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Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

ruben.verborgh.org

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Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#231

Post by rapnie »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #91
xj9 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you've clearly not used any of the modern roaming-enabled encrypted overlay networks that people have been working on. one example is hyperboria. i connect to a handful of public relays (and one that i host myself) and no matter where i am my device is reachable at the same ip address. the address is an ipv6-encoded hash of the public key that is used for routing. its actually really neat, and you don't need to wait…

I haven't even heard of these things, and your description sounds like so much effort I'm not even going to be looking this tech up. If it's more than "install using an installer, not a terminal, and then it just works(tm)", it's not the kind of thing that's going to get people who weren't already on board, on board.

Well the page actually mentions 'Just works' and 'Low barriers', but it goes off a few paragraphs later:

> This year the event will take place from 3rd to 9th August 2015 in Maribor, Slovenia

2015 ??

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#232

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

hinkley wrote: post #189
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. I disagree. I've yet to encounter a system where automatic updates didn't sometimes break things. It's a nice theory, but in practice things break when you change things they depend on even when you're trying not to, and a lot of developers don't try that hard. Not to mention, sometimes you're dealing with design flaws that cau…

I don’t think it would be that hard to build an update system where not everyone gets updates at once, and you wait for consensus among early adopters before forcing it on the remaining users.

No amount of early adopters will ever have full coverage of what people actually have, in part because the people who need reliability are not likely to be early adopters in the first place.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#233

Post by 13415 »

svachalek wrote: post #103
tmcw wrote: post #79

It puzzles me that the linked data future is still discussed, as if we didn't already try it, and didn't already discover that developers dislike arcane RDF standards and the academic-rooted designers of the specifications have a terrible track record of solving real-world problems. And that now they're presenting linked data as some critical component of the decentralized web while skipping out on the debates that e…

I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and…

The problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware.

Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, iOS, Android, and browsers, and may not transport any data or chew away bandwidth without allowing total control over this by the programmer and end user. It needs to have a dead simple, almost idiot-proof API. The resulting network on top of IP needs to be searchable, not too high latency, and route to any endpoint on it.

That's still the biggest hurdle for the Open Web. Everything else is secondary.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#234

Post by rapnie »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #70
rubenverborgh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does running analytics on my site impair my ability to talk about what Tim Berners-Lee wants to do for freedom and control? ;-) Yes, I track how popular what content is on my site. Motivates me to write more. Please feel free to block trackers; I do that as well.

Have you considered Piwik or a similar self hosted analytics solution? I don't care if people run Analytics, its just when they go sharing all that data with a third party that it gets troubling.

PS. It is called Matomo now and at https://matomo.org

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#235

Post by zozbot123 »

apatters wrote: post #214
dasyatidprime wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on. Doesn't exist anymore (often enough). > Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos. Things like identity management and data storage make these barriers pretty deep. “I can delete my post and it basically won't be accessible anymore” (there can be physical exceptions so long as they're legibly exceptions to…

> Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient It seems to me that Mastodon gained traction in a way that wasn't much different from email. In both cases there was a communication network which anyone could add a node to pretty easily. Your node could have local moderation policies and you wouldn'…

> running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others

Only true if you care about Gmail (a centralized service) getting your e-mail and delivering it to its users. You could just not care about Gmail and still interoperate with lots of mail servers - even lots of servers that do have Google's blessing.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#236

Post by [deleted] »

13415 wrote: post #233
svachalek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and…

The problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware. Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Win…

[deleted]

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#237

Post by transpute »

For the technically savvy, you can run a virtualized desktop:

  - GPU passthrough VM (gaming)
  - SATA passthrough (FreeNAS)
  - multi NIC passthrough (pfSense/OpenWRT)
  - app server/cloud/P2P Linux or FreeBSD VM(s)
http://unraid.net sells a KVM-based product. VMware ESXi and XenServer are free. Connect a Ubiquiti AC-Lite WiFi access point to a dedicated NIC on the x86 box, WAN to another NIC. Since pfSense owns the WAN NIC, it can host a VPN server for your devices, including mobile. All VMs get virtual NICs. Dell T30 with quad-core Xeon and ECC costs about $400 with 8GB RAM and 1TB disk, it can hold 4 x 3.5" drives (20 TB in RAID-1) and 2 x 2.5" SSD.

Level1Techs has intro videos on home servers: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=level1+home+ser...

Advantages:

  - Stable and boring x86 platform
  - Good performance for gaming
  - Commercially supported hardware
  - Upgradeable storage and GPU
  - Upgradeable router software

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#238

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

nialv7 wrote: post #226
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.

Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else.

I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit.

Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#239

Post by Drdrdrq »

the_duke wrote: post #81
kodablah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist. > Most importantly, why would users car…

Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations. The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter. Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, o…

> The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter),...

And even there, imho Bob (iirc) from the video was right - I hate font awesome 5, and always install either version 4 or "fork awesome" in my projects.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#240

Post by eeZah7Ux »

cwyers wrote: post #177
cookiecaper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream,…

The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that t…

NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical.

I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.

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