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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

Perfect timing, I just released a tool that enabled a more decentralized web. It used BitTorrent Sync to distribute files and I plan on implementing namecoin or colored coins for name resolution. As soon as an open source, stable btsync clone is released I plan on swapping it in.

The biggest drawback is that you can only serve static content, although I think many websites today would be fine with this restriction.

You can read more on my website: http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...

Follow along with the development on github here: https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet

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BitTorrent Sync is the wrong foundation for this revolution. It should be open source from top to bottom.

Come on, the guy even mentioned himself in the above post "As soon as an open source, stable btsync clone is released I plan on swapping it in.", what's the point of re-emphasizing that point? He obviously knows the issue with btsync but it's fine to start building something on top of it in the meantime, just as a proof of concept.

Free software; the term is free software. In other words, software that respects your freedom.

Refer to this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...

This is a language battle which will never, ever be won, not even with geeks, let own real people. Invent a new term ("liberated software"), or let it go. It is this sort of ideological pedantry that holds back FOSS adoption.

Provide better justification rather than "its my opinion".

It's a mental "snap-to-grid" problem. The average American hears the word "free", and they immediately think of $0, absent a specific pre-existing linguistic context (free country, free speech, free range). Because software is something that is frequently paid for as a product on a shelf, a non-enthusiast is always going to hear the $0 meaning in their head, even if they've been educated as to its other meaning.

At a high layer of abstraction, neural connections work probabilistically, firing in the path most likely to be a useful pattern; hence, most people will tend to assume "free" means "as in beer". However, a new term like "liberated software" will not trip this pre-existing wiring, forcing a new pathway that doesn't have to compete with the conditioning created by a lifetime of marketing messages ("Free Checking! Free Estimate! Free For The First Year!"... etc)

And it's not Linux, it's GNU/Linux!

Ordinarily I think Stallman takes that way too far, but in this case the exact motivation behind free software was being described, yet it was still placed under the banner of open source. I think there's a time and a place for both terms, but when you're talking about resisting the NSA, you are (or should be) referring to free software.

That statement would make sense if the distros we are using were mainly just Linux kernel + GNU tools. If we are going to give everyone their deserved credit, we should call it GNU/Linux/KDE/Apache/LibreOffice/...

Good thing 4-clause BSD never caught on in the Linux world.

open source btsync alternative you say? https://github.com/calmh/syncthing

This is quite nice. You should submit it as a "Show HN". You can be sure that as soon as you have a free software replacement for btsync I'll use it at least to serve my personal website.

By the way, have you heard about Freenet? https://freenetproject.org/

He did a few days ago[0] but it didn't get very much attention unfortunately. I only saw it because I spent way too much time on HN that day.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171978

Yeah I did submit it but it didn't get much attention. I don't know the etiquette on resubmitting items.

Try again when you've got a new feature or make a new release or something else noteworthy. There's always some timing luck to a HN submission.

You should team up with the Ethereum project: http://ethereum.org

While i love your idea, (and am glad you found the context to show your project off again. i read the original post), i do have two nitpicks.

You said it downloads the entire site when i open a site. Now, this is completely fine for normal text-based blogs, but what if it's an image heavy site? Like theChive? Wouldn't i end up storing several gigabits (possibly terrabytes) of data for that site?

Secondly, if somehow we extend the concept to dynamic content (don't ask me how) wouldn't it effectively mean each of us running a server and hosting it on that?

Maybe your idea can be implemented on the server level instead of the client level... like proxy servers doing what you want the clients to do and thus the content would be all over the internet instead of a few specific servers. (not saying that's a good idea btw)

BTSync supports selective sync, so I could only fetch the resources that are needed to display the page.

Agree. Just like the distributed search engines which are not quite practical in the real use, the concept is cool.

You could consider using Tahoe-LAFS instead of BitTorrent sync. Tahoe-LAFS is open source and stable, but it isn't a clone of btsync, and it might not fit for your purposes.

This is awesome.

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