I worked on Secure Scuttlebutt and then founded Beaker. Happy to answer questions.
2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create large amounts of revenues and profits?
3. Does this community also know about projects like OpenMined which seek to democratise access to data & infra to run ML algorithms on? Any pattern like reason you can think of, for it to have not come up in André’s post?
A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clients only have the "rights" to consume and filter information, whereas servers have the "rights" to publish, moderate, and set the software. Clients have to borrow publishing rights from the servers, and that means that all authority is derived from the citizenry of servers. A peer-to-peer Web unifies publishing and consumption rights under one class of device (the "peer") and so it equally distributes the authority over moderation and software among the peers as well.
I bring this up because it alters the service-driven packaging model for the Web. Rather than having software be delivered in a one-size-fits-all package from a given .com, the peer-to-peer Web is a customizable network of packages. There's no builtin authority over the composition of software. All users can customize and share customizations. Therefore no two devices have to share the same application code; they just need to share data formats and protocols.
I'd keep an eye out for how software is packaged for non-hacker use in the p2p Web, because that's probably one place for economic models can emerge. It makes a lot of sense for indie programmers to think of themselves as content creators, and to then cultivate patreons around their modules and packages. For larger projects, we run an Open Collective [1] and have found some initial success there.
The reality is, without a mechanism of user/data capture, it is very hard to create huge profits, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'd rather trade a situation where 1% of the population gets stinking rich if it meant we get the general wealth of FOSS and open data. I think enough incentives will remain to do good new work.
3. I'm not personally familiar with OpenMined but decentralization is a pretty active space. SSB and Dat/Beaker have a few things in common: overlap in the communities, a focus on p2p hypermedia protocols, and not a lot of love for cryptocurrency solutions. That last point may change over time, but currently the usability, performance, and waste of the coins has left us all saying, "can't we do this without them?" And we think the answer is yes.
(That's said, I respect other people trying the coins. Everybody has to place their bet somewhere.)
(beaker's neat... i'll check it out)
For one, even right now we badly need better client-side ways of caching, searching and indexing content. I should be able to easily cache, tag and search a wikipedia article, for example, without ever touching a remote server. On the decentralized web, these tools are critical.
As far as search goes, it'd be interesting to find a way of letting peers run anonymous queries on each others' local indices. Maybe you'd still only want trusted peers (e.g. friends of friends) to be able to query your index. Or maybe you'd want to have some privacy settings for who can search what content. Maybe this is a job for zero knowledge proofs? IDK. It's a hard problem for me to wrap my head around. How to balance privacy with fluid information retrieval.
This kind of p2p search system could be a powerful replacement of centralized search, especially in the sense that it gives users the opportunity to index content with humanly meaningful metadata.
Remember back in the day when people had web indexes? You'd visit someone's www page and they'd have a list of cool links? Think about a next level version of that, where peoples' curated indexes are stacked with meaningful metadata and well integrated with the browser.
I could also imagine interesting peer-graph indexing algorithms that worked using gather-apply-scatter kind of techniques.
We're looking at adding a private search index in the browser itself. This index would be constructed by adding dat sites to your 'library,' and directing it to crawl the outbound links.
What's unique about this is, other than the private queries, we can establish trust relationships with all the data in your results. This is particularly useful for searching for users or software, since you want to trust those results. Dat is a cryptographic network - all sites, users, and apps are represented by public keys, and all data is signed - so your search results are a search against your personal Web of Trust.
When you search for "Paul Frazee," if you had previously added 'dat://beakerbrowser.com' to your library, then you'd see a result for "Paul Frazee (via beakerbrowser.com)". We can layer those signals too by matching URLs, so your result might be "Paul Frazee (via beakerbrowser.com, Alice, Bob)." Dat uses secure ledgers internally [2] so this is really a pretty decent form of key distribution, but of course it can be generalized to searching for all kinds of information. We just have to find out the limits of disk space usage.
I have more to say, but I'll add it with a reply to remain timely.
1. https://yacy.net/en/index.html
2. https://beakerbrowser.com/2017/06/19/cryptographically-secur...
The concept is of the browser as a user agent, crawling the Web from the user's input set to find relevant data, rather than an objective "map and rank the world objectively" engine like Google does.
Other than this local index and distributed indexes like YaCy (which are very neat but a lot of work) there's also the traditional hosted indexes. My hope is that people will be able to self-host their own indexes privately, as an extension of their subjective local index (but with a larger graph searched). However, there's still room for traditional search engines to crawl dat sites as well.
Amazing tool, albeit slow on my machine (old Vista era 4GB ram laptop)