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Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

theguardian.com

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Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#201

Post by dcsan »

kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

I love your blog @kickscondor. The article you have about using Twine with the kids and the way they used it for building linked stories, reminded me how Twine is such a natural and intuitive tool for authoring linked chunks of content, much more than typing in HREFs. If you were able to build a visual map and bridge to someone else's paragraph... that would make the distributed system's easier to grasp.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#202

Post by naveen99 »

synctext wrote: post #146
PinkMilkshake wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance. I agree that this is probably the way forward. The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. It was a PITA when Lavabit went down and I lost that email address.

> The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. Fully agree with this. The link to identity is not often brought up. I run a university lab focussed on re-decentralisation of the Internet as a day job. We focus on identity & p2p + trust. Beaker browser is impressive early work focussed on the raw bit transport. It re-uses DNS for global discovery, its hard to do everything decentr…

Would be nice if all devices that wanted to be routable could get an ipv6 address including mobile, and we not have to worry about turn and stun...

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#203

Post by carsonfarmer »

buboard wrote: post #37
sheeshkebab wrote: post #27

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again

Super late to the game here, but we're (https://textile.photos/) seeing pretty great results on mobile running a 'lite' IPFS peer. Battery consumption is not bad compared to other network-driven apps, and with intelligent swam on/off optimizations, mobile peers can share and pin files quite nicely. It helps if you have a network of 'always on' peers to back them up of course :)

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#204

Post by nielsole »

collinmanderson wrote: post #194
heavenlyblue wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who cares? Just adapt the TCP timeouts (resend timeouts) to 10 minutes. We’ll end up with the same, TCP-based system, except it’s going to be somewhat different, as time scales are not invariant for us humans.

My guess is we'll just have local datacenters on mars for the big services (google, netflix, etc). And then more websites will use services like cloudflare so they can get their website cached on mars. AWS will eventually have a mars datacenter. No need for IPFS.

While I agree with your assessment, it reminds me of the "flying horse carriage" view of the future. Wouldn't be surprised, if multiplanetary hosting would change things more generally.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#205

Post by zmw »

dangerface wrote: post #164
zmw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the list. > You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites. Not entirely sure what you mean, - We can generates HTTP sites at will (all you need is an IP address); - We have existing protocols for mirroring sites (not implemented universally, but nor is dat://); - When you tal…

Its not a higher level of http, its more like lets use torrents instead of http because they are distributed and scale better. But the web is more than http, its dns and email and logins and all of that stuff, it all scales poorly, it can all be improved with distribution, lets not replace http with torrents lets replace it all with distributed stuff. As an example you talk about needing a special device to manage ke…

> Its not a higher level of http

Of course it's not higher level of HTTP, I never said that. I said higher level than HTTP. HTTP is just a stateless transport protocol, of course dat is higher level, and as I said much of the benefits described can be built on top of HTTP (and have been, just not standardized or not widespread).

> it all scales poorly, it can all be improved with distribution

Pretty sure it all does NOT scale poorly, as has been proven over the past thirty years. What's being solved here is not a problem of scale. "It can all be improved with distribution" is very hand wavy and doesn't really say anything. DNS and many other protocols are already distributed, btw.

> Instead we encrypt the key and distribute it across the net, ..., if its distributed and a copy goes down you just use it like normal.

There are two kinds of crypto, symmetric key and public key. Symmetric key is easily out of the window. For public key crypto, you always need a secret key and that has to be prior knowledge, not something negotiated on the fly, and of course prior knowledge has to be kept somewhere and presumably synced if you need it elsewhere, and it definitely can be lost. "Distributed secret keys solving everything" sounds like nonsense to me; there's always a secret key that is the starting point (call it the master key, if that makes more sense) and can't be distributed.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#206

Post by gsich »

rspeer wrote: post #200
gsich wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

This has somehow turned into your opinion on energy use (yes, it's good that desktop PCs can now decrease their energy use significantly while idle, which was not the case in the 90s). But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many thi…

>when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server

Yes, but again, you have used your PC for something. This has shifted to smaller (Raspberry Pis) or dedicated servers (or "cloud" stuff), so you could run this stuff there.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#207

Post by kickscondor »

dcsan wrote: post #201
kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

I love your blog @kickscondor. The article you have about using Twine with the kids and the way they used it for building linked stories, reminded me how Twine is such a natural and intuitive tool for authoring linked chunks of content, much more than typing in HREFs. If you were able to build a visual map and bridge to someone else's paragraph... that would make the distributed system's easier to grasp.

Hey thankyou! This is very encouraging. It's true - kids really love Twine and it is one of the very few tools that comes automatically to them. It is better than code.org at what code.org is 'attempting' to do.

Really cool point about extending Twine! That had never occurred to me. Amazing.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#208

Post by newnewpdro »

kickscondor wrote: post #99
newnewpdro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I correct in undesrtanding no consideration is being made for server-executed code? How is access control implemented? It seems like this basically only applies to web content you want to give everyone access to and can have 100% of application logic run client-side. That's a pretty narrow cross-section of the existing web...

So - there is no server-executed code - it all runs in the browser and the folder can only access itself anyway, which can't happen unless you have the private key. Access control in Beaker is through that private key - you need it in order to edit the 'dat' (name for a synced folder). So, no, there aren't a lot of complex permissions available - but you can also separate an app into several dats and use a master one…

> Access control in Beaker is through that private key - you need it in order to edit the 'dat' (name for a synced folder).

You're referring to write access, which is a small subset of access control.

How do you restrict read access to a group of specific people? Encrypt the data and distribute keys to the privileged parties? How does revocation work?

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#209

Post by frio »

kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

Hi, I've been playing with making something similar myself -- although using IPFS rather than Dat. I notice you've married up Webmentions and Dat; how have you done that? The only real solution I've come up with is to run a bunch of regular services at an HTTP endpoint (for Webmentions, ActivityPub, Webfinger etc.) that then generate new builds of the static site, which gets added to IPFS.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#210

Post by _lol »

sixdimensional wrote: post #48

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124581/how...
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