Slashdot Mirror
Can We Decentralize the Web? (computing.co.uk)
This week the Internet Archive hosted an amazing Decentralized Web Summit, which united the makers who want to build a web "that's locked open for good." [Watch the videos here.] Vint Cerf was there, as was the technical product development leader for Microsoft's own decentralized identity efforts, several companies building the so-called punk rock Internet, "along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities." One talk even included Mike Judge, the creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, which recently included the decentralized web in its ongoing storyline.
Computing highlighted remarks by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Mitchell Baker, the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The ideology of the web's early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. "Money was considered evil," she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. "Advertising is the internet's original sin," Kahle told the packed room. "Advertising is winner-take-all, and that's how we've ended up with centralization and monopolies."
At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem -- recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally -- the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine.
Tristan Harris, who leads the Center for Humane Technology, "just hopes the pioneers of the new internet turn around to face the potential negative externalities of their products before it's too late," arguing that "If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health [issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've decentralized social harms and we can't even track them." But Tim Berners-Lee "remains hopeful".
"There's massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences," he told Computing. "There's a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data"... Meanwhile, there's the rise of "companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data" (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is "turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement".
"These are exciting times," said Berners-Lee.
Computing highlighted remarks by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Mitchell Baker, the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The ideology of the web's early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. "Money was considered evil," she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. "Advertising is the internet's original sin," Kahle told the packed room. "Advertising is winner-take-all, and that's how we've ended up with centralization and monopolies."
At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem -- recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally -- the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine.
Tristan Harris, who leads the Center for Humane Technology, "just hopes the pioneers of the new internet turn around to face the potential negative externalities of their products before it's too late," arguing that "If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health [issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've decentralized social harms and we can't even track them." But Tim Berners-Lee "remains hopeful".
"There's massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences," he told Computing. "There's a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data"... Meanwhile, there's the rise of "companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data" (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is "turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement".
"These are exciting times," said Berners-Lee.
Tor is already a decentralized web, and it needs a central list of initial nodes (either from the website or included in the download) to start up.
It's also harder to use then simply going to google.com, slashdot.org, or some other website which can be easily remembered.
If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest
recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health
[issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've
decentralized social harms and we can't even track them.
Do we need to track them? We do want to measure mental health issues, but that should happen on the real word for real people. Loneliness, addiction, polarization and conspiracy theories are also properties of modern cities, and that is all seeping into the net with the users. Could it be that the anti-decentralization arguments have a touch of opium of the people, or in this case of the government? Issues of property and control are hidden behind other issues that should have been dealt with by other means.
But the web certainly wouldn't be as widespread as it is today without all these "services" that keep people addicted. Such services wouldn't have self funded without advertising.
Just a shame advertising turned into an arms race of who could be more annoying and intrusive.
With all the terrorists and pedos coming out of the woodwork (the LGBT-P fiasco), might it be a good idea for more centralized monitoring? If it saves just one kid, this is worth it. Plus, decentralization brings fragmentation. Look at the Android versus iOS ecosystems. You want centralization. Really, you do.
Long answer, the same: no, we can't. Everybody who matters wants centralization. Centralization means better efficiency and shareholders love that. Centralization means better control, and governments love that. Centralization means simplicity, and the overwhelming majority of users love that. If you could build a decentralized system, only a minority would go there and the government would stop you, if big money doesn't sue you into the gutter first. We lost the internet, and it's time we accept that and move on.
as an old geezer, the web from long ago was decentralized - even if it was decentralized again, it would just go back to how it is now in a few years - the only way to stop it is to ban people from using it, which is an interesting idea by itself, but as long as the same public that gave us three tv channels, cable tv, and so on are using the web, it will inevitably be centralized by gatekeepers ... what would work is to completely ignore paywalls - google and all of them would never link to anything behind a paywall - let the paywalls get customers in some other way - never have a free site that links to anything that isn't public - but never gonna happen
I just wanted to say Usenet.
1. Decentralised DNS. The DNS crew have shown they cannot be trusted to 100%, which is a really bad thing when it comes to free speech online. Perhaps a bitcoin style ledger could be of help here.
2. A decentralised social network solution with monetisation options. Think about it, Youtube and Facebook rolled into one for all sorts of content imaginable, a pay-as-you-go buffet where you can choose whether to pay with your eyeballs, your time, or your money. Awesome stuff if it ever get started.
3. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big dragons (Google, Facebook etc).
Guess I'll keep dreaming of these things forever though...
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Decentralization also means running your own hardware and software. Hardware is a small expense. Software is a big challenge for the vast majority of the population (let's call them our friends & family). Our challenge is to make the software so easy that the average facebook user could deploy it as easily as installing the facebook app on their iPhone/android.
As far as software goes, there's plenty:
Cloud storage (nextcloud, owncloud, etc)
Collaboration platform (rocketchat)
Mail (dovecot/postfix, kolab, zimbra, etc)
Streaming (plex, kodi, ampache, etc)
etc..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought this interview with Francis Irving of Redecentralize.org said a lot about the benefits of a decentralized internet.
Alternative Right.
1. Decentralised DNS. The DNS crew have shown they cannot be trusted to 100%, which is a really bad thing when it comes to free speech online. Perhaps a bitcoin style ledger could be of help here.
2. A decentralised social network solution with monetisation options. Think about it, Youtube and Facebook rolled into one for all sorts of content imaginable, a pay-as-you-go buffet where you can choose whether to pay with your eyeballs, your time, or your money. Awesome stuff if it ever get started.
3. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big dragons (Google, Facebook etc).
Guess I'll keep dreaming of these things forever though...
All fine and good.
In an attempt to start a meaningful dialogue, how do you feel about The Daily Stormer having a website available on the internet, having a site name entry in the distributed DNS system, and having a home page and videos on your decentralized social network?(*)
This is the choice you will have to make when implementing the next internet: in order to make it truly open for everyone, you will have to accept that there are people whose opinion you don't agree to and who have just as much right to free speech. Management of such a system has to be completely decoupled from mob rule, else we'll be back to where we are now.
A completely open internet would allow distasteful speech and people you don't agree with to have a voice.
Are you willing to take the bad with the good?
(*) For those who don't know, Daily Stormer is an actual nazi website that lost their original website name after registrars dropped them as customers while keeping the original name, disallowing them from using the name at another registrar.
The web is already decentralized (if you exclude the browsers' victory in banishing self-signed certs). The fact that tons of websites choose to use one or two services is a business decision, not a technical one. You don't need advertising, you could run your own advertising, and you can manage your own payments and subscriptions. But people don't because it's easier to use whatever's popular at the moment. They could choose to include a free plug-in advertising framework which they self-host and manage on their own, but instead they choose to use a 3rd party service and pay them instead. The sites don't care about you, they only care about making money. Thus none of this is a problem for them.
The biggest obstacle is greed and people too lazy to learn. The others are ISP port blocking, ISPs banning servers, and most ISPs having tiny upload speeds. Business class net service isn't required for personal site, so don't tell me you have to upgrade to business service, which isn't even available in a lot of residential zoned areas.
Close your computers and meet other people. They would also want to be discovered.
Do you want to be on a terrorist watch list?
Only terrorists meet other people, in public instead of never leaving home and the Internet, /s
1. That's life, and there's no escaping life.
2. There's no one out there I trust to decide on my behalf what's bad and what's good.
I'm sorry, but this "kum bi ya" internet needs to run on magical unicorn farts crap needs to end with a harsh reality check.
It costs $$$ to run the infrastructure that runs the internet. It takes man power, energy, and an assortment of various other folks with expertise to keep the lights on. And guess what? Advertising pays for all of that. You know what doesn't pay for that? A tip jar. I'm sorry guys, buy FOSS can only do so much and a "tip jar" isn't enough to keep the lights on something this big. Sure you can do a lot with add-on corporate contracts, but let's be real with ourselves: it takes real hard cash to lay out all of that fiber.
The only thing that needs to be "decentralized" are the folks like Verizon and ATT who feel the need to keep gobbling stuff up. You're utility companies. Get over your bloody selves and accept that you will perpetually be a slow growing stock and not a sexy entertainment company.
On an unrelated note, I find it ironic that a lot of these "information wants to be free" types from the early days of the internet were more than happy to receive a paycheck from their much maligned military industrial complex. Irony at its finest!
New things get the benefit of being open for a while but as is human nature more than enough of someones are going to come along and decide what you are doing with it must be regulated.
It is the basic nature of humans. adults regulate the children, economics regulate the adults, and government regulates it all. You can slice and dice it up however you like but the end result is NEVER different. It will be regulated.
Even in the ever anti-regulation (is that really a thing or just gas people emit?) state of texas you need to a permit to handle unpackaged food.
https://www.learn2serve.com/te...
There is even a temporary suspension in some areas for training for hurricane relief.
http://dshs.texas.gov/food-han...
Isn't it nice that your legislators are so busy that you can't even legally carry a tray of food from the kitchen to a table without a license or permit of some kind in some places?
Like I said, stop with these pipe dreams a free and open internet is no longer possible because it is no longer new enough to escape the clutches of human meddling. There are numerous calls to regulation on it by businesses and lay people and it will become just another arm of the bureaucracy. It's not prophecy, it's not politics, it is just flat human reality! Or you could say everybody's religion. Because that is tribalism in it's most basic form. Grouping up to gain power to tell people how to live and is as natural for humans as talking to each other!
but here's what holds me back. I'd be a johnny-come-lately to a long established culture, with its own established norms and shibboleths.
I can get alone fine with people so long as there's nothing at stake I care about. But having a few beers together is not at all the same thing as working on a project together.
I could maybe go solo and see how much I can fix things with just a forked implementation and maximum interoperability. But I don't have the know-how to head up an open source project.
Behind every technical problem lurks a people problem.
"Decentralized Web Summit" - "which united the makers"
Yes, lets bring all the decentralized people into one single centralized place!
"Who do I need to get in touch with to get this going?"
Please send a $500 cash good faith donation (100 dollar bills only) for membership along with your CV to:
Word Wide Web Decentralization Project
Membership Committee
Attention: Mr. Isaiah Mugambo
PO Box 4714
Ikorodu, Nigeria
104211
Unless you've got really major marketing dollars to get everyone to switch over from their old ways.
The time to solve a design problem is long before it becomes obvious. Or, if you can't manage to spot it early enough...
They say make one system as a prototype and throw it away, then go design a better one. But the existence of a user base makes this advice impractical. The Web was a prototype-quality design that got established as a standard, because people were idiots.
It's probably way too late to do it right.
long before the Web. You can't say they should have seen it coming, because it had already come, decades before.
Allowing deep cross-linking of images was the fatal mistake. If they hadn't done that, probably no one would ever have come up with all the abuses that followed.
It's so damn simple. Keep ads on the same server as the site. Make them part of the site, under control of the site owner, who will lose his users if he doesn't police the ads. Don't support anything else in the protocol. Don't even put the idea of doing it any other way into PHB's heads.
And no cookies, except for session ID. Don't even have the concept of a "cookie" but have a header line for session ID.
But that's all too late now.
The web has been and still is decentralized from both a physical and logical perspective, it only appears centralized to the noobs who no nothing about it or believe Gor invented the internet.
No. Because then you would have two (or more) webs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These problems didn't start with Google and Facebook, the starting point was more like Eternal September, when AOL met USENET. Back in the "Good old days", things were better because you had to work to get on the Internet, which meant you were skimming off the cream of the crop. Not everyone agreed with each other, but everyone was from the upper part of the distribution, so they could disagree sanely, and they could manage to hold more than one idea in their head at once and thus work together in spite of differences. Nowadays, the Internet is an average over plain old humanity, and not a small human-scale group, it's all of them essentially at once, so of course it sucks. It sucks both because advertisers and other manipulators see that concentration of people and thinks "I can make money off them", but it also sucks BECAUSE THE PEOPLE DEMAND IT. Pewdiepie and Logan Paul were enabled by YouTube, but they were created by consumers. President Trump was enabled by Twitter, but created by voters.
Basically, the original post is discussing a technical solution to a social problem, and it's pissing me off that all of these smart people are focusing on the wrong problems (this general meme is all over the place these days). Yes, we should figure out a way to pare off some of the worst self-reinforcing aspects of Facebook and the like, but that's a materially different problem than "We need to replace Facebook entirely with something which is totally antagonistic to the entire reason Facebook is even successful in the first place." We _could_ manage to modify Facebook, but there is no chance that we'll replace Facebook, unless someone more compelling (and most likely worse) comes along.
So be clear, this isn't a "worse is better" argument. I think people can do better. I just think that all of the incentives are not in that direction, and that ignoring the incentives is the surest route to failure. This is a "perfect is the enemy of good enough" argument, where we're going to suffer with it for another decade until knowledgeable people get off their asses and do _work_ to fix things instead of spending their time on pie-in-the-sky redesigns.
Um ... No. He doesn't like it but believes rightly so that it is a thing that isn't going away. He believes one standard devil is better than hundreds of competing ones. So, no, you can't call him a proponent, just a pragmatist.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Hmm we have myultiple host/compute providers with infrastructure in multiple locations all over the world telcos have multiple pops and peering lcations we have multiple cdns, even multiple ondersee fiber links. I must be missing somerhing, but this seems goute decentralized to me, so what am I missing? Any info is appreciated as Iâ(TM)m shore there is some thing rather basic Iâ(TM)ve missed.
I note presence of Microsoft people, who would not be allowed there if the web was Microsoft-centered.
by Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
The conclusion: "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
As a political example of the appropriate need for balance between meshworks and hierarchies, here is an excerpt from and essay where conservatives call (propertarian) libertarianism the "Marxism of the RIght": https://www.theamericanconserv...
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoonâ(TM)s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family [as well as health and community, I'd add] are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
With newsgroups, p2p, forums, websites, a few search engines that actually got results.
Now we have social media, shadow bans, deranking search results, US party political social media removing content and accounts, SJW.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We have to find a way to make the internet in China open and anonymous; If not, the direction will not change.
Close to 1bil people are using the internet in China, either on mobile or PC/Mac. All of them are locked into the Chinese intranet that is only partially connected to the outside world. The rest of the internet is mostly blocked or throttled into oblivion.
Politicians in the free world are now heading in the same direction, since China is able to get away with it so easily. Sadly, we created the technology and even sold the hardware the Chinese use to create their internet oppression.
It has to start with Google. If they wanted to (they don't) they could put everything they do on a new internet layer, fully encrypted and anonymous. All major websites and services would have no choice but to use it.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin - if you don't fix the internet, you have failed. Instead, you will be remembered as the ones who screwed us all and did nothing but waste time playing around with boats and airplanes.
It is decentralized. It always has been. Anybody can put up a web site/page/server on any device. People may call it decentralized, because all they use it Facebook/Google/Amazon/Twitter all day, but that doesn't mean the Web is still not out there.
I don't respond to AC's.
I've been continuously revising a mesh network design. There are two layers: hosts and map servers.
Host's provide:
* Sandbox in which to run Map Servers, each of which may have:
* Ability to swap self with another Map Server, at will
* Network Connectivity
* Memory
* Processing Time
* Optional Resources -- extensible but examples include persistent data storage, user interfacing services, etc.
Each Host will earn "promises" for the resources it provides to others. The promises are a form of currency, redeemable for any services. The main idea is that if a human connects his/her computer to the mesh, he/she can allocate how many resources are made available to others. The more resources others use of his/hers, the more that person (or his/her host) may use from others. These promises may be used, however, for any kind of purchases. So in effect, leaving one's computer online acts as a kind of minimum basic income.
Map Server's provide:
* Reputational Identity Service
Identities are offered to any agents (human or otherwise) that keep the actual individual's anonymous but maintain a reputation based on the identity's transactions with other identities. For example, Hosts and Map Servers have identities. So may people or programs. An identity maintains General Reputation as the sum of all received Specific Reputations. After any transaction, each party to the transaction may "complement" the other's Specific Reputation(s), such as "timeliness" and "quality" but may be any term the complementer decides to use. Each complement is given as a percentage of that identity's General Reputation, drawing down proportionally from previously complemented others, as necessary. So when deciding on whether or not to conduct a transaction with another identity, one may consider its reputation. And one's complements are more or less powerful depending on its own complement's received. Time since birth may also be considered. So complements from one of high esteem, esteems oneself the more so.
* Global matching of services sought with services offered.
An agent may post services sought and/or services offered. The mesh keeps them organized and identifies matches. This is to eliminate unwanted advertising. It also serves to let supplier's know what others are seeking so they don't have to guess what they need to bring to market. The hope is that this will efficiently match ends with means, growing the economy with far less wasted time and guesswork. Also, services sought and services offered are defined in an organic semantic notation (no rigid schemas, as with RDF). So you may creatively describe as many details and sub-details as you like. They are posted in the form of a distributed Tree Graph database.
* Virtual geography
Map Servers are organized into communities, each of which maintains a particular region of a single virtual world, expanding north, south, east, and west from virtual latitude zero, longitude zero. A community manages the physics of all objects with its region of responsibility. The purpose of this is to provide a consistent structure for browsing, such as markets. The virtual world will be interacted with in a protocol enabling textual, 2D, or 3D graphical interfaces.
The web is decentralised. Go ahead. Make a web site. Done.
What they mean is, can we unseat Facebook and make money off the web instead of them. Oh, and maybe make it not addictive too. Yeah, probably not.