As the internet becomes a resource that is completely boring and out of touch to 15-40 year olds people will flock to a less restrictive system. As eyeballs move over people will invest time and effort into making those systems usable.
This happened with the internet and can happen again with decentralized systems.
"Decentralized", "peer-to-peer", and "distributed" are not just magic words that make the whole world better. Consider BitTorrent as a case study. Probably the largest "decentralized" tech success story in internet history ... and it depends on a central core of pre-baked trackers, safe DHT bootstrap nodes, and search engines to be usable.
The internet is plenty decentralized technically. The problems we have are that big companies want to get paid and they want to make sure little companies won't threaten their ability to do that. So we get shameful abuses like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine.
The further problem is that governments and other establishment power brokers want to control narratives. They've been able to do this pretty well for the last 50 years, as your average Joe on the street couldn't just start broadcasting video and competing with the television broadcasts from FCC-approved speakers. But with YouTube, the average Joe can. That is a huge threat to the power brokers.
People are working overtime to make others feel that so much as grunting a sound that sounds similar to the word "Tor" means you're an evil traitor. I don't think that the young, who know little besides the status quo by definition since they haven't experienced much yet..
To save the internet, get out there and teach people about the value of an open forum and free dialogue, even if it makes them uncomfortable. Work hard to counter-influence the negative and evil influences. Abolish the CFAA, revamp Copyright to something sane.
Just whatever you do, don't spend 10 years reinventing the internet just to make us go through this show again in 15 years when Netv2 gets the same treatment.
Pre-edit: literally falling asleep while typing this, excuse any errors etc. Going to sleep now. Goodnight.
Hey, only one part got FUBAR'd. Relatively coherent for semi-consciousness! Fixing:
People are working overtime to make others feel that so much as grunting a sound that sounds similar to the word "Tor" means you're an evil traitor. I don't think that the young, who've experienced little beyond the status quo by definition, can be expected to automatically defy and overcome this.
Preserving/rebuilding the internet as a free space will take a much more intense effort than just lobbing the ball across the fence to the next generation and crossing our fingers that they'll figure something out.
I get the feeling you're not very involved in the private tracker community.
Private torrents are even more susceptible to these problems than public torrents, for several reasons.
a) They have the private flag set instructing the client not to use DHT to find peers.
b) They have the user's token embedded directly in the torrent, making it unsafe to share the file. Stripping the token will make it safe to share the file, but can't actually use it, since private trackers won't serve peers to a client without a token.
c) The torrents rely on a single tracker. Public torrents can throw on a handful of trackers that accept all comers, granting extra redundancy when outages occur.
d) Private trackers are the only search engines that index that specific corpus of data, and they typically have rules preventing users from sharing "internal" or "exclusive" content.
You're right that I'm no longer really "involved in the private tracker community" because I find the invite swapping tedious and mostly just stopped caring (didn't do anything to track down and get an account at "the next What.CD", for example), but private trackers only emphasize BitTorrent's dependencies on centralized brokers.