96 karma · joined May 6, 2018
(Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)
P.S. macOS 10.13.6.
Of course it's not higher level of HTTP, I never said that. I said higher level than HTTP. HTTP is just a stateless transport protocol, of course dat is higher level, and as I said much of the benefits described can be built on top of HTTP (and have been, just not standardized or not widespread).
> it all scales poorly, it can all be improved with distribution
Pretty sure it all does NOT scale poorly, as has been proven over the past thirty years. What's being solved here is not a problem of scale. "It can all be improved with distribution" is very hand wavy and doesn't really say anything. DNS and many other protocols are already distributed, btw.
> Instead we encrypt the key and distribute it across the net, ..., if its distributed and a copy goes down you just use it like normal.
There are two kinds of crypto, symmetric key and public key. Symmetric key is easily out of the window. For public key crypto, you always need a secret key and that has to be prior knowledge, not something negotiated on the fly, and of course prior knowledge has to be kept somewhere and presumably synced if you need it elsewhere, and it definitely can be lost. "Distributed secret keys solving everything" sounds like nonsense to me; there's always a secret key that is the starting point (call it the master key, if that makes more sense) and can't be distributed.
Maybe Twitter is too specialized an example. What about any kind of search? You do need an index, and someone still has to own that index, and “donate” computing power to update that index. You own your self-hosted data, like many of us already do, but there will still be gatekeepers, e.g. Google for our current web.
EDIT: I realized that with a clever enough architecture and probably much more computing power than necessary in a trusted environment, no one needs to own the index. But it seems way more advanced than this protocol. (I’m completely new to this stuff so please excuse my naive skepticism.)
I see, I was looking at it backwards.
> You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites.
Not entirely sure what you mean,
- We can generates HTTP sites at will (all you need is an IP address);
- We have existing protocols for mirroring sites (not implemented universally, but nor is dat://);
- When you talk about pubkeys with coordination, there are obvious problems like the last paragraph of my original comment, right? Again, I'm probably misinterpreting what you're saying.
> Integrity checks & signatures within the protocol which enables multiple untrusted peers to 'host'.
Basically subresource integrity? Granted, with this protocol you can in theory retrieve objects from any peers (provided that they actually want to cache/pin your objects), not just the ones behind a revproxy/load balancer, so that's a potential win from decentralization.
> Versioned URLs
We can have that over HTTP, but usually it's not economical to host old stuff. In this case, someone still needs to pin the old stuff, no? I can see that client side snapshots could be more standardized, but we do have WARC with HTTP.
(EDIT: on second thought, it's much easier to implement on the "server"-side too.)
> Protocol methods to read site listings and the revision history
> Standard Web APIs for reading, writing, and watching the files on Websites from the browser.
You can build that on top of HTTP too.
My takeaway is it's simply a higher-level protocol than HTTP, so it's unfair to compare it to HTTP. Are there potential benefits from being decentralized? Yes. But most of what you listed comes from being designed as a higher-level protocol.
Btw, I skimmed through Beaker docs, and it seems they resolve names through DNS (what else can they do) and even use HTTP for discovery.
(Also, I'm not even sure how you could p2p private user data, unless you expect everyone to carry around one or more yubikeys, or implant chips into fingers or something; plus all devices need into buy into that. But I haven't given that much thought.)
Also, Firefox tabs are as ugly as ever (lots of thick lines), and the search bar drop down is cluttered as hell. I thought I’d hate the Chrome 69 tab style, but I got over it in a couple of hours; whereas for Firefox I simply can’t.