Live data from Hacker News

The Vision for Decentralized Web

tautvilas.lt

51–53 of 53 posts

Re: The Vision for Decentralized Web

#51

This a problem I’ve something I’ve been working on my free time. The biggest problem with the decentralized web right now is that setting up a server is a huge pain and your average person lacks the knowledge and resources to do so. I’ve been working on a simple music streaming server called mStream. The goal is to make a server even my mom could setup. I publish binaries for every major OS which means you don’t need…

I saw someone mention this a while ago and at first I thought it was stupid but over time I've come to agree:

Asymetric internet connections should be forbidden. They assume that users consume more than they create, and the internet should be a place where everyone has equal footing. In addition, IPv6 firewalls in routers should either be disabled by default or have a forced API to selectively disable them [^1]. (IPv4 for the "decentralized internet" is pretty much a lost cause because of NAT). In my opinion, this should be a part of net neutrality. The current definition of what constitutes "internet" is far too loose.

Many applications of decentralized hosting of websites or other content is much harder because most people have a very shitty upstream. If you could use all smartphones around the world that are currently connected to WiFi and an outlet, you could host whole websites (or at least chunked static content) over those. Currently, this is unrealistic because you can't NAT punch for every 100kb chunk and you won't get any good speeds.

[^1] My router by defaults blocks all incoming IPv6 connections to devices

Re: The Vision for Decentralized Web

#52
Personally I think that the most practical decentralization solutions are going to be p2p.

And also I think the big challenge we have now is for people to really work together and support some of the ideas out there. There are actually a very large number of projects in this area. Most of them are both fairly useful and also fairly unpopular.

I think the key is going to be to get some social momentum behind some of the better solutions.

Re: The Vision for Decentralized Web

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 proj…

What guarantee do you have that your thing won't turn into the "Gmail and the rest of them" problem? Basically you need money and tech skills to run a server. Small, amateur servers might have problems like much more frequent downtime, being paid or small and hard to find etc. In that situation, some big corp, perhaps Google or Facebook, could create their own server, free for everyone, but with no privacy and lots o…

> Basically you need money and tech skills to run a server.

Yes, you do, and also an ISP that will allow you to do so. I'm lucky in that my ISP allows me to run almost anything.

However as regards a server, you don't necessarily need a big, expensive machine. I run a low-traffic web server on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it recently had a mass visit from HN readers when I did a "Show HN" - no problems. With the Pi 4 there are lots of possibilities with the extra power etc. Why not start small and see how long it takes to outgrow your machine - it may take longer than you think.

Post reply on HN