The Vision for Decentralized Web

> In order to implement the vision of decentralization, first we need empower people to easily publish and own their content on the web.

Why? If someone wants to publish, they'll learn what needs to be learnt. If they are not willing to do so, they don't really want to publish, so why empower them? (This is a serious question.)

Yeah, one problem is that on the current internet, if people are not constantly posting low value crap on social media, they are hard to discover, and they're ranked down just for inactivity. But this system would support ranking just on the number of domain recommendations, and people would be able to make tools to do their own ranking (eg. how many people I recommend recommend domain X would be my rank for domain X,...), etc.

But I think, it would need to be decentralized, to avoid single DB somewhere that could be abused and manipulated, or lost.

But if you have to use a tool to read the graph from the web yourself, and people have to upload recommendations to their own server, and have them directly associated with their domain, that may encourage saner behavior, too.

If someone wants to make a centralized public search for this graph, so that people who don't see value in building their own index/ranking could search for content too, that would be possible.

But the key aspect would need to be the distributed nature. It would not need any cryptography either, just a bunch of text files at the simplest level.

The graph would be out there on web servers, the creativity would be in creating the tools to scrape it, rank stuff, and searching through it. And that could even be done in some incremental way (without the need to scrape it all at once).

Totally agree. Ping me on connect@tautvilas.lt if you would like to discuss this idea more and try to develop it :)

> the problem with decentralization is that, for an average Joe, it's just a bunch of loonies wearing tin foil hats who have something to hide, and besides, what has Facebook done to me (average Joe) personally?

I agree, but I think there's a middle ground that fits everyone. Eg, I really like federation because I feel it's a quality middle ground _(depending on the implementation)_. It is what I am targeting my projects distributed implementation on.

Roughly, I am designing an application similar in concept to that of the ActivityPub federated protocol (and may use ActivityPub in the future). I want to support first-class self executed tooling, like git locally, while also supporting a federated multi-tenant solution to support the people who don't care.

Currently my thought is that people should be able to pick up their data and walk somewhere else with it if they like. Self hosting with federated multi-tenant, seems like a natural solution to the problem. My implementation _(goal, at least)_ doesn't "invent" anything, uses standard web tech, and supports both federated and solo usage. I'm being purposefully vague for anonymity sake on this account, fwiw - apologies for that heh, but hopefully it doesn't matter to this discussion.

> In my opinion, the worst one is the ubiquitous use of smartphones over PCs, as any decentralized stuff on smartphones is a nightmare, mostly due to systems relying on servers for stuff like push and background app refresh.

Due to the nature of what I am creating mobile matters as well. You're definitely right in that mobile is a pain here. My goal is to "first class" support mobile too, and my "protocol" would hypothetically support first class mobile, but given that storage and cpu are quite limited a client->server architecture will definitely be useful. I plan/hope to make mobile work in a hybrid manner, supporting both on-device and a federated server, as on-device will be important for offline functionality.

> Decentralization must offer some clear advantages over fb, that an average person might appreciate. Those advantages must offset the UX problems, of which there are plenty, most of them pretty hard to fix.

I agree, which is why I don't think decentralization itself will be a winning feature. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with what Facebook is doing - what's wrong is that we can't take our data off FB and move to a platform we're more aligned with. One maybe that we pay for, or one I self host, etc.

The operational costs are considerably lower with Blockstack, since the app doesn't host any user state (and in many cases, no state at all). Most apps don't need a database of any kind -- all the business logic runs client-side in the user's web browser.