Comment by svachalek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by svachalek | Hacker News Reader

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I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina.

Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and this stuff... is not. Going forward it gets even worse, they're going to be opposed at every step by corporations with more money than most nations.

The internet was originally decentralized because the government wanted to make it that way, and I think the only way to get back there is going to require a gigantic, economically unattractive investment. There are at least a few governments that may have the capability but I can't name one that would have the motivation. Hopefully some billionaire's charity will decide saving the internet is a worthy legacy.

The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist.

The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0]

An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.

[0] https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

Eh. I sympathize, but if you were to implement the same as a client-side app rather than a hosted service, AFAIK there's little history or legal precedent for shutting such a thing down. Well, there was the kerfuffle between Microsoft and Google over Windows Phone access to YouTube, but other than that... Admittedly, a client-side app might not be allowed into walled-garden app stores, limiting its reach if targeting mobile operating systems. Still, mobile isn't everything. I find it strange that after the long history of multi-protocol IM clients back when it was still called "IM", there are so few attempts to do the same for modern protocols. I think the barriers are partly technical – e.g. better encryption/obfuscation, more features and faster pace of changes making it harder to keep up. But even that can't explain everything: many APIs are not obfuscated at all, and many services can be boiled down to pretty simple functionality. Part of it, I think, must be social – like people aren't even aware that it's a possibility, or worth spending effort on.

The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.

E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage).

And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?

IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/

I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.

I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.)

And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.

NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical.

I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.

It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.

One way to mitigate spam on Usenet is moderated newsgroups.

Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.

I find that self-regulating communities are much better at it than large platforms with lengthy EULAs written by lawyers. So yeah, if the people I cared about were on UseNet and IRC, I'd switch back to them in an instant.

   The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.

Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.

It's not about UX, it's about how awful people are. Hacker News is an amazing place, and it's not because of the UX, which is certainly of a piece with the Old Internet. It's because there are people who put a lot of effort into making it a not a giant cesspool. And even then, it can be incredibly difficult to discuss some topics here because discussion becomes overrun by bad actors. If you want to get a sense of what the Internet would be like without an amazing amount of curation, go read the comments on basically any story run on a local newspaper or TV station, where they don't have the resources to do content moderation. Read up on the people who get PTSD having to filter content off Facebook so that an unsuspecting user doesn't run across child porn or a snuff film. The walled gardens exist because the places outside of the walls are <em>awful.</em> And they're a lot more awful if you exist outside of the band of college-to-middle-aged white men who makes up the bulk of the people who experienced the old Internet or who post here on HN. If you're in a lot of more socially vulnerable positions, Twitter is far more a fenced garden than a walled garden. But that fence is still a lot more protection than you'd get on a platform that doesn't have to do that kind of moderation to be viable to advertisers. Monetizing the Internet has had a lot of knock-on effects, but one of those effects is that it's really really hard to monetize open neo-Naziism and a lot of other awful things, so the big players clean up their platforms. Recent years have shown that it's easy to monetize a lot of racist dog-whistling, though. It's not perfect. But an alternative to what we have now needs to start from a point of how do you reduce harassment and social harms, not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.

>not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.

In my book, they're moderately worse. I entered the internet around the time of free web forums, where anyone could run one for any reason. I moderated a couple moderately sized ones, mostly oriented around computer games. Overall it wasn't too bad. Certainly nothing compared to what I've seen in larger communities. I suspect the larger the community, the worse the garbage.

But the main reason I say commercial players have made it worse is that they've also commercialized content moderation. Which is to say, they employ people to sit at a desk looking at the absolute worst humanity has to offer for 8 straight hours a day for barely better than minimum wage. That's like a job straight out of Black Mirror.

Forum moderation, by contrast, was/is a volunteer position. You were only in it for as long as you chose to be, and you could leave at any time without any effect on your livelihood.

So I'd argue the "community watch" model of amateur forum moderators was closer to the greater good than the commercial walled gardens.

They've made some things better, and some things worse. Which I think was the point.

"mindbogglingly huge" is an incredible overstatement. It's not easy to deal with malicious e-mails, but it's also not some unattainable end-goal that only a huge corporation can achieve. A single very motivated person can do it with significant effort, or a small team (3-4) people can do it with average effort (in the setup phase. Maintenance is a 1-2 people affair, and not even fulltime).

> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example.

Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”?

Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell.

I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.

> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream

If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.

The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist.

The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects.

An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.

Perhaps it's a social one as well.

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem.

There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

I would argue that the problem of ‘spam’ has not been solved, since that would mean an agreement on what constitutes spam—that spam has some inherent properties that subjects it to easy classification, and that spam is not evolving.

But that’s beyond the point that I originally wanted to make: spam and email have very similar parallels to security and the Internet. In another universe, it’s possible that the issue of spam and security could’ve been incorporated into the protocols themselves. But for some reason I’m sure is rational, those issues were moved outside, to the hosts — to be left to be solved with middleboxes as firewalls and Google’s spam filter.

I would argue that this was the smarter choice and that both of these involve the same problem: spam and security are ill-defined and constantly evolving.

Certificates? That's a pretty decentralized effort. It works because certs whitelist you. You don't claim to get one until you've been whitelisted somewhere, by someone else who has been whitelisted. (Generally). With email we assume the sender is a good actor and then have to run around blacklisting spam. Helped with the network effects but caused untold hassle.

Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.

Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else.

I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit.

Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.

I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now.

It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off.

Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.

I'm pretty sure FastMail uses Spamassassin, so why is an email company so bad at configuring that software? Their spam filtering is simply not nearly as good as Gmail, it's not even close.

I used Spamassassin back in the day and it was effective for a bit, and then pretty much all spammers figured out how to avoid it.

Also, I'm not talking about the obvious VIAGRA large caps spam, which I think is fairly easy to solve. But spam has become much more nuanced and Gmail is the best at it, and the false positive rate is still amazing.

Which was enabled in large part from their centralization of email.

Gmail's spam filter is one of the worst. About once a month some gmail user tells me that he found my mail in the spam folder. Of course it is easy to keep down spam when you don't care about false positives.

The problem with this 'Solid' project seems to be that it is vaporware.

Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, iOS, Android, and browsers, and may not transport any data or chew away bandwidth without allowing total control over this by the programmer and end user. It needs to have a dead simple, almost idiot-proof API. The resulting network on top of IP needs to be searchable, not too high latency, and route to any endpoint on it.

That's still the biggest hurdle for the Open Web. Everything else is secondary.

Does this meet your requirements almost? https://pypi.org/project/pyipv8/

And don't forget to add obfuscation and deniability to the lib, like Tribler and Perfect Dark did.

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