221–230 of 238 posts
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> ...there's an existing mechanism to deal with it: government regulation. Lay your hopes on a monopoly on force to solve an economic monopoly? That doesn't seem like a well founded long term solution.
this seems like equivocation.
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This, but also, they run a centralized system for intellectual property reasons. Facebook Inc. offers a product, called Facebook, where you post content and make connections with other nodes in a large graph. It was built on prior art, but arranging and packaging them together in their particular way was novel. You could wholesale copy Facebook's public APIs and implement your own "Facebook-compatible clone", in the…
>Gmail, another frequent example of decentralization overcome by centralization How did Gmail do that though? I suspect it largely had something to do with ISPs blocking port 25 for anyone except expensive "business class" users under the auspices of stopping spam. Well, spam never stopped, but about 80% of email in the US runs through 10 domains now. Further "stopping spam" measures meant that those big 10 basically…
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" It does nothing to address any of the points raised in the article " Really? It seems that many of the actual quotes from the Fathers of the Internet in the article apply to existing web client-server architecture: “We hoped everyone would be making their own web sites—turns out people are afraid to.” - Tim Berners-Lee “People have their friends on Facebook and some photos on Flickr and their colleagues on LinkedIn…
I'm not talking about serverless, I'm talking about decentralised. The article is talking about decentralised. You're talking about decentralised, even. But your platform is a centralised platform just like most other Web app platforms. It is not at all like what the article is discussing, contrary to your claim. How would a Facebook or WordPress clone built on your platform be any more decentralised than regular old…
Yes
Is your platform easier for Joe public to publish websites on than wordpress and without a central service provider?
Yes, just as easily as in multi-person Wordpress. But it does much more than just publish a website. It can power a web app, one that goes in the app store, support social features like contacts, access control, realtime updates and offline notifications, and more.
Does your platform prevent government snooping?
Yes, by preventing data from accumulating in a single information silo. More than that, we believe that access to the global internet (as Facebook was trying to with Internet 2.0 in India) should be unnecessary, as people on cruises or local villages should connect on local area networks, and only access the wider internet when necessary. We believe the older tools in the dialup era were designed more properly than the ones which assume always-on broadband access and only have "isOnline/isOffline" dichotomy.
Does your platform prevent the accumulation of data in a single information silo?
Yes. People choose what organizations they host with. When they visit another domain, they have an instantly personalized experience, with all friends who wanted to share that they also use the service. Much better than "Your friend XYZ is now on Instagram" without their permission, and much better than oAuth. Over time, you might import enough information to have a full-fledged presence in both communities, and choose which one to auth with. Some communities are for your videos, the others are for some group activities or whatever. Any community can embed components from any other community. Any aggregator can subscribe to publishers (with their permission) and get realtime updates, with custom stream types, instead of e.g. Google spidering your site.
Just take a look: http://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed
Does it reinvent the Web, making it, as a whole, inherently less centralised than it already is?
It builds on top of the web, which is already decentralized, and makes it possible for communities to deploy apps on their domain which rival those on facebook.com, and which allow users to seamlessly use their identities and friends across domains.
Can it do all of the above in a non-centralised way, resilient to network outages, and loss of resources at their original location, across the whole of the Web?
It is designed to power mesh networks such as the ones being set up in various cities. The mobile wireless infrastructure is still centralized, but that will eventually change.
Does it embed key moral principles into the fabric of the Web?
See http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135 for my own overview of the moral and political principles behind the platform.
Some of the other things you mentioned aren't really addressed, such as "Can it verify financial transactions and authenticate data sources?" That's more for blockchains. Our platform does not rely on any global resources except possibly DNS.
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The problem is that I'm not sure anyone has a way for you to get reliability, privacy and not having to deal with centralized bullshit without caring about that implementation detail. Because if you leave it up to someone else, they can make a lot of money by removing all but reliability from what you want. So they do.
Well, you can, but you have to be willing to pay for it. That's the key problem. Users love the idea of a free service that stores all their stuff, and that's pretty clearly not sustainable from a business perspective, but it makes it hard to compete with a real service. They'll keep their stuff on the "free" service right up until it crashes and takes all their crap with it, or the TOS is abruptly changed to delete…
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> "Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?"" To me the answer is obvious. Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your u…
> home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure. People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers. I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's…
> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?” Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the intern…
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People struggle with routers because they're terrible. Buggy, inconsistent, and their UI is full of detailed technical questions they don't know the answer to. I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group share…
I think we are looking at this the wrong way. We are looking at it like techs. These kind of problems need to be looked at from the customers point of view (ok, I know that Facebook users are the product, not the customer but the analogy works) Ask yourself one question: What problem am I solving with this? Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device, however simple, just to connect to others in…
Consider what would happen if you asked the same question about technologies that are popular today before they were popular... What problem does WhatsApp solve? What problem does Instagram solve? What problem does YouTube solve? Instant messaging apps, photo sharing websites and video sharing websites all existed before WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube, yet they all took off in a big way. Home servers can take off despite the competition so long as there are enough early adopters willing to take a punt. Network effects can kick in after there's a small, dedicated group getting use out of the technology.
> "Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device"
They don't have to buy anything. You can run a home server on computing devices you probably already own.
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> The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have been replaced by Gmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook Ease of use by the vast hordes of hundreds of millions of completely non technical endusers and thousands of person-hours by highly paid UI/UX designers have trumped decentralization and autonomy. point, click, drool.
I know it's a rant, but open source people do not know how to do user-friendly user interfaces. A few days ago, I posted the home page links for Diaspora, Gnu Social, and Friendica, and commented "any questions". Blatant UI bugs often don't get fixed in open source. There's a bug in Ubuntu on some machines which causes the cursor to disappear after coming back from a suspend. (You can get the cursor back by typing CT…
There are some notable exceptions of things that have great https/browser based UI: Take a look at Rainloop webmail for example.