Personally, I think we should retire the idea of The Decentralized Web. It doesn't help clear thinking. BitTorrent is one of the most successful decentralization stories out there right now, but it's 0% part of "The Decentralized Web".
" The Principles of a Decentralized Port 80/443 Ecosystem "
Personally, I don't think it survives the update well:(
If we're talking about our ideal pie-in-the-sky protocol (where people have total control over their data) then let's dream big. Web hosting should be completely decentralized. DDOS attacks should become infeasible because there are no dedicated servers to target and web services should already scale directly in proportion to usage. Entities should receive incentives for participating in the protocol, but have no feasible way of negatively affecting others no matter how much relative computing power they control in the network.
I only discussed what matters to the user (control, interoperability and portability) - extending the list with technical perspective will then come soon.
Money has been decentralized.
Social networking hasn't, yet.
Security hasn't, not really. Have you installed the latest SquirrelMail patches yet? You probably use GMail so you don't have to worry about it.
This is less of a complaint about why this was upvoted as it is a question of why.
- What "control" means specifically / what kinds of control a user should have
- What the difference is, in practice, between interoperability and portability
- What is the scope of the project?
The WWW/browser equivalent layer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgNjs_WaFSc
Done. *at least as an awesome starting point. The easier it is for developers to build on the platform and the more network benefits/incentives that arise, the more high utility Dapps will be deployed, the more likely Chrome/Firefox/IE will integrate seamless DNS/pointers to the Ethereum platform. The web will become decentralized by default and the average user won't even notice.
And I mean "platform" in the sense here of a distributed blockchain or lower-stack layer, not some corporate-owned data silo built on proprietary API endpoints and protocols.
But with apps I personally want to make, I'm more interested in MaidSafe Network. It's basically a distributed data storage network, fast enough that it's good for communication/message passing in apps.
MaidSafe got me interested in making apps for it that are pure client-side JS, with the intention of them being served from the distributed storage. While I dislike running JS in the browser, I will support it when it means there's no server. For now, my intention is to write apps using the Elm language.
Other interesting work continues to be done in Tahoe-LAFS, I2P, and Freenet. There's also IPFS. I'm looking forward to the future of this tech!
So as a principle for a Decentralised Web its a contradiction. Maybe it works as a part of a more broad set of principles (eg. a Healthy Web).
Just because data isn't centralized doesn't mean users will have the control.
The Open Mustard Seed (OMS) project is an open-source framework
for developing and deploying web apps in a secure,
user-centric personal cloud. The framework provides a
stack of core technologies that work together to provide
a high level of security and ease of use when sharing and
collecting personal and environmental data, controlling
web-enabled devices, and engaging with others to
aggregate information and view the results of applied
computation via protected services.
In a world where every person runs their own cloud server, all we really need to do is install the same apps as each other. Apps can just invent their own (open) protocols and other developers can make apps that interoperate. Standards can emerge naturally over time.