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Why We Need To Decentralize The Web (postlight.com)
One could argue that the web is already decentralized. But with major websites like Google and Facebook, it's increasingly harder to stay decentralized. Paul Ford writes: There's a good research report that was just published. It's called "Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?" (That's a PDF so watch yourself.) What is decentralization? Take the web: Anyone can set up a web page and link to any other web page. That's decentralized. Anyone can make a search engine to find those web pages. That's centralized. The search engine can add blogging. That's Google + Blogger. Now it's both a publisher and a search engine. It has more power. Decentralized things are harder to manage and use. Centralized things end up easy to use and make money for relatively few people. The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It's a paradox and very thorny. God bless the authors of this paper, they don't make you wade through. They pop up with recommendations by page 5: "We advise investors -- whether motivated by civic or fiscal concerns -- both to watch this space closely and to advocate for the pre-conditions that we believe will enable a healthier marketplace for online publishing. A precondition for the success of these distributed platforms is a shift towards user-controlled data, the ownership of a user's social graph and her intellectual property created online. It will be difficult for new platforms to develop without widespread support for efforts towards data portability and rights over data ownership. Data portability also enables new models for aggregation. Small, thoughtfully curated news sources will be made more powerful by having access to the user data currently locked inside mega-platforms, but right now, federated clients that interoperate between different platforms are borderline illegal -- fixing this may require adjusting overly broad regulations, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
"We believe that these user-controlled data rights are essential to develop a more robust market and allow new efforts to emerge from existing communities. Though individual users might not directly care about or understand these rights, their adoption will free developers to create applications that leverage users' existing data, so that they can provide compelling, interesting new experiences, even with a small user base."
"We believe that these user-controlled data rights are essential to develop a more robust market and allow new efforts to emerge from existing communities. Though individual users might not directly care about or understand these rights, their adoption will free developers to create applications that leverage users' existing data, so that they can provide compelling, interesting new experiences, even with a small user base."
The internet is a series of connections that require physical wires. The owners of those wires will always be an authority despite any law or regulation unless you feel you can fund billions of dollars worth of fiber.
I don't read AC
What an insightful article! Oh, wait, what's the opposite of that? That's what I mean.
Yeah, we'd all like to live in an a world of artisanal, free-trade, organic, loving hand-crafted websites that respect our privacy and that allow anyone anywhere to come in and set up shop.
But then we all decide to surf at Walmart. Because it's easier.
Saying "we should decentralize the web!" is like saying "we should democratize the news!" or "we should give the power back to the 99%!" It makes a great soundbyte, but it's handwavy utopianism that ignores the long canon of human history and any semblance of practicality.
Wake me up when we're talking about news or stuff that matters.
Is for a non profit foundation like Mozilla, Apache, or Wikipedia to make voice UI and assistants ideally local not central. Mozilla is already working on this I think. Basically non profit foundations should be doing what Siri, Alexa, and Google Voice services do. Why can't they? Wikipedia works great. Apache web server is awesome. And Mozilla Firefox is a great browser. Why can't these organizations move into other domains?
I have a rant about this from 2012:
Yeah, the web has changed in my day.
It used to be full of homepages. Personal sites. If you searched for something (and search sucked in those days, trust me), more often then not you found a website that someone had made on their own time and covered whatever subjects they wanted it to. And not a blurb on some reviewing site. No, the whole damn site was theirs. It depended on what you were searching for, but it ran the gamut of important to trivial. From fan-reviews of books, to people raging about how awesome the newest game was. But also important stuff like the effects of the fall of the Berlin wall the the social entanglement the web is posing for Muslim women.
Most of these pages were hosted for free. And I believe that's where I came in. Way past the endless September. Before the 90's putting something on the web required you to run your own server. Or have access to one in college or something. In the 90's, geocities and all lowered the bar for the internet and hosting was now free, with a small string attached.
Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own servers or websites, that's too much work. The bar has been lowered even further. You no longer need to know HTML or even what a tag is. In the web 2.0 world, everyone can simply upload what they want onto websites. Facebook, flicker, tumbler, wordpress, and all. Those places have done the heavy lifting of making the webpage and all people have to do is insert the content. Web pages that take in people's information, pictures, links, knowledge and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see. When you google something now, the first result is usually wikipedia. Because wikipedia is where people upload their knowledge.
And that's it's own separate rant on the importance of wikipedia.
But anyway, today's internet is more centralized. If you want to know about a movie, you don't find someone's website with a page dedicated to ranting about the movie, you go to imdb and find facts and reviews uploaded by people. You see someone's rant that was upmodded by other. The one that got downmodded is buried and the truly insightful one got censored. (and then you go torrent it, but that's not the web).
This is a slightly disturbing consolidation of the web. Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web, the meaningful web is now a handful of sites dedicated to their particular topic. It's arguably more structured, but it's taking the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the companies that own the sites. It's arguably the natural course for these sorts of things. Something new came along. Everyone competed, and then a few, very few, people won, ate up the losers, and the consolidation left one or two victors. Which is why everyone was desperate to become to defacto standard. Fighting that process is hopeless. But the natural way things work is kinda crap. It leads to monopolies, and abuse of power. I guess I'm simply unsure about the nature of our gatekeepers.
And Jesus christ. Think about email. A wonderfully decentralized system where it's a no-holds-bar capitalist survival of the fittest right? We SSSHEEEEEIIITT boy! There's Gmail, yahoo, and maybe hotmail. There are also corporate mail servers. But by and far, for most of the populace, email has consolidated. When the fuck did THAT happen and how did I not notice?
To IRC and Usenet.
More like a decentralized SERVICE than a physical web. Problem is is that if it's not a Facebook/Google people are going to, it could be someone else.
The web is a decentralized because it sits atop of the tcp/ip protocol. Datacenters are scattered all over the place and not in one, central location. Traffic is routed all over the place. Packets still get scattered around the world. It's as decentralized as it's going to physically get. Because that's a physical concept.
But that's not what they're upset about. They decided they don't like that Google and Facebook get a lot of traffic. Too bad. They built useful shit. You make not think so, but millions of other disagree. Search engines made it so we could find those thousands of other pages. FB made it so we could find those friends we're not so good at keeping up with and made it easier to keep up with them.
Unless you're going to show us a way to spread all that traffic out so we don't need a search engine or a facebook, please just be quiet and leave us to get on with life.
I've had it up to here with ignorant trolls who post disagreeable things. We need to decentralize into echo chambers around each water cooler. I only want to hear opinions I agree with from people I like.
Is it possible to build a decentralized search ranking system based on a block-chain cryptocurrency model? Google's monopoly is built on its search engine, and Facebook's is built on convenience and network effects. Myspace shows that Facebook's monopoly can be broken, so cracking search is the tough nut. I'm thinking of something where entities are given cryptocurrency for participating in the computation of search ranking computations, and can exchange the cryptocurrency for other currencies, or redeem it for (slightly) boosted stature in the search computation.
the genie is already out of bottle - the Internet has been very well centralized by Google, good luck changing that.
to MESH networking.
This is about large social media platforms and news aggregators rather than the internet or webpages in general. Here's the thing, this problem has already been solved (multiple times) which they admit to in the paper but don't think it's good enough because... not enough people use them and they aren't integrated into the "mega-platforms".
Sure sounds to me like the neo-nazis and their bile spewing kin aren't taking being kicked off twitter/facebook very well.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The internet was mostly decentralized in the early days, pre-web, and definitely pre-mega-corp.
Some of us continued to push for that model to succeed, but the vast majority of the public preferred centralized services like Facebook, Google and so on.
Any attempt to decentralize it is going to run headlong into that public preference for centralized control. People HAD a decentralized internet, and they couldn't wait to centralize it. I see no evidence that people's preferences have changed.
Those of us who were not willing to move to the centralized services have been marginalized.
Then build a decentralized search engine. There are many, many, examples of distributed systems - if "we" need to do something, or "one" could argue, I think it's time for "you" to read some academic papers on ring / distributed algorithms, blockchains, byzantine generals, submit papers to academic journals if there is a hole in the academic literature (doubtful), start cranking on code (probable), and start marketing existing solutions (almost certain.)
But how will we be able to block sites that we disagree with?
Where's that anonymous coward who calls posts critical of Google "word salad"? I miss that shill.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
If a decentralized system ultimately finds VALUE in some order and organization (in search function, for example) that may just be a natural and healthy evolution of a system.
After all, in the entropic universe, we have people. Clearly local organization is possible while entropy (in total) is increasing.
If there's ultimately a drawback, as the OP suggests, then the results will follow. To demand somehow decentralization is like emplacing a tyrant to impose anarchy - sort of self-defeating.
-Styopa
Reminds me of an excellent post from an Iranian blogger who was put in prison for six years, from 2008 until an unexpected pardon in 2015. It's worth a read, especially for the younger folks who weren't paying much attention to information theory or internet philosophy prior to the Rise of Social Media.
- https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426
See also: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-04/after-six-years-prison-iranian-blogger-sees-very-different-internet and http://www.businessinsider.com/iranian-blogger-hossein-derakshan-internet-changes-6-years-filter-bubble-2015-7
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
APK just claim your shit posts. We know it is you.
Webrings are still a thing. The Netscape index is still around.
The centralization virus has taken over far more than just social media, or news, or even the web. They've infected the open source too. You want to have your own document repository with collaborative editing? There's Apache Wave (which is Google's proto-virus), or the 100 other "alternatives" which are all also *based* on Apache Wave, and.... well nothing else. There is no actual alternatives. You can do this with any major type of software. It's all been infected. You want to contribute to an open source project? Nearly all projects are now infected with Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Twitter "framework" type codes. Before you can contribute to any project, step 1 has now become: build yourself a centralized development environment exactly like theirs. It isn't until step 10 that you can actually contribute code. And don't forget, you must submit all code via a github.com pull request, all issues must be filed on github.com. If you want to participate in W3C standards: github. If you want to sign up for a non-profit meetup, you have to use meetup.com, or eventbrite.com or add your name to a Google Sheet or Google Form, etc.
Any time you want to participate in open source code, or even a non-profit meatspace organization, you CAN'T DO SO if you are actively trying to avoid Google/Facebook/Twitter.
This is the real problem. It's not just the web. They literally took over our entire society.
See subject: I can say I've done MY part to aid in partially "decentralizing" the web via hardcoded hosts files favorite sites where you spend most time online resolving them locally & faster via APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ & it works well enough for our /. peers to say these things about it (& there are MANY more like those quotes) e.g. https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11033545&cid=55085539/ - how about YOU & "your kind" (hypocritical bs artists do nothing "ne'er-do-well" blowhard windbag) showing us YOU CAN DO BETTER?
* You NEVER can, or will (& you KNOW it) - prove otherwise...
APK
P.S.=> Lastly, take YOUR OWN ADVICE you little loser pot calling a kettle black UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous nobody... apk
We have ways to decentralize. We don't have the will to make it work. As already observed, we are moving toward a one-to-many relationship on the web. Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube etc harvest categories of information and harvest users who want that information.
Decentralizing requires us to return to a many-to-many relationship. The technology is almost ready. With bittorrent we have a beginning that could be further developed. Inherent redundancy would strongly resist tampering by powerful entities. Another technology is blockchain where ideas like LBRY can allow an alternate network that discourages monopolies. Slightly unrelated is the need for a flexible micropayment system, and again blockchain may become a good choice. All of these can free us of excessive corporate influence and government intrusion.
But how could we convince the drones using Facebook and Twitter to actually make an effort to move toward this brave new world? They are content in their blissful isolation.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Anyone can run their own XMPP server which will talk to any other XMPP service in a similar way to email
Any email server can refuse to accept connections from other email servers. One example of this is blacklisting known sources of unrequested advertisements. Likewise, any XMPP server can refuse to accept connections from other XMPP servers. Spam control is ostensibly why Google Talk defederated from other XMPP servers when it became Hangouts and switched to a proprietary protocol.
"Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own servers or websites, that's too much work"
Editing a text file would be too much work, but with libreoffice and gnu/linux, it can be made pretty easy. The reason people don't have servers isn't because they are too much work, it's because they are forbidden by terms of service from their residential ISP. FCC complaint ID#12-C00422224
Lazy & Convenience usually win.
gmail is easy. People use it.
we all like to connect to friends. facebook and twitter make that easy.
even people blogging have centralized - blogger, wordpress.org/.com ...
people making money by tracking all of us on the internet like centralized services. google loves them, but also gives away google-analytics to every webmaster who gives up the privacy of their visitors.
slashdot has 4 trackers on this page (I just checked). Bet if I enabled javascript, at least 4 more would show up too.
In the beginning there were mainframes with dumb terminals connected to them. This was because hardware was very expensive and few people understood how computers really worked. Serious men in lab coats ran the hardware and software that was 'the computer'. They had all the power. If you wanted your program changed you had to put in a change request and hope someone in a lab coat listened.
Then along came personal computers. Suddenly, computer power was put in the hands of the unwashed masses. Anybody could buy one and start writing software programs. Much of the power now became distributed as people managed their own data and controlled everything on their own devices. Then, people started connecting all those computers so that they could share information and for a while, the web was very decentralized as millions of independent web sites were created.
But the emergence of big players like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook changed everything back toward the earlier model. Suddenly a large portion of the data was again centralized because of convenience. As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The new 'gatekeepers' on the web want to control access and the content. They want to decide (like the mainframe operators) what we get to see and how we use their platforms.
It is time for a shift back in the other direction. We need our data once again distributed out to devices that we control, but have the convenience of interconnecting that data with other, relevant data found within other's data domains. We have the infrastructure (billions of smart devices, powerful processors, and high speed interconnects) that we need to build a fully distributed data management platform. We just need the right software to tie everything together while still giving the end users control over their own information. This is a project that I have been working on for a few years now. It still has a lot of work left to be done, but it is well on its way.
I call it the Didget Realm. A world-wide data network of interconnected data nodes that are each essentially a really smart object store. The data objects are called Didgets (short for Data Widgets). They can contain either structured or unstructured data and each Didget can have a variable number of meta-data tags attached. Each node can act like a really smart file system; a relation database; or one of the NoSql solutions (key-value stores, document stores, graph databases, etc.). It supports multiple data models (hierarchical, relational, etc.) and is really, really fast.
Think of it like a file system that has 100 million files in it, but you can still get a list of all your JPEG photos or a list of all your documents with the tag 'Author = Bob' attached in just a couple of seconds (without having to first go through some multi-hour indexing process).
here in China it seems that they aim at the exact opposite: one application to centralize everything, Wechat.
Don't know which will prevail in the end, but even without being fluent in Chinese, I find this Wechat quite convenient.
I guess there are downsides to these all-in-one strategy but for the moment it does not exist for the Chinese people
See subject: It's nothing more than fact vs. an UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous "ne'er-do-well" do nothing in yourself...
APK
P.S.=> ... & you KNOW it... apk