1. Has anyone of the "redecentralizers" ever thought about how developers would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale, Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that?
2. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah, that's non-trivial, but wouldn't it be cool if with minimal effort we could move existing software to a more decentralized model?
3. Don't tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to build JS SPAs.
4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?
They may never be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but that's because the web has grown in audience to people looking for something similar to watching TV, reading newspapers and going to the pub. Those activities will always be more popular than people hacking in a garage, but they can coexist.
Sell a "box" (think something that looks like a apple airport extreme). The device will have a nfc / bluetooth / wireless / rj45 and internal storage. To link your device to the private cloud box, you use the app on your device and sync public encryption keys. Now there would be two ways of syncing photos / data between the cloud box and your device:
1. Local Wifi sync - when the device detects that is on its home network it will sync any changes.
2. Remote Sync - Use a public server, upload encrypted data using the public encryption keys, and the home cloud will download them.
For sharing with others, im thinking of of web / circle of trust, where you can share your public keys with your friends / family. There would be privacy levels: 1 - Me & wife / 2 - Close family / 3 - Close friends etc...
Anyway, this is just an idea i have been thinking about for some time now. There is still a lot of details to work out but I do believe that we need to try moving away from the public cloud.
Foisting off the infrastructure funding on the opposition has a sort of poetic justice to it.
Install NextCloud, eg via "snap install nextcloud" on Ubuntu. Now you probably want to configure NextCloud a lot via its web interface.
You are 90% there. There might be a hurdle to access your box if it is behind your home NAT.
Not available to non-techies, but you could sell such pre-configured boxes.
It does seem like "incentive" is the missing piece. The two somewhat successful, somewhat decentralized things I can think of are Bitcoin and TOR. Both provide some compelling incentive to either join as a user or to subsidize infrastructure.
BitTorrent is the only one that I'm aware of past the core Internet protocols. As I said elsewhere, it spread because of the problems it solved for users in a way they could learn easily. Most probably didn't even know it was decentralized. So, best advice is to solve a problem for users really well with extra benefit of "we also protect your privacy instead of selling you out."
E-mail fits all of your requirements. Even the now being centralized (Gmail)
I have thought fairly hard about compatibility. What you could do would be to serve a standard website over http, but allow anyone to act as a cdn. The only centralized piece would be dns to route people to their closest peer. Most clients would think the peer was a normal http server, under control of the website owner. In reality it would be any random person on the internet who had decided to rehost the content. Therein lies the problem: how do clients ensure the integrity of resources if they don't even know to look for it. One of your cdns could be serving fraudulent content, and none of the clients would question it.
In order to distribute http, you would therefore be forced to get at least some custom code into browsers. At that point, why not shove a whole ipfs implementation in?
Yes. Bittorrent. It makes use of centralized directories, and centralized trackers, but is otherwise p2p. It suffers from everything weve come to expect from decentralized services. It is only able to survive because no startup can legally disrupt it (not to say no one's tried). In order to use it, a person first has to download a custom client. They also have to visit a completely separate website to get a list of possible torrents. Both the most popular client and the most popular website are riddled with obscene and intrusive ads. What it should have, if it wanted to compete with netflix and spotify, is a web client with the ability to play things instantly. Both those things are antithetical to bittorrent, and so it will continue to lose to the legal avenues.
In my view, adoption will always be held back as long as there's:
a. a UX gap (in both software and dev skills)
b. a lack of innovative open source business models
c. an absence of completely novel apps that couldn't have been done before
We're trying to tackle all 3 at Blockstack with our developer platform but it's not easy. Would love your thoughts sometime on whether we're on the right track and how else we could help you out as a developer.
Really? how does wikipedia function then, why do lots of people create meaningful content in web for free?
Applying the results of a system (aka web being currently commercialized) as its cause is circular reasoning at its finest.
I get the impression that sometimes it's barely getting by; very few months I see a banner at the top of its webpage suggesting that it's close to running out of money and pleading for donations.
Make them available to install (like traditional forums) instead of a good service. And build into them methods for users to liberate their data and/cross-link their identities from one software to another?
Facebook, twitter, Instagram and others are just huge in our field of view because most people on the web just want to hang out and chill out. And they do that on Facebook.
People who want to have a conversation and to get back to it two or three days later are still roaming forums (HN, reddit, etc., phpboard installs, etc.) and blogs. But these formats don't need big news every 6 hours to exist.
my tired 2ç.
analogy: facebook is huge because it's getting paid to hang ads in every pub in town where people go to relax drink and socialize by er... drinking, usual boards works because it's more like my friend's attic where people go to relax drink and socialize by playing dnd but it's my friend's attic so girls aren't allowed (unless you are cool, can you geek out ?)
Second, protocols matter. A lot. They are the are the landscape on which we build our online cities, and just like cities, if you look carefully, you can see outlines where old old protocols used to be. Code is law, as a certain smart guy says.
And even if you really don't care about all that and just want to see the next new shiny, it still matters. Some of us, for instance, think Twitter's problems stem directly from the fact that they wrote a business plan instead of an RFC. That is, the nature of the service would be much better-implemented as a federated messaging service owned by no one, more similar to email.
Of course, nobody gets VC$ for writing RFCs.
It comes from the fact that non of the decentralized tech is getting massive adoption outside of BitTorrent. That got adopted because it met a user need better than anything else as opposed to being decentralized. Since all this tech isn't working & centralized tech is, then the commenter wonders why someone doesn't just build compelling, privacy-preserving, centralized tech that the masses might use. Probably because it's harder work with unfamiliar skills (eg marketing, UX, business) for developers that would rather bullshit around with custom crypto or protocols nobody will ever use.
I strongly encourage privacy-preserving, non-profit, usable alternatives to every popular ad-supported or cheap tool out there as an intermediate step. That might go somewhere. Think WhatApp vs Facebook Messenger but with WhatApp using Moxie's stuff and staying paid non-profit.
We started back in 2011, and managed to build a large open source system that anyone can install and builds apps on top of (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform).
(Video of what you can build quickly: https://vimeo.com/208438090?ref=em-v-share)
However, when I heard about solid, I reached out to Tim Berners-Lee and was interested in partnering with the solid team. Ultimately it is good if our system is just one of many that are interoperable because they all support the same protocol.
There were a couple things that needed to be added to this protocol to make it fully capable of handling our use cases, however. I like it when existing projects get together and design a protocol with everyone's voice being heard, as with oAuth with Twitter and the (sadly ignored) xAuth with Meebo back then.
So - protocols are good. But I have come to realize there is a lot of politics in this, and it's not as easy to collaborate as I had hoped.
Not very sexy, but it would be ridiculously decentralized.
Throw in GPG for some behind-the-scenes encryption and authentication if you really want to knock it out of the park.
I would argue that there's plenty of good projects out there (like i2p), it just doesn't become popular and it never gets used.
Timing and marketing is 90% of the way there in my opinion.
That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts. (E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.) However, that framework won't be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized social over something like Facebook.
In a previous comment I wrote: Thinking in terms of technology & software like the "fathers of Internet"[1] have done to try and "solve" the adoption of decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the "software stack", think about the economics. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don't seem to ever address the economics of why a billion people won't choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc.
My theory on why those scientists don't put economics at the forefront of their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was sponsored by the government and universities. So to them, it just seems like today's problem can be solved with "technology".
As another example of how "protocols" & "specifications" don't really solve decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982. As you read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc. The technical stuff. But there is nothing about how people pay for pushing SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives. To be fair, the "economics" are out of scope for a RFC. But knowing what we know now, you can see that a computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and not predict that centralized email like Gmail/Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior. (E.g. the word "spam" is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential internet.)
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/intern...
I think it's for both technical and social reasons that the web is the way it is, and it's hard to separate them. If there was a stronger social demand for decentralization, the technical problems would be solved. On the other hand, if setting up a decentralized service and using it didn't require a Ph.D. then more people might do it.
The reason people build and join centralized social networks is that building decentralized networks is hard to get right. So you get stuck with "natural" monopolies for a time.
You need to try to re-decentralize in every generation, however, as technology improves.
There are more serious socioeconomic issues however:
1) Centralized organizations have better security. That's why gmail is more secure than a random host with squirrelmail. That's why AWS has better uptime than a small data center. That's also why people joined cities formed alliances to fight off the invading hordes.
2) Network effects. To leave a service for another competing one, you need to pull all your friends with you. That's a high barrier for most people, so you have lock-in. The key is not to compete head-on.
3) Interoperability. There is so much politics that it's hard to make something interoperable that doesn't get forked up the wazoo.
I believe that, in the future, technological tools will lead the way, and protocols and regulation will follow. You see this with anything:
Bitcoin
IPFS
Scuttlebutt
And hopefully Qbix [1]
Power generation
Wireless communications
> their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was sponsored by the government and universities. So to them, it just seems like today's problem can be solved with "technology".
As it should be.
The internet mirrors our reality, and our reality mirrors the internet. If we let corporations control either, we've already lost. We have to ensure all data is owned by the people, or cooperatives, governments, etc they formed democratically.
If we let corporations control data, and access to it, and use it, then we have already lost.
I'll mention at this point Bundesdatenschutzgesetz §34, allowing a user to get the canonical representation of all data stored about them from any entity that has data on them, plus a list of all entities they gave data about the user to, plus info what data they gave to which entity, plus all data derived from this users data (including probabilistic models trained from the user's behaviour or choices, for example models for credit scores).
Whether one chooses to analyze the economics or ignore it, the fabric of monetary incentives is always there because harddrives and bandwidth are not $0.00. Even ephemeral things like "trust" and "reputation" are not zero cost to implement. Maintenance tasks such as "software installs" and "upgrades" are also not free.
If those costs (which are never specified -- and can't be specified) in the technical protocols are not mentally accounted for, it will seem like "centralization" is some weird illogical phenomenon. One would incorrectly believe that the masses haven't adopted distributed protocol stacks like IPFS, sandstorm.io, Diaspora, GNUSocial etc because the "technology" is a problem. If you focus on technology like that, you'll just end up inventing another distributed protocol that non-geeks will not use.
Put another way, you can write a paper specification that such & such protocol is designed for decentralized deployment. You can also draw out an architecture diagram that illustrates how peer-2-peer nodes can be federated, etc. However, all those intentions still have to be executed in the real world and the real world costs money. That is why decentralized protocols/tools like SMTP and Git coalesce into centralized entities like Gmail/Hotmail and Github.
E.g. the Git specification about BLOBs, sha1 hashes, etc does not include a free $10/month VPS server. Therefore, if I want to post a public repo without having to use my credit-card to pay for bandwidth, I can just put it on Github. Thousands of people making that similar economic decision leads to a centralized Github.
You might be interested in Thomas Edison State University, which is an accredited, public university in Pennsylvania with a distance education focus that places on emphasis on giving credits for employment experience and credit by examination for degree completion purposes.
There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to decentralized ones. What I am hoping is that once the tech gets solid, one or more people who are good at thinking about ordinary users will come up with some ways to win them over.
My own thought is to figure out what it is that people value that centralized services, by their very nature, cannot provide, but that decentralized services can.
Along these lines, maybe what will happen is Facebook will get hacked, millions of people will suffer as a consequence, and then people will be in a frame of mind to listen to arguments for decentralization.
I imagine decentralized tech would creep into everyone's lives by accident, service by service, rather than happening all at once. I don't think people care (yet) about how their bits are pushed around, but they'll jump into a decentralized service if needed to keep up with the latest craze.
That said, I think that there is a less elegant but far simpler approach that I use: I write articles for my own blog and often I decide to license my books using a Creative Commons license. I then use traditional social media (Gnu Social, FB, Twitter, G+) to link to my own content.
It bothers me (a little) when I see people putting a large amount of effort into generating content for platforms they don't own. I personally think that social media is OK for posting vacation pictures and simple stuff, but for anything you work hard on, why not have your own content on your own domain?
I see two kinds of people for which it make sense economically to own their own site:
(1) Technical people like programmers. Because of their skills, the cost to owning a site is low.
(2) Business owners. They can afford to pay a high price because it contributes to the business. That said, many small businesses choose to use Facebook or Squarespace as their presence. I guess with Squarespace you own the domain (?), but migrating out is still a pain.
That probably accounts for 5% of people with a web presence... for the other 95%, getting the tools for free is apparently more important than owning the site.
It seems to me that these re-decentralizing attempts are really just marketing in open-source wolf-clothes.
Furthermore you don't re-decentralize the web my making a tool whos value proposition is just that. Create something which has value, which people want to use instead of something else. Thats decentralization in reality.
It's the core piece of the architecture producing the instant gratification high that everyone is addicted too.
It really is the biggest factor that forces centralization of our social networks. Any decentralization scheme that produces value needs to address it. Most that get proposed don't.
Real social activities are decentralized local things like:
* Going to dinner
* Taking a trip together
* Chipping in for a gift
* Attending an event
* Dating
* Interacting with one another
* Forums and communities
* Group driving
* Meetups
* Volunteering in community
* Helping after a disaster
* Buying and selling furniture
You don't need your signal to go to facebook or even AT&T to invite friends for dinner.
Centralized social networks and governments cause perverse feelings in local communities where eg democrats and republicans living next to each other increasingly hate each other.
I talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY
What's missing from many of these projects is the ability to remix / mashup people's peice of this goal. Imo, these efforts often seem to attract grand visions instead of utilitarians. I talked to one guy and he was pretty hostile about me using his open source code in a way he didn't approve.
"within a few months I'll release an open source ML powered browser that speeds up their web browsing experience by something between 10X-100X" sounds more grand than utilitarian to me.
Nobody has to change their code to support whatever odd thing you want to do with it, or even to think that what you want to do is worthwhile. It's open source, change it yourself. Or don't, but remember that other people have the right to say "no, I'm not doing that."
Selling is what got us into this mess.
The creators of personal computing and internet like Licklider were idealists who envisoned the computer being a tool to expand human intellect.
>“In a few years humans will be able to think as no humans have thought before”
See the scope of their thinking and that of sellouts who want to commercialize personal data to squeeze dollars.
The crass selling out of the ideals by the later "entrepreneurs" who claim to make the world better but have no such ideals other than profits has resulted in complete mess.
RDF has a high barrier to entry, and it's going to take a lot of work to get this REST API to even come close to what WebDAV already does-
* Locking
* Versioning
* Expressive ACLs
* Expressive search
* Quotas
* Simple distributed data structures
Also, these days LD-JSON exists and is totally compatible with RDF. And in fact Facebook's Open Graph and Google's schemas.org are RDF!
If you want to make the web decentralized again, then think about how would you pitch it to consumers and companies, no tech guys like us.
The big win is actually cross-platform compatibility for user, system & network management protocols. I don't think the goals they want to achieve matter to users, and are antithetical to corporate interests. But it'll be neat to have these protocols work with so many existing systems.
This is going to be a fucking security nightmare, though.
"Monocrop agricultural systems provide an ideal environment for pathogen evolution, because they offer a high density of target specimens with similar/identical genotype" source: Wikipedia
Try to imagine a set of proposed conventions and tools for building decentralized (or distributed) digital cryptocurrencies written before the Bitcoin whitepaper. All the hard problems-- consensus, reducing trust in third parties, defending against Sybil, etc.-- are outside of the scope of this proposal.
What are the chances that such a proposal would be not only relevant but also significantly improve the design of future distributed cryptocurrencies?
This is relevant because many of the same hard problems are still outstanding when it comes to building secure social applications where the user has some semblance of control over their data.