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Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

brewster.kahle.org

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Re: Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

#2

Post by wwwtyro »

I'm all for this, and consider it to be inevitable in the long run. In the short term, however, it seems like the major hurdle will be getting one of these projects into the mainstream: for the most part, the web already does what most people want it to do, and those people aren't going to be bothered to install a new web browser so that they can do things they're already doing. Especially if it lacks the features, performance, or ease-of-use of their current browser.

So, how do we address this? Is there a "killer app" for the distributed web that will motivate people to move to it? Can we use existing web tech like Web-RTC to bootstrap the system? Maybe a workable avenue is mobile, where people are pretty comfortable installing new applications - what if we built the next social network into an app based on the distributed web?

I don't know the answer, but I'd love to hear any ideas/brainstorming you clever people have to offer.

Re: Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

#3

Post by lsjroberts »

wwwtyro wrote: post #2

I'm all for this, and consider it to be inevitable in the long run. In the short term, however, it seems like the major hurdle will be getting one of these projects into the mainstream: for the most part, the web already does what most people want it to do, and those people aren't going to be bothered to install a new web browser so that they can do things they're already doing. Especially if it lacks the features, p…

You may be interested in https://ind.ie/about/vision/

Re: Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

#5

Post by gagege »

wwwtyro wrote: post #2

I'm all for this, and consider it to be inevitable in the long run. In the short term, however, it seems like the major hurdle will be getting one of these projects into the mainstream: for the most part, the web already does what most people want it to do, and those people aren't going to be bothered to install a new web browser so that they can do things they're already doing. Especially if it lacks the features, p…

I love the idea of doing a distributed social network via a mobile app. Being a native app, it could be kind of seamless as well, for the user.

Re: Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

#6

Post by mtgx »

wwwtyro wrote: post #2

I'm all for this, and consider it to be inevitable in the long run. In the short term, however, it seems like the major hurdle will be getting one of these projects into the mainstream: for the most part, the web already does what most people want it to do, and those people aren't going to be bothered to install a new web browser so that they can do things they're already doing. Especially if it lacks the features, p…

Going mainstream would probably require something like Firefox or at least Ubuntu integrating IPFS.

Re: Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

#7

Post by simon_vetter »

wwwtyro wrote: post #2

I'm all for this, and consider it to be inevitable in the long run. In the short term, however, it seems like the major hurdle will be getting one of these projects into the mainstream: for the most part, the web already does what most people want it to do, and those people aren't going to be bothered to install a new web browser so that they can do things they're already doing. Especially if it lacks the features, p…

Implementing other protocol handlers into existing web browsers and operating systems would be a good start IMO.

Taking ipfs/ipns [1] as an example, having handlers inside web browsers would allow people to link from http[s]:// to ipfs:// and vice versa in a seamless way, lowering the barrier to migrate.

From there on, there's nothing preventing you from distributing your application code (html/css/javascript/whathaveyou) over ipfs, and make use of WebRTC for user-to-user interactions.

Obviously http[s] is going to stick around for a while as it has its use cases (basically anything that deals with a centralized service, from online banking to search engines to apis), but having a secondary, peer to peer means of distributing content and applications would be a major plus.

[1] http://ipfs.io (they have a working implementation in Go with an HTTP gateway as well as a FUSE filesystem)

Re: Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

#9

Post by EGreg »

I think it's obvious that the current web is decentralized, but is heavily server-based. At the same time, there is something about propagating applications across these servers... Russia can ban Reddit but they can't ban Wordpress. For the moment, that is what we are working on at http://platform.qbix.com (and have been for the past 4 years). Making it easy to have a distributed social network the same way bitcoin makes money distributed.

Now, how would you take it further and make the web entirely peer to peer, so you wouldn't have to trust servers with your security and politics? You can have additional schemes like http and https, for various methods of delivery and storage.

I wrote this FIVE years ago but nothing seems to have been done about it since then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2023475

That would be an easy first step, that would do a lot. It's 2015 and we can't even have XAuth (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/18/spearheaded-by-meebo-xauth-...) in the browser! (We would need a space for storing preferences where websites from any domain could read what was written.)

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