Comment by evv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evv | Hacker News Reader

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As somebody working in this "future-web" space, I see HUGE issues with the legacy web stack:

- It requires a server to publish, which is expensive and difficult for regular users with a laptop or a phone. This can be solved with a mix of p2p and federation

- There is no decentralized trust system- only DNS+HTTPS, which requires centralized registration (TLDs). A domain may be cost-prohibitive for somebody who just wants to write comments and a few documents on the web. This can be solved by forming a social graph of cryptographic identity validations (aka, the "web of trust")

- There is no versioning system. This can be solved by making chains of immutable signed content, like we do with git.

- There is no archival system that allows you to "back up" the content of a website in a trustless way. Look at IPFS and BitTorrent for the solution there.

I believe these are the main reasons the web has failed as a social publishing system. Aside from companies and technically skilled individuals, everyone publishes on centralized social media platforms. This is a dangerous consolidation of power.

We hate to admit it, but the open web has taken the "L". The good news: these are solvable problems and I'm not giving up anytime soon!

> Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams.

To distance ourselves from crypto scams, we strongly avoid the web3 label, despite some similarities.

This feels very 2000's. eDonkey, Perfect Dark, Opera Unite....

Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.

P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)

Web of trust never took off - turns out people don't trust their friends' friends' much, some sort of centralized authority works much better.

_Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC - for example, they have only one laptop/phone, they don't back it up, and it breaks regularly. If your system requires one to keep a secret key for decades, it automatically excludes a very large fraction of computer users.

Publicly accessible versioning and immutable content sound cool for readers, but have very few upsides (and many downsides) for writers. And it's writers who select publishing technology.

People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today. Just look at which decentralized social networks are actually winning (like Mastodon) - it's pretty much opposite to what's described in your comment.

Thanks for spawning many interesting topics. A dose of cynicism is great, in moderation!

> P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)

Yes, most people will rely on servers because phones are terrible p2p nodes. When identity is properly owned by the end users, the servers have nearly zero lock-in, unlike traditional hosting providers. A community's server can go down for some reason and the community can easily transition to other server(s), keeping their conversations and knowledge intact. Sadly this is not the case with Mastodon or even Bluesky.

> _Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC

This is probably the single biggest problem we are facing, because it impacts UX. There are several tools available to mitigate this issue, but I don't believe there is a perfect solution. Keys can be linked across devices with cross-signing, there are mechanisms that can enable key rotation: DNS, social media connections, and social/manual rotation in the worst case. The plan is to leverage existing tools that are used to keep secrets safe for regular people: system keychains, password managers, passkeys, smartphone "wallets".

> Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.

People become very comfortable in their virtual prisons, and most people won't change unless they have a reason to. Maybe they have legitimate work or content that is stigmatized and censored by other platforms. Maybe they live under an autocratic regime. But I think most people want better control over their content moderation and feed algorithm.

> People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today.

I'm not laughing at your exaggerated use of "no one". Decentralized and censorship-resistant technology is society's fail-safe. Maybe your social media oligarch isn't abusing their power too much today. Maybe your government actually supports free speech today. What about tomorrow, the next decade, and the next century?

So is the "oligarch" of the mastodon instance that I use? And why is that webforum I frequent "a virtual prison"? And if the government decides to start blocking communications, what'll stop them from blocking P2P protocol?

For some reason, most of the decentralized people assume there are only two options: Megacorp-controlled media (facebook, X) or start from scratch (P2P + crypt-identities). It sure makes for an easy argument or a flashy slogan, given how much bad stuff megacorps do.

But the thing is, those slogans all look very cringy and naive to me. The "open web" is not dead, and never will be. There are traditional websites, activitypub, bluesky... They are still very much alive, and most of them are not megacorp-controlled. They are the real competitor to all the new upcoming p2p technologies and "future-web" startups.

You are not building replacement for Facebook or X, you are building a replacement for Bluesky or Mastodon.

P2P and federation tech is really cool stuff! I feel like ipfs is what most non-tech people thought the cloud was, perhaps even what it should've been.

I'll admit I'm a bit out of the loop though. Say I wanted to publish a blog on this.. Let's call it web 4, for lack of a better term..

How would I do it? How would people find it? Last I checked there wasn't really a good solution for that(or at least I didn't find one) but it's been nearly a decade, so things might've changed!

The solution is to build on the traditional web. How does anybody find anything new on the web? Basically: hyperlinks!

People will create links from social media. With some basic SEO, your content can be indexed by your favorite search engines. Increasingly these "web4" sites will link to themselves, leveraging the built-in social features that are portable across sites/servers/peers.

I fail to see how "federation" is supposed to solve any of those problems. First of all, it would require a bunch of copies of the same thing, which all could suddenly go offline on a whim. And secondly, "it's too expensive for me to host a server, so I'll rely on someone else doing so and mooching off of theirs" does not seem sustainable to me.

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