Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

I'll be interested to see where these distributed trends go. I too have been working on something to solve a problem I face; "information" sharing and storage. Fundamentally I want a public wikipedia focused around small pieces of information (though I'm still toying/dogfooding with the UX), but more importantly I don't think it should be a centralized entity.

Oddly though there's something I don't like about building on top of a blockchain. It feels strangely walled off. A distributed system with all the problems of a closed off startup. I'm likely being unfair, but I'm just saying how I perceive them. Despite being interested in this area, including working on it personally, I just have no interest in joining one of these blockchain things. I don't honestly understand what I or my hypothetical users are getting out of it.

I really like the Scuttlebutt protocol in concept; it feels very.. "email-like". Something that is a mix of federation and self-hosting. Scuttle or maybe ActivityPub seem to have a good feel for decentralizing. Blockchain (as I've seen so far) however.. eh. Am I being unfair / short sighted?

Some decentralized discovery method for interesting tech content would be nice. Something simple, like if you could put a list of websites you like to:

    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/recommended.list
    -------
    https://friend1.domain/ Blogs about electronics
    https://friend2.domain/ Blogs about knitting
    -------

    https://friend1.domain/.well-known/distributed/recommended.list
    -------
    https://my.domain/ Blogs about hacking SBCs
    https://friend3.domain/ Nice website
    -------

And you could write a bot that would walk through this, avoid loops, and construct a graph, and give you a search or RSS. RSS feeds could be also discoverable.

    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/my-feeds.txt
    --------
    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/feed-blog.xml My blog posts
    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/feed-announce.xml My announcements
    --------

Just something that helps with discovery of interesting content in a decentralized way, outside of search engines, aggregators, HTML pages, etc. You would be able to select search distnace from certain domains, blacklist domains, etc.

And if you assume person == domain, this would build an open, distributed, searchable social graph (of people with domains :) and something to say). You'd be able to see weights of domains by how many people recommend them, etc.

There would be no central storage for the graph.

That is something I have been thinking about too. I imagine this could work as a distributed decentralized db where you publish some link and sign it with your domain key. A client could easily select the most submitted urls from DB and also 'follow' certain domains(users) that submit the most interesting urls. I would love to discuss and validate this idea more.

Yeah, one problem is that on the current internet, if people are not constantly posting low value crap on social media, they are hard to discover, and they're ranked down just for inactivity. But this system would support ranking just on the number of domain recommendations, and people would be able to make tools to do their own ranking (eg. how many people I recommend recommend domain X would be my rank for domain X,...), etc.

But I think, it would need to be decentralized, to avoid single DB somewhere that could be abused and manipulated, or lost.

But if you have to use a tool to read the graph from the web yourself, and people have to upload recommendations to their own server, and have them directly associated with their domain, that may encourage saner behavior, too.

If someone wants to make a centralized public search for this graph, so that people who don't see value in building their own index/ranking could search for content too, that would be possible.

But the key aspect would need to be the distributed nature. It would not need any cryptography either, just a bunch of text files at the simplest level.

The graph would be out there on web servers, the creativity would be in creating the tools to scrape it, rank stuff, and searching through it. And that could even be done in some incremental way (without the need to scrape it all at once).

Totally agree. Ping me on connect@tautvilas.lt if you would like to discuss this idea more and try to develop it :)

This is a really cool idea. I might spend some time hacking on something like this after dweb camp. If you're on Scuttlebutt I can CC you on my progress.

You should check out blockstack. The platform does not use blockchain to store data, but only to create a more robust domain name and identity solution. The data is stored on encrypted server storage. I think this is a nice combination of decentralization and blockchain at work.

"Blockstack PBC, a public benefit corporation at the heart of the Blockstack ecosystem, has raised $50M+ in capital to develop the core protocols and developer tools for the platform."

What is decentralized about a venture-funded vanity project?

If I could upvote you more than once ...

Muneeb from Blockstack here.

There was a HN Launch discussion recently that might be relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413420

The decentralization comes from (a) open-source GPLv3 code, (b) permissionless blockchain, (c) enabling users to host private data lockers, among other things.

The discussion on decentralization in our recent SEC offering circular -- page 49 and page 69 at https://stackstoken.com/circular -- is also relevant here.

From page 69 of your circular:

"At some point when this decentralization process is complete and there is a healthy ecosystem of applications and users on the network, Blockstack PBC expects to develop new business models"

This is the Field of Dreams approach to reinventing the internet economy.

Also from that circular: "core nodes are hosted on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which provides us with computing and storage capacity. Some elements of this complex system are operated by third parties that Blockstack does not control and that could require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue"

I'm struggling to understand what is decentralized about any of this. From my vantage point, you got VC to pay you to run a project on the cloud by saying "blockchain" a lot.

Blockstack engineer here.

The protocols under the hood ensure that each user chooses where their data gets stored -- all that's required is that wherever it is, it's available via HTTP(s) so it can be loaded into your Web browser. As such, Blockstack-powered applications hold no user state -- the user takes their data with them, and "brings their own storage" to the application. The blockchain component acts as a discovery mechanism, whereby any user can discovery any other user's public keys and storage locations, given a username.

Blockstack PBC gives users a small amount of free storage space to help onboard them, and runs some publicly-routable Blockstack nodes. However, nothing stops you from electing to store your data in your own storage provider (e.g. S3, Dropbox, your personal server, etc.).

Have a look at Blockstack's gaia protocol for storage, it is free and open source. And you can also use it with other decentralized identity providers. If you don't like the company, you still might like their vision.

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