Hacker News Reader

Comment by tredre3 | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing of Safecloud, but freenet failed for a very valid reasons:

1. Data retention isn't infinite. If the source disappears from the network, peers will prune it shortly. This is exponentially true in our multimedia-heavy world.

2. Despite 1, if you actually want to delete something you published, you can't. Absolutists will see this as a good thing. Normal people will see this as a problem.

3. Peer-to-peer doesn't work in a mobile-first world, and not enough people will host nodes as a hobby. If all website publishers/hosters have to host a node, then we're just back to the current model but with extra steps.

View on HN

Closed-garden mobile-first tech feudalism lobotimized the Internet. I remember trying out the Freenets, I2Ps, and whatnot in the 90's. Too cumbersome nerdy tools to use for anything actually worthwhile. It was born in the idealized world village of the 90's Internet. Maybe real life doesn't work like that, and the lobotimized centralized tech will eventually win.

Is the p2p problem really still one in our world that is mobile first, but also has ubiquitous internet connectivity pretty much everywhere? I’m almost sure I could host my website from my phone and have at least 99.5% percent of uptime.

Give that it's impossible to even listen on port 443 on a phone, as that would require root privileges, I don't think you can host your website on your phone at all, at least not if you want it to accessible in a normal way. And that's not even going into all of the problems with running background apps on a phone, especially on iOS.

By I could, I meant that my phone has a persistent connection uninterruptedly long enough to be theoretically able to serve a website in the background. There are all sorts of (arbitrary, mind you) technical limitations, from the IPv6 address randomly changing as you roam across networks to iOS killing background processes - but those are software limitations.

The point was that mobile device doesn't equate spotty connectivity anymore for most people.

Even in this idea of "could in principle", the IP address randomly changing as you roam is not an arbitrary technical limitation, it is a fundamental property of how IP networks operate that proved to be too hard to fix for IPv6. The LTE network does a lot of work to try to preserve your IP as seen by the servers you connect to, to preserve your active connections, but this could only be done as a layer on top of IP.

The reason why this is fundamentally quite hard is to do with routing optimization. Routing tables have to reflect physical connectivity - which means packets destined for F2::67 mustn't be routed to LA if that is the IP of a phone that is now resident in SF. However, changing routing tables on all devices along the way as a phone roams would not be an easy feat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com