Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

So in my mind the problems that need to be solved are:

Information-Centric Networking > Unstructured Mesh Networking > Distributed Data Storage > P2P Information Retrieval

Software development isn't free. Sure, OSS developers can donate their time, but there's a selection process that comes into play.

OSS developers do what they do partly because they enjoy it, and so they tend to gravitate to the types of development that is fun. Fun stuff includes deep systems stuff, algorithms, distributed systems, the flashier aspects of UI/UX, machine learning, etc.

Fixing stupid bugs that stem from stupid compatibility issues and adding stupid features for stupid use cases is not fun. Debugging edge cases that afflict 1% of your users occasionally is not fun. Porting to popular but crap platforms is not fun. Supporting legacy platforms and APIs is not fun, nor is maintaining backward compatibility. Accessibility features and translations are not fun. Supporting right-to-left language is not fun. Rewriting your entire already-working app to support the next web fad (e.g. "responsive mobile design") is not fun.

I could go on forever. There is a really really really long tail of these horrors.

This is why OSS rules in the systems/algorithms/etc. space but drools when you get close to the user. This is why every major end user OS, site, or platform is commercial. People have to be paid to torture themselves with that stuff.

Yet these sorts of problems are precisely the ones that make the difference between something only geeks (with time on their hands) would want to use and something regular people who aren't computer experts would want to use (or computer experts without time on their hands).

For a distributed, decentralized system to challenge the silos of the web, it would absolutely need funding. Eliminating hardware and bandwidth costs is easy; eliminating HR costs is not.

There will never be a volunteer-developed mainstream platform for the same reason there are no volunteer-developed mainstream anything elses. To make a truly polished product of any kind requires pain.

Disclosure: I currently run a distributed networking / SDN startup. The core technology has been up and running for years with few modifications. It started as a side project so I haven't kept careful account, but I'd easily estimate that upwards of 90% of the development time spent on this project has been on trying to get it to the point that it can install and run trouble-free on multiple platforms and is easy enough for mere mortals to use. Getting the core plumbing, crypto, etc. working was the most fun and the most intellectually challenging, but it was a huge minority of time spent. Had there been no chance of a commercial application I would have stopped there and it'd be yet another piece of interesting GitHub networking orphanware, because for the love of God who would voluntarily try to port such a thing to Windows?!? let alone Android (It's in C, so enjoy your JNI pain).

There's the problem that distributing content means someone else pays for storing and serving it. This is part of what killed USENET, once the binary groups (mostly pirated stuff and porn) became huge. There's a scaling problem with replication.

Federated networks are interesting, and there are several federated social networks. A few even have a number of servers in two digits. You could have a federated Facebook replacement that costs each user under a dollar a month at current hosting prices. No ads. The concept is not getting any traction.

Kahle wants a system with "easy mechanisms for readers to pay writers." That's either micropayments or an app store, both of which are worse than the current Web.

Anything less than that is like using snake oil crypto: it might make you feel good, but it's not really there.