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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.
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.
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..
I thought this interview with Francis Irving of Redecentralize.org said a lot about the benefits of a decentralized internet.
Alternative Right.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.