where do you fin…

> The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure.

I'm not sure this is a real problem. Email is federated, scales to approximately everyone, and there is no shortage of email providers that all interoperate with each other.

How to fund it when no one you know wants to operate it personally is also no great mystery. Either the server provider puts ads on it, or the users pay for the service. And the individual users can decide which of the various options they prefer but can still interact with everybody who makes a different choice.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#18

Post by viksit »

The biggest challenge I've seen with using decentralized systems today is with on-boarding the average user into them. As @woah mentions, the process isn't straightforward and even remotely close to signing for a facebook or ig account. I think there are a few problems that'll need to be solved before all this is actually usable.

(There's definitely a parallel here with the AOL and CompuServes of the world vs the open web, but not quite)

- It almost feels like that for a variety of decentralized protocols to take root, someone will have to build a browser-equivalent (or perhaps an extension to an existing one) that allows the normal user to partake of these new systems in one place. That means, a chrome or firefox style system that supports IPFS, but also offers tools for ActivityPub and SSB and whatnot - in the same way netscape navigator used to be bundled with a news reader, a web browser and an email client.

- The next challenge is to get the average user to use this on the mobile and then the desktop. That's a problem best solved by modeling this as an app - and there needs to be a reason for the average user to use this. The words "killer app" come to mind, but honestly, even if there was something slightly more useful that current services provide that built on top of this - it would be helpful. I'd download this new "chrome" on my phone and use it. Is there something out there that people think can be that?

- Lastly, we'll need to democratize information and app creation for this browser.

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#19

Post by lucideer »

woah wrote: post #3

The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I’ll use SSB as an example. If you install the software and make an identity, you’ll soon find that you have to sign up with something called a “pub server” to actually get any of your friend’s updates. Where do you fin…

Pub servers are very much considered a temporary workaround in the Scuttleverse, and there is a lot of ongoing work to make onboarding both more directly user-friendly, and also less dependent on "having an anarchist sysadmin in your friend group".

Right now, without pub servers you can:

1. find friends in your immediate vicinity over WiFi/Bluetooth/etc.-type nearby protocols.

2. if you have a friend (see #1), you can connect to friends-of-friends

(#1 may seem extremely limiting at first, but it's actually only limiting for a technology which is not popular in your local area—network effect problems—so "in theory" it's not really so bad when you think about it. I've probably added a good portion of my FB friends in their presence)

However, one of the main alternatives being actively worked on is DHT invites. This is basically the "torrent magnet link" equivalent for SSB. See various links to work on this below:

[0] https://gitlab.com/staltz/ssb-dht-invite

[1] https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/issues/186

[2] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/pull/862

[3] %r6dTZ4WG7kuLFfGlUR1DAhyat7YEuX682mGI9UJXlc4=.sha256

Re: Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet

#20

Post by jimbosis »

newscracker wrote: post #5

Easy user mobility should be a goal of decentralized protocols and platforms. That would help users leave one provider and join another if/when the need arises. If I join Server A today as User A, I should be able to carry my identity as User A to another server or provider in the future without losing the ability to still remain in touch with everyone I was in touch with or having to tell them that my address has ch…

Hubzilla[1] has a a feature called "Nomadic Identity" which seems to be a solution to your use case of carrying your identity to another server.

See the "Nomadic Identity and Cloning" paragraph on the Hubzilla homepage [2]. See also "Nomadic identity, brought to you by Hubzilla," by Andrew Manning, on Medium [3].

[1] [2] https://hubzilla.org/

[3] https://medium.com/@tamanning/nomadic-identity-brought-to-yo...

Edit: Newline formatting.

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