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There’s a simple alternative to the current web

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Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#41

Post by skrebbel »

purplerails wrote: post #21
idlewords wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An early design idea I had for Pinboard was as a browser plugin that just saved everything it saw in passing to an upstream server. But the problem that stumped me was that there's much more downstream bandwidth than upstream on a typical residential connection, so it was hard to push things to a server in anything like real time. How did you end up dealing with this issue?

Pages are saved in the background. Nothing too fancy. I dedup when uploading: that helps a lot.

How can you dedupe if the content is encrypted?

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#42

Post by idlewords »

purplerails wrote: post #39
idlewords wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but how do you handle things like big PDFs or image gallery sites? Or pages that just pull in a lot of javascript includes? That stuff downloads in parallel, but then I would find myself trying to push it upstream through a little straw of bandwidth, sequentially.

You're right, it takes longer to upload a page than to download it. And image gallery-like pages take long (I know because I save Imgur pages now than then :)). But in practice, this isn't a problem. There are a couple of heuristics to avoid wastefully uploading pages: the full page is uploaded only if the reader expresses "sufficient interest" in the page. Currently the heuristic is 90 seconds of continuous reading…

Sweet, thanks for the detailed answer! I look forward to checking it out.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#43

Post by purplerails »

lingben wrote: post #34
purplerails wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) saving is automatic 2) privacy-first architecture (e.g., plaintext is never uploaded, plaintext URLs are never uploaded etc)

ah, so it saves... everything? wow! that's nuts. I mean, where the heck are you going to store all of that? and it is terribly inefficient to store say, 30,000 examples of the exact same article. or do you have a way to check and not store duplicates? if so, what if a blog post is saved today and has 10 comments and it is saved tomorrow by another person and it has 11 comments. technically the page is different so it…

> ah, so it saves... everything? wow! that's nuts. I mean, where the heck are you going to store all of that?

Please see my reply to idlewords. It isn't literally everything; there are some heuristics to detect what was interesting to you.

I understand you might find this excessive. I routinely find that useful. :) See also "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush.

> and it is terribly inefficient to store say, 30,000 examples of the exact same article ...

You're right: no deduping is and can be done across users (HMACs chained up the user's password are used create dedup hashes). Storage is sufficiently cheap that I feel it's a acceptable tradeoff vs. privacy (i.e., server being unable to confirm that two users have saved the same page).

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#44

Post by corin_ »

idlewords wrote: post #7
nb13 wrote: post #4

This wouldn't work for any web page that has dynamic content stored in a database. If the database no longer exists a decade from now this doesn't solve that problem. Also, wouldn't this break analytics and reporting for most websites too? It'll be much tougher to track user behavior to improve user experience. And debugging using log data? I get what the author is suggesting but "fixing the web" this way would break…

Well, as the Internet once said to the music companies, it's not our fault if our new technology breaks your business model. People would find new ways to solve these problems.

It's fine to be that stubborn if you can win. But against the world of business that needs analytics... I suspect their business model trumps your technology for now.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#45

Post by purplerails »

hollerith wrote: post #40
purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

I'd prefer for the pages to be saved to the hard drive of the machine running the web browser. But maybe browser extensions cannot obtain permission to do that?

I see your point. I may release installable native apps that can serve as the local storage backend for the truly paranoid. Time limitations etc: the usual. :)

I anticipate that PurpleRails will be used on multiple computers and over several years. Which is why pages are sync'd to the cloud.

I've adopted the current architecture because I feel that the energy barrier that needs to be overcome to persuade somebody to install an app is much higher than the one to install an extension.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#46

Post by zargon »

purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

This sounded really great until I went to the website and saw that I can't use my own cloud storage, only purplerails'. As soon as purplerails disappears all my saved pages are gone. I already have this functionality with diigo and it makes me very uncomfortable not to have a copy of the data.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#47

Post by purplerails »

skrebbel wrote: post #41
purplerails wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages are saved in the background. Nothing too fancy. I dedup when uploading: that helps a lot.

How can you dedupe if the content is encrypted?

Deduping is per-user not across users. For the sort of content here, this works well. E.g., static assets of web pages are the ones that are dedup-ed.

The basic algo is to generate a HMAC of the plaintext and compare it against a table of previously uploaded blobs' HMACs. HMAC is keyed with a key derived from the user's password. When a blob is uploaded, the ciphertext and HMAC of the plain text are both uploaded.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#48

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dilap wrote: post #3

"The Tyranny of Print" has a nice ring to it, but mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences. Sure, not disappearing in 10 years (or whenever the original server goes poof) would also be nice, but it's of little benefit if no one ever sees the thing in the first place. And disappearing is the default, natural state of things…

> mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences.

There is a difference between the creator and the server. Most of the content you consume is created by people who don't own the servers. Separating appearance+behavior from content source would help actual creators because they wouldn't have to worry about their host deciding one day to delete all their content because the service is being discontinued or the creator is competing with some business interest of the host.

> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.

The problem is that the web is being used for everything, even things that can and should work like books rather than like live performances.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#49

Post by TelmoMenezes »

Coming up with architectures to decentralize servers is the fun part. Convincing people outside of our bubble to use the new system is the very hard part. It has to be able to do something the regular person really wants that the previous system didn't allow. This is why Linux never caught up on the desktop.

Now excuse me while I go curate my socks collection.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#50

Post by purplerails »

zargon wrote: post #46
purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

This sounded really great until I went to the website and saw that I can't use my own cloud storage, only purplerails'. As soon as purplerails disappears all my saved pages are gone. I already have this functionality with diigo and it makes me very uncomfortable not to have a copy of the data.

Excellent point. The ability to download your data in a well-documented format is coming soon. See also my reply to hollerith on a native client.

Time limitations are what is preventing me from doing this.

Thanks for your feedback! Hope you will use Purplerails. :)

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