A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet (2017)
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I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora, Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies).
In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up.
Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement. Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious, production-quality systems based on dweb techs.
When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why". What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them.
As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.
The problems are clear but the solutions need to be clear too. So far many of the alternatives tend to focus more on the tech (decentralized protocols, this or that programming language, etc) than solving the problem. Even worse, sometimes the nature of the tech makes solving the problem more difficult or impossible (decentralized protocols brings a lot of challenges by themselves for example).
I made a comment back in the day about my thoughts on Mastodon and similar alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
I'd add that a centralized solution can be run by a big corporation extracting significant profits, and thus investing significant resources into it. Investing into a decentralized solution gives a much vaguer idea of ROI. Look at email, the long-standing champion of federated protocols. Most investment went into Gmail and Outlook, proprietary solutions that happen to interoperate with the rest of email universe, but which use proprietary ways to communicate to centralized infrastructure as their strong suit. They are wildly popular.
I posit that for normal users a decentralized solution only makes sense when a centralized solution is impossible and / or illegal. See p2p music-sharing networks of 2000s, or modern bittorent. For bittorent though, centralized catalogs like TPB or rutracker are the norm, unlike the p2p search in Gnutella or DC++ of old. Even though incentives of those running TPB are better aligned with the interests of its users than e.g. in the cases of FB or Reddit, TPB is not a non-profit, AFIACT.
So, for decentralized web of 1995 to return, a lot of people must have it very bad using the centralized web. Even though ad networks actively work in the direction of making the experience of web browsing insufferable, it appears that relatively simple tools like uBlock Origin, or paying a small subscription fee, make the experience okay again.
So, YouTube + $5/mo, or even YouTube played via NewPipe, again trump the experience of using PeerTube, etc.
BTW even if the internet becomes a mesh network on transport / connectivity level, it won't change much in these dynamics. Instant gratification + not needing to pay money are winning, and will win, the majority of the audience, by default.
I've started to wonder if the web will split for this reason.
Main stream stays on the normal web and techies move to their own. Almost like an end to the Eternal September but really it just feels like everything old is new again.
In order for people to care, give them something to care about.
It is hard to expect that an average person would 'care' about IPFS or Mastodon which are unpolished, hard to use technologies. But people care about their iPhones and Instagram accounts, even if they come at a great price. It is our job as technologists to give people something to care about. The perceived rate of 'caring' measures our own abilities (as creators of technologies and products), not the lack of theirs.
Then it's not solving any immediate problems for them. Anyway - people get obsessed with getting the entire planet on to distributed networks. IMO that's not realistic - the mass population is always going to choose simple, corporate shit unless there's a direct need for something disruptive enough that they'll spend literally days working out how to do it - eg learning how to find and download torrents.
>Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything.
It won't change everything but I think it will become important. General purpose computing will continue it's dying path and in 10-15 years, normies will be solely on their smartphone walled gardens and programmers, scientists, muckrakers, enthusiasts etc will populate some kind of very niche darknet (<5% population) - or an array of totally disparate darknets aligned to various niches - whether theyr'e running over the Internet proper or some kind of alt network.
I swear these kind of statements makes me feel old.
People in tech has been saying this for a very long time, and it's never been true, the PC market will only die if innovation and usability is dead.
What has happened is that we've spaced out our usage of tech with specialized tech, a good recent example is how say for instance smart watches have replaced the heart beat sensor and as a notifier /clock tool which the smartphone used to be.
until the consequences of using the current cloud hurts them enough
From my experience just being an observer and not too much of a techie I’d say it’s one of the cons of open source products.
For example, if there’s an open source product you like to use but the maintainers are not very active, you may get aggravated and fork it and start another similar product thinking you can do it better justice. Problem is, for every new “fork” of a product you end up dividing the user base as well.
When users have too many options to choose from they usually do not compare differences when there’s too many to compare and just pick one.
Also, most of these similar products are not always backwards compatible which is one of many reasons people may not try to compare similar products.
Another way of thinking about it is the less effort someone has to input to copy something, the more “copies” you’ll have to pick from. From a users perspective it is very confusing and frustrating not knowing what to pick to use.
just my two cents...
Linux didn't win the server & cell phone market by having the entire world read the GNU manifesto. It won by being good at what it does and meeting needs. The philosophy may have helped it do that, but meeting needs, not the ideological underpinning, is what won the day.
All this distributed web stuff is all ideology first. At best you end up with a system that lets you do the same thing as the old system, but with much more complexity and latency (and that's the best case). There is no way that is ever going to win, except against the small minority who take ideological purity very seriously.
After all, if people really wanted to get fb to go away, we would all be self-hosting blogs and rss feed readers would be our "wall". No new internet neccesary. The world choses to use fb instead.
So how do you get them to care? Or how do you offer enough value that they migrate to new systems and protocols?
I think privacy on the web is already heading in a good direction.
You mean Firefox?
That's another problem, the lack of any real browser diversity.
there's a lot of neat little networks that are active, that have a community. even if you are just connecting with other p2p, decentralized, whatever folk, & the whole world hasn't adopted your platform, so what?
open source doesn't have to scale. start with what beautiful ideas you have.
You don’t need to reach a billion people to be useful. Wikipedia didn’t have a billion users when it was first useful, nor did OSM, or slashdot, or alt.Wesley.crusher.die.die.die
It is a really serious concern, even if a majority does not directly think about it. Just like water pollution or fertilizer runoff. Essential stuff, that affects everybody, but there's no real need for everybody to care about it. I don't understand why you paint this as a an elephant in the room to address. Not all battles are won by swinging public opinion.
To your point, arguably not enough people have cared about climate issues for too long… It is only now that pressure is piling up on governments and corporations to change, and arguably it’s late and much remains to be done.
Similarly, the trends towards a gated web described in the article continue to grow.
I want more people to care because my rights and those of my loved ones are better protected if enough people care.
I also want people to care because I prefer to develop open web products and services, and the more demand there is for them, the easier designers and developers in the space can make a living.
Why would anyone not want more people to care?
Regular people don't care about operating systems, yet many of us are able to have a superior desktop experience by using Linux.
Regular people don't care about fine music, but we're still able to listen to Mussorgsky and are not forced to listen to Ariane Grande.
Regular people don't care enough about technology to sit around discussing it in their spare time, and yet here we are.
There's a lot of things that regular people don't care about. Let's concentrate on making something good, that enough people will use, rather than winning a popularity contest.
What I’m trying to say to say is that I find the whole model just not very compelling anymore, maybe even harmful. There are some subreddits that are more like forums (like this one) but the general experience is just not something I think is worth striving for, whether it is decentralized or not.
What I do care about very much is communicating with interesting people and to read or watch interesting content. The signal to noise ratio is typically disappointing on these platforms.
We need more people to be innovators and early adopters, to guide and consciously participate in the technology adoption life cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
Fast forward 95% of the internet is made up of AOL users who primary use their phone and a few walled garden apps.
Why would we want them to be part of the systems we are building that serve our needs?
Not everyone needs to be part of a techie enclave on the internet. The barrier of walled garden can help us create an identity outside. Those ready to make the jump should be welcomed and onboarded.
The difference from before and now is money. Everyone wants everyone together because it means more money. If you can live without the money a lot of cool projects and unique communities are possible.
Perhaps thinking of the situation as an Overton window, a range of "normal" stances to tech, is more what this about than enclaves. I have another reply to parent despising a similar "do for ourselves" attitude, and I think that's capital, but there is a "follow the alpha geeks" aspect to tech too, for the good stuff hopefully does come down, does propogate, does spread. the Overton window of tech shifts, slowly, if new good self replicating practicing communities of tech are visibly doing better.
right now I don't think anyone cares because there's so little apparent difference. but there's low visibility because it's so early, we're so new with our different social approaches, and few alternate approaches are radically compelling, few offer radically better features or better experience. I continue to think protocol based systems, as we stay getting good at them, will offer radical creativity& empowerment that classic big social can't it won't. and that's when we start changing hearts and minds, stay being highly visible, when we are empowered& leveraging it, when we are making our self determinism count. we are not there but we are getting better.
what I want to underscore is, right now tech is a secret. there's all sorts of amazing people who would do amazing things of they were involved here. unlike Eternal September where Usenet got swamped with low nettiquette text, this is a chance to involve people: our designs are fast more egalitarian than fairly top-down Usenet. this is an onroad to upgrading yourself, a repersonalization of computing, to make it real & in front of you, rather than floating around on Zuck's servers.
for sure a lot of people will go about, unchanged. and would bring semi questionable value to these alternative ecosystems. they one should still be served. two, we will have failed entirely if we don't lift some people up, open their eyes & excited their hearts, by properly prove them in touch with the communications engines of their lives.
> Those are large enough numbers to admit that the open Web is already rather irrelevant to Zuckerberg’s products.
But this claim doesn't make any sense, because with few exceptions people still need the open internet to access Facebook. Is Facebook really stopping any of us from using other parts of the internet? Sure, we can point to Facebook's initiatives to provide free internet access in some countries as a sign that they want to control some of the internet, but it's irrelevant for 99%+ of the population.
As much as I love mesh networks, the idea that we're going to replace the internet with regional mesh networks is a pipe dream. Mesh networks could be fun as a relatively low-bandwidth alternative network, but there is zero incentive for the average consumer or even a tech person to give up their high speed internet access that already does everything they need.
I'm getting tired of these articles that neglect to consider that maybe people who voluntarily choose to use products like Facebook do so because they actually want to. It's becoming a common theme to talk about the general public like sheep who are under the control of evil tech companies, and to pretend that us enlightened tech people need to use our hardware and software skills to stop people from choosing to use websites they enjoy. There are some legitimate concerns around things like privacy and tracking, but the solution isn't to create an alternate internet universe and hope that everyone decides to give up the main internet for this alternate, Facebook-free version of the internet.
Content that previously would have been on some personal geocities(?) page on the open web is behind Facebook's wall. Facebook has effectively taken something that was previously open and made it closed.
While I also could not find a coherent solution in the OP, I have to agree with them that the proliferation of closed networks are detrimental to the web as a whole.
I don't think that really bears out. There's lots of content on Facebook etc that would not be posted anywhere if Facebook (or whomever) didn't make it dead simple.
A Facebook user can write a post, start or join a group, or post pictures with no technical expertise. Hosting that content doesn't require a credit card or any credentials beyond their Facebook account. It's also a platform that will spread their content to other people's feeds.
Most people don't have the technical skills to do any of those things on their own. Even the lowest skilled Geocities user in 1999 was more technically skilled than the average computer user.
Wrt decentralized/p2p networks mentioned in TFA I guess we're a bit more informed (disillusioned) today, seeing as even devs happily flock to github where they get shafted (copilot) and looking at the lack of beaker/hypercore (née dat) and ipfs adoption. And also lack of any initiative to make HTML fit for non-js/doc-only delivery on protocols other than http. To the contrary, http/3 is even eating TCP/IP (DoH).
This has convinced me to move my model to a web-based one
Development is already underway. The scare I got last week fuels my efforts. And WASM is great (and fast!)
That's not true; Zuckerberg spent a lot of time and resources pursuing HTML5 Facebook app which was meant for all smartphone devices. When he realized HTML5 web app it's not going to work [0] Instagram already emerged and started growing rapidly. That's when he figured out he needs to make native mobile Facebook app and purchase Instagram in order to gain foot in mobile space and in order to eliminate possible competition in social photo industry.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-bigges...
He fought mobile, and left their mobile czar position open for years.
I believe he’s even explicitly stated he missed mobile.
How can anyone say he “missed mobile” when he led the biggest mobile play of any software company in the world, leading to a dominant position today? Top analysts like Ben Thomson widely give him credit for it.
If he says he “missed mobile” it’s possibly false humility and actual hubris, or he means something completely different.
They were indeed really slow to recognise mobile as a worthwhile platform. So long that it would have jeopardised their position if it hadn't already been pretty much invincible.
Messenger as a standalone app was released in 2011. They bought Instagram pretty much within two years of birth.
The UX of a lot of the mobile products might not have been good - I don’t remember - but all things considered I would say they moved fast on mobile, at both the engineering and strategic levels, and it paid dividends.
Facebook was still in its infancy as an internet company back then and I doubt they would’ve been able to carry out a hardware or OS play without extremely diluting its focus. But sure, if they had done so and succeeded despite the minimal odds they would be in a totally dominant position right now.
The handful of platforms we use to actually interact with each other over the net, on the other hand, have taken over the web. There's little competition, and most are on the verge of government intervention.
It's the other way around: the Internet needs to be rescued from the web.
Among other gems in this interview with Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium. A startup which claims to be "the world's first peer-to-peer wireless network".
http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/265
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For the pedants, like a 1998 flashback, The Web is not the Internet. Different levels of the stack.
Also, the anti-Web was called Xanadu.
Like mediums before it, The Web is an ad-funded outrage machine, now amplified by algorithmic feedback loops. Responsible for annihilating truth, weaponizing doubts, history's largest transfer of wealth, and the murder of millions (so far).
We can never know if the Xanadu path would have been better, preferable. Or if it was even feasible. But we do know that its systems of payments and copyright would have mooted the most toxic aspects of The Web.
This is an incredibly strong claim. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, as I legitimately am not familiar with what you're referring to here. Would it be possible to get some more context on what event, or combination of events you are referring to with this?
This has a core flaw. While the service itself may be reasonably priced without the middling service, the information search costs are dramatically reduced.
Couchsurf was a similar service in the mid-2000s for staying at strangers locations. But they were niche (couches) and didn't do much user protection. Along comes AirBnB with a model of services travelers want out of the middling service. Thus is thrives.
This is wholly unconnected to IPv4+NAT
it has it's limitations but personally i believe servers generating signed bundles of content that we can transit as we like to each other ameliorates almost all the downside of the current web transport stack. That's happening under the WebPackage work:
https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web...
Letting the internet be dominated by a single use (www) is every bit short-sighted as letting the web be dominated by five gigantic websites.
Is this just baby-talk for non-techies, or does the author really think this is how IP4 addresses are allocated?
The former, probably. Nominally, that is how IPv4 addresses are allocated, but the mass of caveats and "but actually"s required is enough to bury it many times over.
(For starters, we actually care about network topology, which is only roughly correlated with geography. Additionally, address blocks are typically allocated to organizations, which again correlate only loosely with topology or geography. Those blocks are then subdivided on a basis that slighly relates to topology (but not geography), but only the extent that it helps limit the size of routing tables and BGP data. And of course there's all kinds of other messes mixed in with this as well.)
The corporate presence on the (web|internet) isn't really taking advantage of IP (or TCP or any other internet transport-ish layer protocol). It's taken over the web, loosely defined as a protocol with HTTP at its core.
Switching away from "the internet" buys you only one thing: for now, most corporate online presence will not follow you. But most of the problems that the author and most other people have with this corporate presence relies only on the HTTP+above aspects of the current web. If we switched the web to run on, I dunno, DECnet, and corporations followed, not a single problem (ok, maybe 2 :) would be solved.
All the chit chat in the article about IPv4 vs IPV6, about NAT, about cable ownership: this is just noise. What's wrong with the web, if indeed there is actually wrong with the web at all does not originate in the internet. How many ways does the author think there will ever be of getting a packet across an ocean? The answer is destined to remain in the low single digits (i.e. a very small number of cables, controlled by something, plus perhaps a couple of satellite routings).
The author identifies NAT as the primary cause of some computers not being "first class citizens" online, but a much more fundamental issue is asymmetrical connections. Your computer can pull data at 100MB/sec, but can only push 5MB/sec ... ergo, it can't sensibly act as a server to any widely popular material. You can consume, you cannot publish (widely popular material), without using someone else's network connection. (This asymmetry is not universal, but is still typical).
The "content-centric" alternative proposed by the author is a nice distributed caching scheme. It's fundamentally a technical detail that is of little actual consequence to anyone, other than any impact it has on apparent performance when accessing information. When I want to read an article that a friend just told me about, I do not care where my computer gets it from, as long as it gets it. We already have this in a totally implicit way, via CDNs. The scheme proposed just makes this explicit, and in so doing adds an entirely new layer to content addressing. Anybody familiar with cache architectures is going to see the kinds of problems this can cause, and the potentially insane levels of complexity required to avoid them.
How about we stop trying to "save the web" at all? How about we recognize that "the old web" continues to exist for those who care (and most do not). How about we recognize that the technical aspects of a distributed, hyperlinked content system are probably not likely to be the best substrate for other kinds of networked communication, and that therefore it doesn't matter if the web cannot "do it all".
But decentralized has to embrace a kind of indifference to its users that makes it more like a natural force. Having more users is mostly a pain and lacks direct profit incentives, since, by definition, the gates are lowered and there is no tax to collect. That makes the self-interest more of a principled do-gooder fanaticism which operates outside the benchmarks of market success, and as such there's a heavy influence from anti-capitalist ideology in a lot of dweb projects.
Of course, one form of reconciliation has come through the idea of re-injecting the market dynamic through cryptocurrency. This mode of incentive-setting can produce some tremendously ugly results, but looking at the projects out there(I am using Brave right now), neither does it seem to have failed outright either.
For the sake of argument, Google's or Cloudflare's DNS alone probably have so much data that any country or ISP pales in comparison.
The web is broken and it gets more and more rotten over time. Google found out they don't need cookies to track people, so they invented FLoC and decided to actively don't give a damn about any privacy regulation on the planet - activating the tracking mechanism for everyone without any real influence or decision on the user's side.
I think the web3 idea will never exist when we keep trying to reinvent the wheel of network protocols. New protocols and new ports can easily be blocked. At some point they're just portrayed like TOR, as a tool for evil rather than good; because the politics will get involved when power shifts to quickly for them to compensate. DNS over TLS just gets its 853 port blocked by most ISPs already so it's useless as a tool to shift the means of power here, and only DNS over HTTPs actually makes a real difference because it's way harder to block HTTPS and tell customer's that their internet still works.
Given the nature how the web works, how it's transported and how dynamically it's changing in its resources over time - I think it's more important to focus on the idea of statistical truth in the moment, when the specific end user was using it. Some moments afterwards the same URLs change anyways, so it's important to preserve the resource's timeline - but not back until the dark age.
Most parts of the world don't have the bandwidth to download gigabytes and still have crappy 2G slow and even lower network speeds. So a blockchain for a single website isn't a good idea to begin with. As a user I also don't know how hashes work, but I know how URLs work. URLs are predictable, hashes are not.
The real strength of a peer to peer system is not only ledging, it's also offloading of network traffic. Every cached download that's offloaded via a closeby peer's cache is another tracking prevented. Every request that looks and behaves like Chrome's rendering engine on Windows/MacOS is another user saved from network fingerprint identification.
Privacy is not keeping things to yourself. Real Privacy is looking like everybody else.
For my own Browser I've decided to push the boundaries a little by implementing those features with the primary goal of being able to make the web work when you're offline or just connected to trusted peers (that have the URLs already cached). [1] And I'm honest here, it still needs a lot of work. Not only is JS malicious, but HTML/CSS has to be assumed to be malicious as well due to all specifications making it possible to identify people just by using CSS and background images or by simply making the website unusable with tricks like overflow:hidden or opacity:0, so these malicious parts have to be filtered out as well.
Also: You don't need custom network protocols there. You don't need to roll your own crypto. HTTP, WebSockets and TLS are already peer to peer. The only thing missing is a decentralized way of cross-signing certificates and the ideas behind TLS notary could make the real difference in peer to peer networks. [2]
[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth (highly alpha)