Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

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Back when mobile devices were rare, skype used p2p and was very popular and novel. But then an increasing percentage of nodes were mobile with limited power, limited bandwidth, and much less storage. Even being a member of a DHT (a nice way for distributed peers to keep track of each other) is a prohibitive from a battery life and bandwidth perspective for phones.

So Microsoft moved skype to a centralized service and have been trying to monetize it since.

The problem with decentralized servers isn't technical, something half as fast as your phone could easily handle distributed versions of popular websites. The arm based "wall warts" were plenty fast, and they are several generations old already.

How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? If it is advertising, what's the benefit to users?

Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?

It does seem that a modest arm based server that's silent, potentially integrated into a wifi router would hugely reduce the downsides of p2p networks. Free power, cheap bandwidth, and being part of a p2p network they would avoid long startup times for applications. Users on their phones would get instant access to their data while their local node did any proof of work, DHT tracking, earning the reputation necessary to use bandwidth, cpu, and storage from other peers.

I don't see any technical barriers, just that users wouldn't care, and nobody would want to pay for it.

> Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?

Probably few, except those actively searching for it. And, especially with decentralisation, the inevitable outcome of being too popular is that it starts to become centralised again, to make things easier.

Besides that, I thought for a moment about Apple's tech. If you and a friend have an iPhone and you're both trying to connect to the same network (and have each other in your contacts, I think), iOS will allow you to automatically share the credentials and connect the other phone too.

I reckon that you'd see a lot of value in that kind of device integration, which is essentially peer-to-peer.

I don't know, if people could buy a 'personal cloud box' that is as user friendly as an iphone, for less than a 100 dollars, a substantial number of them might possibly do that.

These products have existed for a while and don't really make a dent.

I don't think I've encountered any super simple appliance I can plug into my home network and move data onto and then easily give online services I trust access to its data. Ever since I heard about Tim Berners Lee's new project, the Solid POD (Personal Online Datastore), I've been thinking about how to make it friendly enough to people that they'd actually use it in large enough numbers to gain traction. It always seemed like people would have to learn to start paying at least a little money to make privacy work without advertising dollars. I just Googled around for the latest and noticed that the MeWe social network (which emphasizes privacy) which Tim is working with offers a free tier on data but then charges above 8 GB. I wonder if their long game on being sustainable is to just make money on add-ons above the free tier. Here's hoping it catches on...

https://mewe.com/faq

I love my Synology NAS server :)

Though its not really simple enough for non-technical people to set up.

I also love my Synology DS-218+. I'm hosting my own Spotify (Airsonic [1]); music tagged to perfection with Beets [2]), an IRC bouncer because Matrix is still not ready, my own Netflix (Synology's Video Station [3]), and my own mailserver (Synology's MailPlus Server [4]). I've been giving out access to this pod to close friends. It's empowering and community-building. This is the kind of social network I desire: close-knit around the warm glow of a server.

It's really self-host heaven. I don't pay for Fastmail, Spotify, or video streaming anymore.

[1] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-airsonic

[2] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-beets

[3] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/video_station

[4] https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/mailplus

Sick, now turn this into a product that can be adopted by the masses!

I have an older Synology. It is already ready for the masses.

Why: You only need one one for a family and most of the time there's already a person in the family who does "PC stuff". And even if there isn't there's always someone who'll learn it if a friend has one.

The rest of this post is not targeted at you but rather on a whole attitude here at HN:

-------------------------------

Anyone who can operate a web browser, has any education in IT and knows enough English to read instructions in the box should be able to set up one.

In fact I think just being able to read the quick start instructions should be enough to install one with basic features.

Setting up websites in the 90ies - early 2000s were a lot harder. Same goes for using older PCs with DOS.

A major problem today seems to be learned helplessnes. In our well meant and to some degree profitable[0] effort to make sure anyone can use anything we have are creating a situation were people are more helpless .

Seriously: if app stores and walled gardens had been introduced first the web and email had been considered to complicated now. I can imagine HN: """You mean my siblings, parents and grandparents are going to install this "e-mail" thing? Even if they were able to configure "smtp" and whatnot they'd forget the "email address" or even how to start it before tomorrow."""

[0:]: if anyone doesn't catch my drift, your brightest customers might not be the ones who pays most ;-)

Edits: a number of them :-)

> most of the time there's already a person in the family who does "PC stuff". And even if there isn't there's always someone who'll learn it if a friend has one.

That's not true at all. Confirmation bias is rough when you're technical; you keep spotting other technical people.

Was about to disagree strongly with your conclusion but you have a point. Not everyone had a web site.

But I'm not totally convinced either: email has been huge despite the configuration needed, also with people who had to take it step by step twice and make notes while doing it. Some figured it out on their own (or more realistically using the step by instructions that came bundled with their first modem). Other had a son or a grandson who'd picked it up at school. Others got it at work.

My grandparents where the youngest group of people I can think of that didn't have access to email somehow.

And my wifes grandparents have/had access to mail and used actual mail clients too, not just Hotmail or Gmail.

A 'personal' cloud box is not enough. We need a 'social' cloud box which can talk to the equivalent boxes at the homes of our relatives and acquittances, and which are as easy to set up as logging into a centralized social network.

Mastadon meets Dropbox, with a content navigation interface thrown on top?

Yes, that's the thing. We know how it should be used because people are already using such systems. We need that no part of the system is owned by a single organization.

And the biggest issue of them all, keeping it absolutely secure while doing all that. It would be a killing blow to the venture if someone got their data stolen.

The existing centralized systems set a pretty low bar for that, to be honest.

I do not think current big centralized systems are a low bar, the attacks get more and more sophisticated, but mom&pop/volunteer/etc. systems still get exploited in the most banal ways possible.

https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

This is what hubzilla can do, along with using the Zot protocol for distributed identity.The main issue really is having an easy wizard-based installation/configuration for new users wanting to host.

The issue such devices have in practice is upfront cost, compatibility, the need for port forwarding, and the lack of redundancy so you don't lose your data. Among other problems but these come to mind. Centralization solves those problems because you can connect to a server instead of port forwarding, your data might be stored across 3 servers, the cloud storage might be as cheap as free, and applications are designed to work seamlessly with a small number of big cloud providers.

In the depths of my soul I would love to re-decentralize the web. I truly believe data centralization will cause people to suffer a lot. decentralized tech needs to solve so many problems before alternatives to centralization become viable. Centralized approaches also improve over time and are a moving target to keep up with.

Dont forget about device maintenance, which is a huge burden. Users of centralized services never have to worry about upkeep.

IPv6 will help by eliminating NAT (and thus port forwarding problems). IPFS might help with redundancy. But yeah the cost and complexity are major problems. I think the biggest problem is making open standards that can evolve quickly. All the big chat platforms have switched to proprietary protocols so they can iterate and roll out changes on their own.

Basically all home routers block incoming connection because so many shitty IoT devices were built to trust anything that is able to connect to it. My router doesn't even have an option to turn off the block. Can only unblock ports 1 by 1

I guess the route around this would be for the maker of these devices to partner with router companies. Alternatively, they could also be routers. That would potentially make quite a lot of sense...

I can see a lot of value in routers becoming mini home servers + IoT device hubs. There should also be some standard way for devices to let the router know if they should have access to the outer internet so things like lightbulbs only have access to the iot hub and then the hub has access to the internet.

Doesn't UPnP already solve this? And it enabled by default on most routers.

But IPv6 routers will continue to block incoming traffic.

Which NAT/PAT/port-forwarding issues are you thinking of?

I'm not certain we need to make this accessible to "the next billion". We like to dress up these actions in virtue but the truth is we hook people up because it's a business. Facebook devastated our social fabric. I don't think it should have been invented. But here we are with its nuclear fallout all because some young douche thought it was a good idea.

If everyone owned a personal cloud box, security procedures would quickly fall off a cliff, those people are now the new botnet.

Maybe leave people alone, stop sticking our fingers in all the places they might stick to money. Let the geeks take care of their little tribe.

> How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how?

How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist.

> Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?

They wouldn't. And ideally, beyond the annoying hoops on initial versions (e.g. discovery/identity), they shouldn't. Your software needs to win on features. A self-hosted, subscribable Reddit clone w/ chat would be a very good start.

Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations.

The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter.

Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, or companies allow their developers to do so.

> The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter),...

And even there, imho Bob (iirc) from the video was right - I hate font awesome 5, and always install either version 4 or "fork awesome" in my projects.

Why so?

I must thank you for your question, and must (embarrasing as it is) admit I was wrong.

I started a reply stating that one can no longer use <i> elements and must instead include svgs, but then I decided to double check - and found I was wrong all this time... Some minor details have changed, but mostly for the better. Their marketing is a bit annoying too, but that's the price of having a sustainable business model.

I obviously haven't checked version 5 in projects yes, but I guess I should now. So thanks for making me realise my mistake...

Those, then, would seem to be valid ways to organize such a project. Lord knows there is more than enough volunteer time available to achieve any project - if properly organized.

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