Show HN: DPAGE – build and publish webpages on the decentralized internet
dpage.io
dpage.io
In terms of tech, it’s built on top of Blockstack’s decentralized infrastructure. You log into DPAGE using a decentralized id, and your data is stored on Blockstack's decentralized storage hub (Gaia). At any point you can run your own storage hub and store your data on your own server.
DPAGE doesn’t store user data, it connects to user’s storage hub from the browser when user logs into the app. Gaia storage hubs are usually publicly accessible, but all private information is end-to-end encrypted with the private keys associated with the user’s Blockstack id.
As a result, there’s no vendor lock-in with DPAGE, users can bring their data with them to other apps, they have complete control over their data. For example, if Facebook was built this way, a user who doesn’t like FB could seamlessly start using another app and keep all their contacts and messages.
We realize that it might be harder to monetize a product, when you can’t lock-in users into your app. You basically voluntarily open yourself up to the competition. On the other hand, the total value that the product can create for the world is much greater if the data is controlled by the users and they can permission other apps to use it. Imagine all the innovation that could happen if all the data on Facebook was open to developers (with the permission of users who own the data).
We’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback about the idea or the app.
Also, what's your plan to handle illegal content? You're on major cloud providers now, but they've shown that they will reject some customers who have harmful/illegal user-generated content. Anything marketed as decentralized tends to attract flies like honey.
What dpage can do is deny the access to illegal content by blocking illegal dpage.io urls. But then, a user can pick to use another app that serves the pages created on dpage.
The DPAGE page says: "your data are by default stored on a free Blockstack’s Gaia storage hub". When I looked at the Blockstack, their page says "Personal data lockers built on Google, AWS, and Azure."
Does this mean that my data is stored (encrypted) on Google/AWS/Azure, and that Blockstack is currently paying for this? So if Blockstack runs out of money, all the pages are gone?
This way you'll be able to pick both: 1) your storage provider 2) the app that works on top of your data
The Gaia hub can be run anywhere you want -- on a server, in a service worker in your browser, etc. It's only on the write path, so availability isn't too big of a concern as long as your storage provider handles the read path (which cloud storage does).
Gaia (the Blockstack storage system) will let you use IPFS as your backing store, but at the end of the day it gives users the choice as to where and how their data gets hosted. This way the user can select the best cost/performance trade-offs for hosting and storing their data.
Well, that's what Filecoin is for. Although I'm generally skeptical of cryptocurrency, as well as the scalability of technologies like IPFS. But we'll see.
In the theoretical case where the personal photos are hosted on IPFS, they could provide storage for me. And since it is IPFS, it would not require much -- even if they get super popular, the outgoing bandwidth is still relatively small.
Going further, imaging a web build on IPFS, where it is considered acceptable and recommended to pin all the sites you link to. So ipfs hacker news pins all the articles that people are linking to, and my browser bookmarks pin all the bookmarked content (possibly via Firefox sync service), and my personal website pins all the outgoing links so they never go broken.
(Note that this likely would not with the videos very well, but I am fine with that -- most of things I bookmark, and most of HN content for that matter, is video-free)
This is all dreams today of course -- there is a number of technical reasons and missing technologies that make that setup non-feasible now. But wouldn't it be nice to have no broken links?
My ideal solution would use Layer 3 multicast and Layer 7 anycast heavily where content is initially hosted on your device but scales with popularity by becoming available on the nearest node near the client within the client's multicast group.
I think this problem is difficult because people want decentralization from the start. Why would I pay for hosting or transporting random content I don't care for. I believe IPFS (and bittorrent) have the scale-up decentralization where only one node hosts the content intially with gradual adoption scaling availability. Due to assymetric wan networks and traffic throttling/shaping I think hierarchial grouping of nodes is required,especially when considering low latency applications.
What is this "blockchain" they're talking about? I've read the Blockstack pages and I can only find references to "blockchain", no specification of what or where.
Your Blockstack ID is anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, so everyone else can find (1) your public key and (2) the location(s) where your profile and application data are stored. The naming system is described here: https://docs.blockstack.org/core/naming/introduction.html
It warms my heart to hear that people can use Blockstack and not have to think about blockchains :')
Should I have some other browser installed? Some extension?
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