Some say knowledge is power, but in order to gain knowledge you have to make that choice. One can try to educate people about the benefits of hosting their own data, but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing.

I tend to agree with others that posted here, that in general, people are just not interested. It may be too hard for them to grasp the real implications of giving all those informations about them to third parties.. They may also consider that it's too hard to handle all those problems by themselves so they're willing to pay the prices...

I don't think that the change can happen unless the people who do understand, do something about it, but usually these people are more interested to cash in on the ignorance of those who don't...

If you really think that's the problem and you think you know better than other people, you should quit using every single centralized system out there, like your bank (they take your money and invest it elsewhere! And most people don't even know about it!), credit card (It's just a small piece of plastic but you have to pay them money just to pay money, and they even track your purchase history, how ridiculous is that!), etc.

Sure there are shitty aspects to this (and I don't like it either), but the reason they are still around is NOT because most people don't know, but because most people have better things to worry about. I know EXACTLY what's going on but still use centralized silos for certain things because it makes sense at the moment, even though there are many downsides.

It is these "decentralized" people who are out of touch, not the ordinary people.

Even if you understand the downside of centralized systems (and most people really do not), you cannot individually do anything to stop them. So you use them out of convenience.

"Decentralized" people are out of touch only to the degree that they believe that they can change the world based on collective altruism. That is an uphill battle. They are not out of touch in realizing the dystopia that we are heading towards.

I imagine two possible scenarios for decentralized systems to take over:

a) Dystopia goes mainstream -- one scenario: "social credit scores" become common practice and people start to fear using the web to an extreme degree;

b) Someone comes up with a decentralized system that is able to do something, only possible with decentralization, that everyone really really wants.

I hope b) happens first.

That said I agree with you and that was exactly my point. Instead of coming from altruism they should build something genuinely useful that's only possible as a decentralized system.

Do you have any evidence that this ever happened?

Second, I'm not trying to disagree with you at all. It was to point out that there are definitely use cases for decentralized technologies where centralized systems can't go (although a lot have been negative so far)

Mine was not a rhetorical question. People keep mentioning assassination markets but it always sounds like a urban myth to me. I would like to know if there are documented cases or not.

Just because you see an advertisement on something like silk road, doesn't mean that it's not some kid playing pretend.

Most likely they won't going to do that. This is proved by China and more extreme example of North Korea also available.

Or just look at any country with totalitarian regime: they increase regulations really slowly so people "too busy" to think about that, but at some point they simply too scared to do anything.

Take as an example the Germans' insistence on privacy, to extents that even seem ridiculous to a lot of people (e.g. the right to blur your house in Google maps), and then consider their historical context.

I've talked to at least hundreds, maybe a thousand, people (not techies) about these issues over past 10 years. Most don't understand the scope of the problem in terms of the tradeoff they're making. Many also think main suppliers couldn't, wouldn't, etc do sinister things X, Y, and Z because something would happen. Many think problems X, Y, and Z are inevitable since all the famous apps allow them for extra profit or growth. Vast majority don't know much about computers, privacy law, or U.S. history of surveillance states (eg Hoover) because they don't put time into learning. They will shout about minor things that are similar on TV they understand with little thought.

So, it's not condescending. It's a fact that "people don't understand," are apathetic, or terrible at long-term risk/reward tradeoffs. There's shitloads of empirical evidence confirming it in terms of what they adopt in the market vs what problems it causes them. And what crap they adopt next time. We definitely should put the share of blame on them that they earn.

"It is these "decentralized" people who are out of touch, not the ordinary people."

A lot of them are, too, in fairness. They come up with all kinds of crazy, unrealistic solutions that ignore human nature, economics, etc. Best models are going to be hybrids.

This statement seems a bit condescending, just saying..

2. In my post I'm not trying to make value judgements, but just offer a possible explanation why things are the way they are, and who may have better chances to change them.

3. I don't think that we should/can decentralize everything, but I do believe there is a worrying tendency towards extreme centralization. This may not neccessarily be a bad thing though. The world we live in is the expression of our choices, and if this is the result, then this is the result. We can observe and adjust if we feel the need, by changing our behaviour, if not, then that's that.

I don't think that's what condescending means.

Decentralization/Centralization is nothing new. In fact the entire history of humanity is about pendulum swinging back and forth between centralization and decentralization. And in 100% of the cases when this happens it's not because of some elites convince people to switch, but because it makes sense for people. "Normal" human beings are not as dumb as these elites think. So we don't have to worry about decentralization never happening. It will happen. And probably back to centralization. And then back to decentralization again. Just not through these efforts to "educate" people. It's because these elites are so out of touch with how real people think that their attempts at convincing people don't work.

Not a native speaker, so maybe I got that wrong, but this is the definition Google gives: "having or showing an attitude of patronizing superiority.", and this is what I was referring to.

Agree with what you say about the varying degrees of centralization/decentralization throughout history, but don't think that these changes happen out of the blue. Education is usually needed to bring about change and not because people are dumb, but because information doesn't always gets to them easy. So maybe this is what's happening now. You can think of it as a balancing force...

Well, who is patronized? Those decentralized groups that think that the masses "don't know what's best for them", or someone pointing out that such groups are out of touch with reality?

In the end, any critique can be though as "patronizing" -- it implies the one making it knows better than those he criticizes. But I think that's too low a barrier.

It's usually a safer bet to dismiss the assumptions of some small group of people than think that the whole general population are idiots.

E.g. to dismiss scientific opinion on a topic to go instead with lay opinions on it

What we should respect are hard results and proofs from said experts.

Science is not about trusting experts, it's about trusting a methodology (the scientific method) to produce results.

E.g. centralized Snapchat has a multi-billion market value based on marketing of ephemeral messaging and a fun UX. Despite technical limitations of the marketing claims, they have reduced the audience for their "historical conversations" from "all customers" to "malicious actors", which is a big step forward.

Also, WhatApp was losing incredible amount of money with its number of users despite using efficient, centralized tech. I bet they'd loose even more if people were mostly sending images. I've been thinking secure, decentralized apps with no advertising or acquisition will cost money to develop that will require paying users. Or some clever freemium model. Also, not in a police state. ;)

In the bigger picture, Snapchat can be viewed as Instagram v2, rather than WhatsApp v2. Instagram educated consumers on the use of filter-driven photography as content creation. Snapchat is extending that trajectory, with filter-driven videos being authored by kids in less than a minute. Where might that lead? AR in the style of Google-funded Magic Leap, i.e. animation overlays on filtered reality, which will inevitably be used for advertising, e.g. http://hyper-reality.co. They recently launched "connected" sunglasses.

Have you looked at http://matrix.org? They have telco funding and a long-term vision for OSS and decentralization, so are not subject to typical VC/startup pressures.

There's perennial evidence that consumers won't act toward privacy except outside of very, narrow constraints. You're analysis of Instagram to Snapchat is correct. Yet, with the carrot of ephemeral messaging, they went to a centralized service who could keep all their stuff to sell to whoever with no security or assurances in the whole process. Similar with WhatApp in terms of assurances. That's the best we're seeing. Whereas, the usable, truly-private apps that jump into any of these markets get virtually no adoption.

What you're seeing is the power of marketing rather than delivering privacy. Two very different things. Kind of like how many juices market themselves as healthy and natural while actually being a pile of sugar that might harm you if you consume enough. But people drink that 100% juice kool-aid. We've also seen where that went in the corporate space where virtually nothing is actually secure despite marketing claims and the fact that corporations try to hire people that can make an informed decision about that.

Definitely money to be made pressing that button of "ephemeral" on devices that couldn't be that if you tried. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence for those of us pushing or developing actual offerings that are secure or private. I think more can be done and even maybe widespread but the evidence indicates market will always be dominated by scheming oligopolies of evil companies pretending to protect people with their offerings. Because people don't do better as users or buyers.

The people who use Snapchat have a threat model that includes the ordinary people around them: parents, friends, friends of friends, etc. It does not include governments or the provider of Snapchat itself. Given such a threat model it makes perfect sense to use something like Snapchat - it isn't the result of "marketing" (do services like Instagram and Snapchat advertise at all? I've never seen an advert for them).

The reason decentralised crypto-to-the-hilt products never succeed is they misunderstand the threat models ordinary users are using. Most people fear privacy violations by people who know them in some way - not remote faceless programmers an ocean away who, they figure, don't care about them at all.

Who were downloading apps that could keep Snapchat pics at the time Snapchat users were telling me they went away and nobody could retrieve them. The Snapchat company could also sell them to the same people. That means, due to no attempts to learn about online privacy, they falsely believed that what the marketing told them was true. Or their friends who spread the same propaganda.

So, let's recap. They had a false belief due to a lack of knowledge of and apathy for the most basic information on digital privacy of the devices they ran their whole lives through. They believed these incorrect things about their own threat model because they listened to a marketing team or their friends' repetition of a marketing team without due diligence. Even mainstream media was posting articles citing security professionals saying its claims were false. Snapchat users were spreading knowledge on Facebook that someone could keep the Snapchats. They still stayed on the bandwagon.

Conclusion: it's entirely accurate, not condescending, to say these people didn't know crap about privacy of the apps they were using and/or were too apathetic to research better options. They continued to do so after lies were revealed since the app was fun and popular. They don't care about privacy in practice.

Meanwhile, easy-to-use, private solutions were available and making the media. Hardly any uptake. Speaks for itself.

Also which part of "people don't understand" is not condescending?

Funny enough, I watched this movie called Barton Fink last night, and it's a perfect depiction of this nonsense.

Take it easy.

The bank analogy was about how there are upsides and downsides to everything, and the society is not as stupid as to have no clue what's going on. For things like this the world follows the collective intelligence.

Even the people who have no idea how a bank works still use bank with no problem because of the collective knowledge. We know that a bank is safe enough and provides more upsides than downsides.

But this is not always the case. In countries where people have low confidence in their government, even the "ignorant people" who have no idea how Bitcoin works learn about the benefits and move away to it. This is not a result of some intellects trying to convince the "uninformed" how the world should work. It's a result of the collective intelligence recognizing how the pendulum has swung and now there's more downsides than upsides.

How is asserting a fact like that in any way condescending?

No... I specifically asked because I wanted to know why you thought it was condescending. That's a far cry from arguing for the sake of arguing. And it didn't come off at condescending to me.

Exactly. I'm still not sure how we ended up in this world where people no longer understand market competition and consumer value choices. People choose platforms and products based upon what is convenient for them, not necessarily best for them. In the 90s AOL became the internet for many people because it met their wants and needs, much like Facebook has today. Consumers/users are not idealists with regard to their choices and they never will be.

There are plenty of countries in the world where "ordinary people" and "political active people" are two different groups.

Ordinary people there have better things to worry about than politics. Many of them also know what exactly going, but do nothing to prevent it. Usually this end up really really bad.

These "ordinary people" often end up allowing "extraordinary" things to happen to these "political active people".

It's true that many users who give away their data are not cognizant of the consequences, and there are others who understand but do it reluctantly because of peer pressure or usability. But there's a huge swath of people who fully understand the privacy implications of giving away all their data in exchange for the products they use daily, and they're perfectly happy with the deal.

They're not as vocal as the zeitgeist here on HN, and they're not irrational, naive or helpless; they just have a different set of values.

I agree with you that people who care deeply about this issue have the power to change it through focused, collective effort (even if that means supporting open alternatives, like DuckDuckGo). However, I disagree with your characterization of people who willingly support this as being predominantly exploitive.

It's easy for people to misunderstand others' values as being based on misconceptions and assume they are either ignorant or malicious. Members of identity groups (i.e. everyone) tend to, in the aggregate, treat their beliefs as positive statements, not normative ones.

Bringing this back to the subject at hand - the point I'm making is relevant because I would postulate that most people make this deal while being reasonably cognizant of the consequences, and simply being okay with it. They don't need to understand how the data is used at a deeply technical level to understand that it can be used in ways that reduce their overall privacy.

I know many non-technical people who can demonstrate an awareness of the way their data is used to impact their privacy in tech products, and they're okay with it. I even know many technical folks who use the typical banter about the NSA, government surveillance and corporate privacy indiscretions ironically, and don't actually care. They just think it's humorous.

If they otherwise don't care, but they appreciate the usability and convenience features of these products, then that is an objection to change if they won't get the same features in more open, private alternatives.

My second point is this: if enough people can be described as both aware and accepting, then mainstream change will not occur because people like what they have more than they like their privacy, and they make that decision in an informed and responsible manner that does not provide a market opportunity.

You can make an alternative, and it can be great (e.g. DuckDuckGo), but it will not be mainstream.

DuckDuckGo is not decentralized, it's just a worse Google with a better privacy policy. Actual decentralized search is hard. But this is not a one-time global binary decision. We can have decentralized YouTube and Facebook even if nobody has yet figured out how to have decentralized Google.

That's the problem you have to solve if this is something you really care about. Haranguing people because they're not using it isn't the way. The way to do it is to figure out how to make it attractive by the users' metrics rather than your own.

We already know that. It's not trivial but there is a clear path.

You make something that will become popular for reasons unrelated to the thing it should replace, it just happens to also be able to replace it. Once you have something that everybody already uses for other reasons and can do everything Facebook does, anyone can start using it instead of Facebook without waiting for anybody else.

The interesting thing is this bootstraps across the whole space if you can do it once. Given a decentralized social graph you can take over for YouTube as soon as you have video support etc.

YouTube is not just a web server for videos. You can't set up a decentralized, P2P real-time streaming network (like webtorrent) to replace YouTube. Many of the features that make YouTube virally successful and a continuing platform are developed based on research produced by its analytics which sacrifice privacy to improve insights into what users care about.

YouTube also has a profitable business model, which provides a capitalist incentive to improve the product according to user demand. To make a comparison - which are you betting on in 2016 - IRC or Slack? Even if you set up a successful open source project to replicate YouTube, how will you develop it as well when your best employees are poached because they aren't paid as well as centralized companies?

How about the analytics features? How do you design an anonymous or decentralized recommendation engine with the same or similar utility? How do you power search relevance in a meaningfully private and decentralized way? How do you add the social networking features that people care about without a centralized social network?

The fact that you can technically make product clones with distributed graphs does not on its own constitute a feasible replacement. The basis of modern product research and improvement is data tracking and analysis. You can argue that it can be curtailed or scaled back to improve some privacy, but we haven't even started talking about the performance constraints of decentralized search, streaming, etc. Where will the primary files (e.g. videos) and supplementary files (e.g. recommender models, analysis features, graph, infrastructure, etc.) be hosted? How will you guarantee similar uptime and performance rates to AWS and GCP with a decentralized network of seeders?

You strictly cannot replace products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix or Google with decentralized counterpoints. The demand and feasibility is not there.

I think you're overselling it. YouTube is successful predominantly because they originally had first mover advantage and now have a direct link from google.com.

The problem decentralized services have is the same problem Google has had in taking over for Facebook. You need to provide something which is enough better than the incumbent that it can overcome the switching cost. The problem has nothing specifically to do with decentralization, and time has proven again and again that it can happen, every time one network replaces another. The next time it happens we just need the new network to be a decentralized one.

> To make a comparison - which are you betting on in 2016 - IRC or Slack?

Here's a different question -- which are you betting on still being used in two decades, IRC or Slack?

That's one of the huge advantages of decentralization. Things stick around because they don't die when one company goes out of business. Which means the process of incremental improvement can refine them into something that, once it has the incumbency, is almost impossible to displace. Examples: TCP, email, Unix/Linux, DNS. None of them are perfect but they'll be with us for the rest of our lives.

> Even if you set up a successful open source project to replicate YouTube, how will you develop it as well when your best employees are poached because they aren't paid as well as centralized companies?

The same way it works for Linux or BSD.

> How about the analytics features? How do you design an anonymous or decentralized recommendation engine with the same or similar utility? How do you power search relevance in a meaningfully private and decentralized way? How do you add the social networking features that people care about without a centralized social network?

Decentralized search and recommendations are hard. So do the easy part first.

Look at YouTube. It's really two independent pieces. One is a web host for videos, the other is a player app with search and recommendations. So you decentralize the hosting and then people make apps with central servers that do recommendations and search. Tomorrow somebody else will figure out how to decentralize the other part. You can make progress without having to solve every problem in the same place at the same time.

> The basis of modern product research and improvement is data tracking and analysis.

The underlying assumption is that you can't ever be finished with anything. But the more time passes the more refined the product becomes and the less you need to fiddle with it anymore.

There were a lot of video sharing sites around before YouTube.

The set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is in the majority if most people don't care about privacy but want privacy reducing features. Sure, in a perfect world they'd take both, but we're talking about which is more important to them when they have to make a decision. You're arguing my second point, about market viability of a privacy-enhancing product. My first point, which supports my second point, is that most people give up their privacy because they understand the compromise and don't value privacy more than convenience-enhancing, privacy-reducing features.

I'm not sure if I'm conveying my points well, let me try to rephrase. I don't think my postulated demographic is in the majority if they 1) desire competitive features which reduce privacy, 2) are willing to responsibly reduce their privacy for those features and if the market alternatives (decentralized or otherwise) increase their privacy without competitive feature parity.

Basically, if the majority of people are ambivalent about privacy, understand the privacy compromise and still desire privacy-reducing convenience in features, then the alternatives will never become mainstream. This is my hypothesis, and I am pushing this hypothesis by defending the idea that most people give up privacy because they understand but don't value it, not because they are naive or ignorant and value it. The reason I am putting this hypothesis forward is because I think it's important that the HN crowd consider this possibility.

It's easy to believe people give up their privacy because they don't have alternatives, or because they don't know any better, but that perspective comes across as condescending to people who fully understand the compromise they agree to, and there is a strong argument that this is the majority of the population. If that's true, you can't expect privacy-enhancing products to become mainstream if privacy is the only competitive feature, or if the privacy precludes competitive features offered by other companies.

The overall conclusion, based on these premises, is that many privacy-valuing technies misunderstand the privacy values of the majority of the population. They believe that the aforementioned privacy-enhancing products can be competitive and replace the incumbents if only they could get people to understand the privacy breaches they're suffering. My grand unifying theory here begins with the hypothesis that most users actually understand the privacy compromise, and it's really the vocal HN zeitgeist that misunderstands the awareness of most users in this arena. By extension, they also misunderstand the market oppurtunity, mainstream potential or even feasibility of open alternatives that can change or replace the incumbents.

At this juncture I'm not sure how else to convey my point. I feel as though we are probably talking past each other.

But those things are relatively rare and can be separated out. You can layer them on top of a decentralized system -- run this separate program that tells The Cloud everything you click on and in exchange you get the benefit of data from other people who make the same choice. That is still possible even if a video from your family gets downloaded P2P directly from your actual friends and no corporation automatically finds out about it and stores it in a database forever.

The problem currently is that the decision of whether to give up privacy is not tied only to the few features that legitimately require giving it up, it's also tied to participating in the same networks as the majority of people and many other features that don't inherently require privacy invasion.

Decentralization doesn't take away the choice whether to share data from the people who want to do that, it gives it back to the people who don't.

This criticism of decentralization is in addition to my parallel comment in this thread about how you cannot realistically and significantly improve privacy with feature parity.

The performance and reliability would also be difficult to manage without centralized servers. You're not going to be maintaining the same uptime guarantees.

Finally, how are you going to motivate development in a decentralized manner? You're removing capitalist incentives to improve the product. This would have to be managed by a consortium of companies, which doesn't sound like a much better situation than we have now, or it would have to be an open protocol. If companies weren't earning a profit on developing features for further user demand, how would the products improve as well as they do now?

This argument is self-defeating. If any significant plurality (e.g. a third) of people opt into the "privacy for analysis" setting then you still have "truly vast amounts of data" and there is no trouble. Whereas if so few people want to make that exchange when the choice is made explicit that it can't even work properly then it doesn't matter how well it works because nearly everyone doesn't use it.

> The performance and reliability would also be difficult to manage without centralized servers. You're not going to be maintaining the same uptime guarantees.

Uptime is just math. You decide how much service uptime you need and based on the average device uptime that determines how much redundancy is necessary to achieve it. Consumer devices have lower uptime so you need somewhat more redundancy. And in practice not even much of that, because you want "close copies" (to improve latency/efficiency) anyway, so if you have enough copies for that then a failure doesn't reduce uptime, it just requires you to use a far copy that once.

Moreover, if you have something that really does need specific uptime guarantees or is unusually likely to incur a DDoS, nothing stops you from pinning it to a P2P node hosted on the likes of AWS or CloudFlare. Then to lose uptime you have to lose the entire P2P network and CloudFlare.

> Finally, how are you going to motivate development in a decentralized manner?

Much the same way as we motivate development of Windows, Linux and Wikipedia.

Not to mention the difficulties of reindexing and fast retrieval over P2P. If I need to add an additional index on my centralized servers, the development cycle is much shorter than forcing every peer to reindex itself.

There is no magic security pixie dust inside a data center. If the server is vulnerable and your data is on the server then you're the same amount of screwed as if the P2P app is vulnerable and your data is on the client. Possibly more screwed because central servers have data for multiple users which give the attackers more incentive to break into them.

> If I need to add an additional index on my centralized servers, the development cycle is much shorter than forcing every peer to reindex itself.

And why is that?

You can't say that at all about a distributed P2P network, so you'll need to put in more elbow grease to address those vectors. For example, if I find a severe vulnerability, I can immediately patch my own servers. If the vulnerability is in the P2P client, it may be impossible to guarantee that every last client gets patched.

> And why is that?

Because there's obviously an inverse tradeoff between control and development speed. Managing distributed state is hard enough when it's on your machines, it's exponentially harder when it's random devices somewhere on the Internet. Your guarantees are much looser.

For example:

1. Your data is less local so there is less effective latency.

2. You're spending computation and bandwidth that other people are paying for

If I need to get some big batch job done quickly and the data is on my servers, then I just up a bunch of instances and get it done. If the data is on a bunch of smartphones somewhere, I can't suddenly grab a bunch more of their computational capacity and bandwidth without pissing off a bunch of users, can I?

And what if I need to change the protocol? We're back to the problem of patching all the clients.

I'm not saying these technical hurdles are insoluble. I'm saying they are real and to date nobody has actually solved them.

With a centralized system you have this:

client1 <-> central server <-> client2

With a decentralized system you have this:

client1 <-> client 2

In the first case, if either client is compromised then the data is still compromised regardless of what happens at the server, because the data still traverses both clients.

And in the second case the "central server" is better than physically secure, it's non-existent. That method of compromise is removed entirely. There are no intra-DC data links to worry about.

> For example, if I find a severe vulnerability, I can immediately patch my own servers. If the vulnerability is in the P2P client, it may be impossible to guarantee that every last client gets patched.

For serious vulnerabilities the solution to this is to push the update with a date check in it that gives people a reasonable amount of time to update their clients, and after that date all of the updated clients refuse to talk to the unpatched ones.

> Because there's obviously an i, wait a reasonable amount of time for everyone to have instnverse tradeoff between control and development speed. Managing distributed state is hard enough when it's on your machines, it's exponentially harder when it's random devices somewhere on the Internet. Your guarantees are much looser.

Only if you're testing in production. If you're the actual developer then you have a test network which is completely under your control, or maybe an isolated group of beta testers who have chosen to allow you to force-update their machines.

> 1. Your data is less local so there is less effective latency.

With a central server the data is on the server and the client has to fetch it every time it wants to do anything. With decentralization you can keep the data closer to where it will be used, e.g. (a copy of) your photos are already on your device.

> 2. You're spending computation and bandwidth that other people are paying for

You're always spending computation and bandwidth that other people are paying for.

If a decentralized system uses 30 seconds of compute time every day from each of a billion devices, probably nobody even notices (especially if you select for idle devices), but do the same on AWS and your boss is going to want to know why the bill is so high.

Isn't one of those things rather unlike the other two?

You obviously mean Windows as the outlier, but decentralized is orthogonal to proprietary. TCP/IP is decentralized but people still make money selling proprietary operating systems with TCP support and proprietary TCP libraries and proprietary routers and so on.

Do they know what they are giving up?!

Yet, when "network effects" drive something to a place considered undesirable, even for a minority at the time, we occasionally pass laws.

See: smoking bans. Network effects (smokers are way more profitable) prevented non-smoking bars from ever forming. So, we passed laws to level the field.

I'm not saying we should do that here, but it is not without precedent.

I'm currently trying to stand up some docker containers for gnusocial and paperwork. Paperwork at least has a dockerfile and docker-compose file in it.

These take a lot of work. There's a huge barrier to entry.

We still don't have an easy to use computer that can run 24/7 in your own home, on which you can install a blog, vlog, social stuff, email, as easily as you use the current centralised services. When I first installed my mail server, it took me a week. I'm not a system administrator, but I am a developer familiar with GNU/Linux. Your average muggle doesn't stand a chance.

Even if we had those little computers, our bandwidth is still asymmetric (even the fibre, even though it makes no technical sense) and that decision is a corporate one, that you are not going to reverse by voting with your wallet.

Even if we had our symmetric bandwidth, we still cannot send emails from our own home. I mean we could send it, but it would be rejected by every big players out there, as well as most mail filtering systems, because the current assumption is that if it comes from a residential IP, it's spam.

And we still don't know how to make a decentralised search engine.

---

The choice these days is simple: either you give up on the likes of privacy and anonymity, or you shut yourself from the network. It's not a binary choice —more like a spectrum in fact— but there is no third alternative yet. For instance, I don't use Facebook. I missed some events because of that, and people are surprised I didn't know about that party I was invited in. It's the fifth time I told them I never log in, dammit!

A distributed social network may arise, we just haven't yet seen the initial conditions, value chains, and systems structures that will bring it about.

This article gets excited about blockchain cryptocurrencies as the substrate, since money is a ubiquitous need. Well, it's worth pursuing. I'm still angry with Google & Facebook for killing off federated chat, which was the other nebula in which a new star protocol might've been born.

Imagine if installing a server-side chat app, message board, project management app, or CMS were as easy as installing a desktop app. In a desktop app, it's usually one click to start the install and then, if necessary, you're guided through a few screens to complete the install. Want to uninstall? The OS (operating system) will provide a feature to manage that.

Now consider how complicated installing on a server is in contrast. Upload you files to a folder or directory, enable permissions, set configurations not just for your server but also the language the program is written in - the list goes on. No wonder SaaS (Software as a Service) is thriving like never before. Who, other than technical folks, could possibly have the time, interest or inclination to set up a self-hosted solution when the barrier is so high? Perhaps some in the tech field would like to keep it that way? Would Saas be less attractive if installing a self-hosted solution was simple, easy, quick and secure?

Surely an essential part of a decentralised web is that companies, organisations and individuals choose to run their own software using open protocols and data formats. But until the ease, security and simplicity of installation improves for web software, it simply won't happen on a large scale.

sandstorm.io

The auto updating server that you can self-host or use as a hosted service, allowing you to install and uninstall lots of applications, both free and proprietary, just by clicking the button.

(No, not paid to tell this unless you count the stickers I got. And no, not perfect but still a refreshing change.)

Has anyone ever actually seen an ISP network that filters local traffic to other ISP endpoints? I'm not even sure why they would do that. DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud so it would not help there.

Here (SoCal) traceroute to a host in the same local neighborhood is three hops.

In any case the encrypted p2p protocols run by dapps (decentralized apps) are opaque, and these don't really qualify as servers because architecturally they are not client-server at all.

This is not about money. This is just good housekeeping. When I was in NY, I believe they TimeWarner and Verizon (or was it AT&T?) also used to do the same thing.

At one time ISP's gave you a bit of space on a shared host for free as a courtesy, it would be nice if these days you could get the equivalent of a t2.micro. I know a few people (teenagers I'm related to mostly) who would like to mess around with programming and building web sites but for whom even a tiny cost is a barrier. As it is I throw a few bucks at nearlyfreespeech for them and it's good for a year, but I imagine plenty don't have that option.

Another thing to consider why we can't easily allow our user to run services if we wanted to because most home users IPs are not static, and often your IP is shared by many users. IPv4 is running out, giving our user the ability to run service will also mean giving him a unique IP, which they will have to pay for it and because of the scarcity of unique IPv4s only business users are allowed to have them and business accounts cost money. We haven't moved to ipv6 yet, it will require some investment and overhauling some of our networks. Depending on your local law, you may actually have to have a business under your name, meaning you have to show business license papers, to get a business connectivity.

I know what you mean by having to run your own blog or services. I have done it myself and I have learned what I know today mostly due to me tinkering and optimizing apache and WordPress on the fly when it was on the homepage of Digg. It was such a rush and I have come a long way since those days, thanks to being able to host my blog on a time warner DSL line. This was in the early or mid-2000. But it was a different time, and things have changed a lot since then.

One of the reasons ISPs back then used to give you free email address and shared hosting, because they wanted to tie you down to their services. Specifically, if you used their email for a long time it would be difficult for you to leave it behind. But the landscape has changed since then, consumers are smarter and webmails are much better and free blog hosting are dime a dozen.

My advice to people who want to learn hosting services by doing it themselves on their own computer that, even though it can be a thrilling experience, hosting it remotely and configure/securing server from scratch can be an even better learning experience. And VPS hosting services like digital ocean can be very affordable.

There is a popular misconception that ISPs are a profitable business and they try to shaft the consumers at every opportunity they get. Maybe for the big players like Comcast, it is true, but the rest of us small and medium sized ISP its far from the truth. The complexity in running reliable services can be staggering, the equipment and licensing can be an astronomical investment (at least for us it's a large amount) and running the last mile and upkeep for it with 24/7 support are very expensive for us. BWs are not expensive, but equipment is. When we saturate our 10gbps port, moving to 40gbps or even 100gbps network (switches and routers) can be a mind-numbing expense. On top of it, we are taxed and need high license fees for all kinds of services. We really don't make a lot of money and you constantly have to spend on your infrastructure as you grow (fighting to get customers by lowering your cost, and hence your revenue and profit). You have to keep growing to stay relevant and reach that point you can connect more users with minimum costs without having to invest in growing your network. Reaching that point can take anywhere for 5 to 10 years, if not more.

Sorry for the rant, I just needed to get it out of my system. :)

<1> http://www.slashgeek.net/starting-isp-really-hard-dont/

That isn't true. Those are the ones that you'll hear about in the media but there are plenty of DDOS attacks on smaller sites both for extortion purposes and to force them offline.

The 940/40 is DOCSIS 3.1

The situation with uploads on home connections is better than it was a few years ago though.

Lesson: any distributed or federated protocol that is not robust against abuse is doomed.

you could of course go with non-standard ones, its still another complication that they throw your way.

Now consider how complicated installing on a server is in contrast. Upload you files to a folder or directory, enable permissions, set configurations not just for your server but also the language the program is written in - the list goes on.

I think a lot of the difficulty is artificial, created by software that is far more complex than it needs to be, to cover far more use cases than most users actually need. In the "enterprise" space, a lot of this complexity probably also drives auxillary revenue in the form of training, consultancy, etc. In other words, it could be a deliberate barrier to entry. Building big, complex, immensely flexible, yet difficult-to-configure systems with plenty of dependencies just seems to be the norm.

Perhaps some in the tech field would like to keep it that way? Would Saas be less attractive if installing a self-hosted solution was simple, easy, quick and secure?

Indeed, the whole category of "enterprise software" often fits this business model.

But me and many others have written HTTP and FTP servers which do not require any installation at all --- they're just a single (often very tiny compared to most other software) binary, sometimes with an optional configuration file. If you're doing something like hosting static pages, this fits the use-case perfectly well.

Finally, a huge part of making the web truly decentralised is to abandon the notion of dedicated servers/clients altogether --- and thus also the notion that you must need a dedicated or "server" computer to host anything, or for that matter a dedicated Internet connection. Of course some machines will have more resources to serve, and a typical residential connection may be more limited, but the key idea as exemplified by P2P is that any machine can serve.

We can't really call P2P filesharing today decentralized. It depends on trackers. And it's trackers who help users (often out of commercial interest) overcome all the troubles with software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT

It's really quite awesome: https://sandstorm.io/

Configure the EC2 security groups (firewall) to let you reach Sandstorm

By default, Amazon EC2 protects your virtual machine from being reached over the Internet.

In the above tutorial, we allow the virtual machine to be reached on port 80. By default, Sandstorm uses port 6080, so look through the above tutorial and add another security groups rule allowing port 6080.

SSH in, and run the Sandstorm install script

I love the concept, and I'm looking forward the day a facebook alternative could be built into it. And if it had existed when Google Reader ditched the internet, everybody would be on Sandstorm today. I've just experienced the feeling of browsing my RSS feeds of porn without feeling watched and without being afraid of hitting a "share to facebook" button: It's a great experience.

It's ludicrous to suggest that everyone should run their own server. It's like saying they should all build their own cars.

It's also hard to argue that it's fundamentally different if you don't run it yourself.

Also, economies of scale.

If people used a decentralized service called "UnFaceBook", the total cost of servers, administration, etc. would dwarf the cost of Facebook running their data centres. From a business perspective, it's just not feasible.

Hmm... perhaps everyone running their own systems is, in fact, doable. Most people have smart phones which are much more powerful than servers from 6 years ago. Why not just use that?

Have the content at the edge, and controlled at the edge. Scalability can come from lots of caching at the core.

Not a startup I'd want to do, but it's technically feasible.

This isn't even remotely true.

The most powerful servers from 6 years ago is a xeon x7560, which has a 40% higher passmark score than even the best enthusiast consumer-level cpu on the market today (an i7 6700k), never mind even the most expensive smartphone on the market.

https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X7560+%40+2....

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6700K...

And that's only for public cloud, not including Facebook, Google's internal servers, Apple's infrastructure, ISPs, and servers hosted by all companies. So to provide all IT services to citizen of modern economies, we're certainly close to 1 server for 100 inhabitants. Sometimes I wonder what we're doing with so many servers on Earth: I don't spend 24hrs a day sending requests to public servers, and even if I did, the server I'd be pinging could handle a few thousand users at the same time. So where does all this processing power go?

And there's even more computing available if you include everyone's home and work PC, phone and router, but those are not always-on.

> Hmmm... perhaps everyone running their own system is, in fact, doable.

Crunching the numbers, we're already above one system per person ;) So we might as well go full-decentralized, if we could conceive a theoretical model around it.

Security, redundancy and isolation. Often times you have an extra server not because you need the processing power, but to separate things for security reasons, to provide failover and to avoid noisy neighbors.

I was going to make a different comment though. You suggest that, because it would have higher infrastructure costs, a decentralized network is "not feasible" from a business perspective.

I'm wondering a) whether infrastructure costs are currently a limiting factor in the growth of social networks, and b) if a decentralized social network needs to be a business at all.

But more to point a, what if it cost 10x more, but the current costs were $0.10 per user per year. Do you think a service with a cost of $1 per user per year would be too expensive to operate?

[1] https://ipfs.io/

With decentralized, you also have a huge issue of protocol. Facebook can upgrade millions of people instantly to new version. Decentralized could be a major pain.

Not before we have breakthrough in power cells. Or some other breakthrough. Perhaps computer implanted in our body and powered by our food.

If you have a desktop, you can install any server software you want. And if you have a desktop, you can leave it running as long as you want. You don't need to purchase a host somewhere; you can just use the computer you own.

Heck, you own a computer which is on 24/7 already: your cell phone. And software written well could run on that phone to serve whatever you want, at a minimal cost in CPU & hence battery.

That's why it's important to hold on to people owning general-purpose computers, open standards and community governance: because once you move away to centrally-controlled appliances, there won't be a platform from which to bootstrap the next, better system.

LOL.

Decentralised would mean the user installs software on his/her desktop/phone and it works as you think a server works. Thats all there is to it.

If you make "installing on a server" - somebody else computer easier, its not gonna be detentralised. Youll have shareing of peoples "apps" on a single server, and eventually Cloud is going to be invented. Look then how easy it is to run apps and install shit on other peoples computers.

Running "a server" is not any more difficult than running any other app, on Android or on Linux, the difference is pacman -S kwrite or pacman -S lighttpd, or picking "primitive ftpd" app and running it.

I think the real problem is that people think servers are some kind of magical computers, different from any other general purpose computers people are already using as clients.

Which directory does the ftpd app store it's data in, and on which partition? How do I get alerted if I'm running low on space and what do I do if I am? Is the data backed up and what is my disaster recovery process? What port is it running on and how do I connect to it? BTW, insta-fail because we should be using secure ftp. Is it using encrypted communications and how do I install a certificate and share public keys? What about configuring access through the firewall? etc, etc.

The problem is that you don't just want a CMS, you want it to look a special way, do special things with it, don't want other people to access it without you allowing it, etc.

Several NAS vendors already offer that, so you can install such server software on their devices with a single click and easy configuration.

It seems to me that a more difficult part is to make this server public, that is with a fixed IP or domain name. I've never quite went this far.

It's this way already. Virtually every shared hosting provider (Hostgator, Bluehost, etc.) provides a Cpanel admin panel with Softaculous software installer. All kinds of apps (blogs, CMSs, project management apps, etc.) are a single-click install and removal.

Some evolution of docker swarm could greatly simplify this.

It all comes down to perceived (!) value. Once people use one thing, they will only switch if something else offers a clear higher value. At that point offering the same value is not enough anymore. This higher value has to be something that makes every day life in a very obvious way a little better. I am afraid something abstract like 'more power' will not do the trick.

A fully decentralized web would be delivered peer-to-peer via a mesh network or something similar. Anything else is a farce, because it's not just about who holds the data on the network, it's about the network itself. If any link in the chain of the communication can be controlled by some centralized power- it's not decentralized.

On a fully decentralized network, three things restricting freedom and privacy would be:

* the personal device used to (inter)connect, like malicious code hiding in firmware

* those controlling the power needed for the device

* those that can interfere with communication or alter data on the distributed network, either as a peer on the network, through malware/disruptive communication on the network, or those blocking communication

The problem with the decentralized web, though, is that when the web is fully free- if everyone stores part of the content from everyone else, then they could be storing things that are illegal and that they don't agree with. I personally don't want to participate in any network where I can't control what data is stored locally.

1) Cloud hosting --> might as well use the centralized application because this is still centralized.

2) Peering your own hardware for a direct internet connection is not accessible to most people.

3) even in a p2p context, your PC or mobile device is not under your full control and especially in the US, most broadband goes through one of a small number of service providers (Comcast for example)

So I agree with you: network architecture is a major stumbling block.

On second thought, though, that still doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to create "decentralized" applications that are accessible to most average people somehow. I believe this is possible and without a huge upfront cost (besides time). They could still gain power through traction.

And as far as hosting content for others in a p2p context, I think part of the point of a scheme like that is you should never be able to know what you're hosting. It should be opaque encrypted blocks of data, right?

I remember to have seen a protocol for such ad hoc mesh networks that wasn't even IP-based and could be implemented on most routers. The network can dynamically self-configure, route around failures, and nodes can go in and out of existence whenever they want. It looked pretty cool but unfortunately can't remember where I've seen it. :/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

When is that going to happen? All those routers, etc. don't run on fairy dust and the people that keep them serviced and running kind of enjoy doing things like being able to afford to eat, etc.

Even if you get rid of that part, you have to provide power to the devices and pay for a place to put them. Don't expect that a local telco's going to let you just slap a box on their pole rent-free. Any halfway savvy businessman is going to say "Good of humanity? That'll be $25/mo to put your box in my shop." unless there's some larger, provable benefit to him or herself.

It already happens/has happened with AMPRnet, HSMM, CUWiN, Freifunk, FunkFeuer, OpenWireless, Firetide, Guifi.net, Netsukuku, Ninux, Senceive, and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network

When higher levels of portable energy become safer and cheaper, then it would be more likely that a small radio could be used to transmit and receive over longer distances.

If a company like Google and Facebook were to provide free adequately high-speed internet access, there'd be less incentive for a free peer-based network wherever they provided free access. Google's free wired plan is lower speed and they didn't plan to expand it; however, I'm not sure about their plans for Wifi. Neither Facebook nor Google have stated they plan to provide access everywhere. So, free access via a peer-based network would remain an incentive over paid plans for the foreseeable future.

I see zero evidence this happening.

But when you put a person's life in to context, how do you expect a working mother of three to just learn the tools? What if she has the remotest of computer literacy? That is, she could operate Facebook but no more? Then is it reasonable to expect her to learn how to administer her own server? Can she choose to spend hours a week learning for months while her children need food to be prepared for them, clothes to be washed, and beds to be made? In a practical, not theoretical sense, does she really have that choice?

The example with voting feels disingenuous because voting is specifically designed to be accessible to every person. Learning bash and administering your own web server is absolutely not the same.

She wouldn't have to, it's all about the money and the wish to be dependent or independent. There are web hosting as well as consulting companies that can setup private social network for one time fee, with automated backups and all.

To me, when I hear that some "computer illiterate" person "learns to use facebok" it kinda sounds reminiscent of hearing that someone learns to make crack from cocaine. Is it useful - maybe, is it good for society - eh I don't think so. I rather see them "learn" how to use sandstorm...

Just the words "web hosting" are not in most peoples' vocabulary.

You are right that it's good to teach people computer literacy. But your belief that people can somehow spontaneously learn about web hosting is unrealistic.

People first need to experience something, then get some language for what it is and how it works, and only then can they begin to seek out education about how to learn how to reconstruct it for themselves.

Providing turnkey decentralized application hosting is a way to allow people to first experience what it's like to deploy an application. By having that experience and doing it over and over they can start to have shared experiences around it, from which they will learn language about what it is. Only at that point can they start to learn how it actually works and what it might be like to do it in a different way.

Edit: There's another comment in this thread where someone brings up the hassle of IT as a major centralizing force. Best comment so far in this thread.

So you have to create a system that's decentralized and yet has the interface of a centralized application and which is distributed on centralized, mostly monopolized platforms.

So that's certainly an undertaking... but not necessarily impossible.

No, that's not how it works. Sure, perceived value is important, but that's not where it starts. For people to switch to something else they need to find out about it first, and to find out about it somebody has to promote it to them. And how do you get people to promote it? You need an incentive, you need to find some way to make it worth for people to promote the software and of course it has to have a value for users to use it too.

Torrent sites, for example, benefited from promoting torrent technology.

The perceived higher value itself is the incentive that will make people tell other people about it. People like to share things they really like or dislike. It gives them something to talk about ;-)

You seem to talk about building a platform to replace Facebook, Snapchat, Google and others like them ? Good luck ;-)

Snapchat made it by offering easier photo options before Facebook did. Whatsapp did the same with messaging. Maybe some startup will make it with VR before the others do. But 'more power' and 'decentralized' will simply not do.

This is the classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would've asked for a faster horse" thinking.

There are lots of things people want that Google, Instagram, etc don't offer them. Most people just don't think they're allowed to ask. I know many people who want a better job, people who want to be able to stop living on the street, people who want to eat better, people who want political representation they believe in.

Health, career mobility, and an end to poverty, and good reprentation are maybe acceptable outcomes for specific businesses. But overall the world of business owners is hurt by those things. Sick people spend more money to treat their symptoms, people without job mobility work harder for less pay, poverty forces people to spend the same money over and over again, and corrupt officials can be controlled with bribes. These things are all great for the great core of businesses from Wal-Mart to Coca-Cola to the donut shops, strip clubs, and restaurants on your street.

The way that incentive plays out is complicated, and this is just a theory. I can't prove that there's any kind of permanent system there. But that's how it seems to me.

Decentralized systems don't have that incentive. Ethereum doesn't care how easy it is for employees to quit. Email servers don't care how sick people are.

That doesn't mean those system will necessarily be empowering... "Empowering to disempowered people" is a political aim, and if you want tools to support a political aim, they have to be designed and tested for that outcome. Unfortunately, even though the decentralized tools don't care about the cultural incentives, those of us who build tools on those decentralized platforms do, and we often recapitulate the same incentive systems that Google, Facebook, etc do.

BUT, the light in the end of this whole tunnel for me is that IF you can take "empowering disempowered" as a design goal, and IF you can find some space outside of the commercial incentives to design a tool on decentralized platforms that moves that dial, THEN that tool will actually embody those values, and because it is decentralized it will not be beholden to the standard cultural pressures, and that might actually make a difference.

To some extent this happens every day in in little corners of every product and service in the world. Employees do find ways to enact their values in the work, when they have a little bit of free energy after doing what their boss likes. In theory a decentralized toolset can replace the corporate structure that makes that employee beholden to the boss, making them beholden to algorithms of their choice instead. In theory one of those algorithms would be responsible for keeping them solvent. In theory that could free them up to spend a larger percentage of their time enacting their values. In theory that could create more economic value than doing what an (largely arbitrarily selected) supervisor thinks is right.

But that's a lot of theories.

Until recently, I was trying to go 'all in' by favoring GNU Social over centralized social media, almost always running Linux on the laptop, etc.

I have backed off somewhat, realizing that my workflow for writing books and consulting is more efficient using OSX, and sometimes Facebook and G+ are much better at connecting with friends and better for publicizing book updates, etc. than GNU Social.

I am trying to live in a practical 'middle ground' where I can get my work done and still participate in keeping the web open and decentralized.

Two new developments that are promising: a Ruby version of GNU Social that uses the same protocols that looks much more hackable, and TBL's W3C Solid project.

Even the rise of git was because of github. A for profit centralized company.

May be the best case is to have open, decentralized protocols, with for profit companies providing hosting and simple signup.

ICQ or XMPP, never quite took off like slack. Is it because of the interface?

I really do hope we see another "rise of P2P", but there seems to be strong commercial interests against it. (Bitcoin itself is rather commercial in nature, as it deals specifically with currency.)

Decentralization sounds great, but it can be a pain in the ass, sometimes. And if you've somehow managed to set it up to feel like it's centralized then 1) it probably is and 2) you've made it easier for someone to create a one-stop-shop which is centralized, built on top of your decentralization.

I do have to question the notion that free entertainment is what empowers people, but I suppose it isn't the stupidest attempt at justifying piracy I've ever read.

It hasn't, but it's far diminished than what it used to be.

I do have to question the notion that free entertainment is what empowers people, but I suppose it isn't the stupidest attempt at justifying piracy I've ever read.

Not only entertainment, but information in general. Various books and journals, some of which you probably wouldn't even be able to buy a physical copy of, obscure software, etc. "Knowledge is power." Piracy isn't just movies and music...

You're right, of course, but this is one of those situations where 99% of cases ruined it for the rest.

And I would argue heavily that p2p is diminished in any way. I don't have anything to do with the piracy subculture and it took me under 5 minutes to find torrents of current movies, tv shows, and albums.

Most decentralized services are open source projects maintained by volunteer developers. They are competing with centralized commercial projects with deep pockets and the ability to hire not only smart developers but also artists, testers, sysadmins, designers, marketers, researchers, and project managers - some of the things you need to deliver a best-in-class service to users. The odds are stacked against the decentralized service from the beginning.

Even when these projects attract commercial interest, such as Dat or Ethereum named in the article, it is not clear how their funding will be sustainable given that decentralized platforms are more difficult to monetize than centralized ones. And it's really hard to see Github as a "posterchild" for the decentralized web, since it is really a centralized service.

This in combination with a few other problems with ISPs, slow upload speeds and the "intellectual property" watchdogs prevented 1-click installation. Without extremely easy and fast setup that even the dumbest person can manage, no software will achieve wide popularity. Shareware authors have already realized this in the 90s and this hasn't changed since then.

So my verdict is: technical reasons, mostly, although I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there were some "dark forces" behind them in some countries. Genuine P2P has always scared the shit out of traditional companies and politicians.

This conclusion is not really supported by the facts.

The failure of decentralized VOIP services to achieve mass adoption was not due to technical reasons. Let us remember that SIP was standardized in RFC 2543 in 1999 and had a head start over Skype. The first STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) RFC 3489 to help solve the NAT traversal problem was published in 2003, the same year as the first release of Skype. There was no technical reason stopping the SIP community from building reliable VOIP clients to compete with Skype. One might object that due to NAT, SIP required most users to use a STUN server. But this is not a technical problem: it is similar to the situation with XMPP, which required users to register and then connect to an XMPP server, yet XMPP is still a decentralized protocol.

Besides, decentralized services encompass a lot more than just VOIP. For example, they includes instant messaging, file storage, and social networking. The first Jabber/XMPP protocol RFC was published in 2004, even though the server software had been open sourced since 1999 or so. The decentralized file storage service Tahoe-LAFS was first released in 2007. The micro-blogging service and Twitter-alternative GNU Social was launched in 2008. The Diaspora decentralized Facebook-like social network was launched in 2010. None of these services were able to compete with their commercial counterparts, yet there was nothing technical stopping them from doing so.

These services and their spiritual descendants have failed to gain mass adoption because they didn't have the same resources as their centralized commercial counterparts, and so could not offer users a better or comparable product in terms of quality, features, usability, reliability, or even "cool factor".

There is a parallel here with the mythical Year of the Linux Desktop, which never seems to arrive.

Oh yes, it is. I have to wholeheartedly disagree with almost everything you've said, I'm afraid.

STUN requires a centralized outside server. As I said, by now there are better libraries that didn't exist ten years ago, but even they fail often. NATs behave very differently form implementation to implementation, some don't even get UPnP right, and it takes a lot of resources to get p2p reliable without special user interaction (e.g. with their home router) and without any server outside. AFAIK, there not no single library or method that works reliably without a server outside of the NAT. Also don't forget that I was talking about why decentralized p2p didn't take off, so we're talking about a of 1996-2010 not about now.

Adoption of technology does not work the way you describe, it works similarly to language change. It doesn't have much to do with resources of companies. Here is how it works in reality:

1.) If there is already an easy to use service that covers the functionality, new ones will likely fail. (Just like possible word compositions are often blocked when there is already a word for sth.)

2.) If end users cannot get it running within a few seconds, the technology will likely fail. (If it is intended for a mass market, I'm not talking about specialized tools or b2b software, of course.)

Decentralized p2p failed because of 1.) and 2.), and the reason for 2.) was primarily the lack of a cross-platform, reliable way to punch holes through NATs.

All of the examples you give fall under 1.) or 2.) respectively. On the other hand, Bitcoin is a typical example of p2p that satisfies both conditions, and that's why it was successful.

But there are are more conditions (though not the ones you suggest). One major factor was also that for an ISP, it's most desirable not to see strange server traffic from their ordinary, non-business end-consumers. So even if you succeed with NAT and complicated network topology issues, ISPs might still mess with the traffic or even block it. In fact, some infamous ISPs even disallowed running servers at any non-standard ports for some time, and used other methods to limit the Internet to passive web consumation for their customers. My ISP in the late 90s, for example, used PPP over ADSL for no technical reason, and switched off the connection once a day for no technical reason other than making it a bit harder to get a continuous server to work. And let's also not forget that most consumers nowadays are behind ADSL, where upload speed is usually limited 10 times less than download speed. That alone makes p2p harder.

Again, all mostly technical reasons. By the way, the Linux Desktop is also not successful for mostly technical reasons, contrary to what you claim. First, there is the application barrier maintained by commercial companies - a technical issue that could easily be overcome if besaid companies would work on interoperability standards (they do the opposite, of course). Second, there are numerous issues with usability on Linux that will never be resolved, because they would require everyone in the Linux world to pull on the same string at the same time. But these issues are still technical in the sense that there would be technical solutions to them, if there was some sort of "benevolent Linux dictator" who could force every programmer to use a given API like Apple forces their developers.

https://ipfs.io/

http://dat-data.com/

https://blockstack.org/

https://www.ethereum.org/

http://matrix.org

http://gun.js.org

http://webtorrent.io

The problem isn't that Facebook mediates the relationship between you and the people you went to high school with, or that twitter mediates the relationship between you and Washington Post reporters; it's that once those relationships have been well-established and don't need any more protection (or need protection from Facebook itself), there's nowhere to take them to on the web. It shouldn't be easier to send baby pictures to my mother and aunts through Facebook. If one of us wants to make the effort to get some off the shelf appliance (or appliance that needs Debian installed and apt-get run periodically) and hook it to the web, and establish a hub for the family that provides most of what facebook provides, it would be better if it were both possible and easy to create and access.

https://github.com/solid/solid

Link to github repo above

If anyone here knows Tim Berners-Lee and can introduce us, please hit me up, that would be extremely helpful.

https://gitter.im/solid/chat

Whatever else it may be, the animation banner just killed it for me.

Assuming you meant centralised here? ;)

The biggest obstacle to running a personal server is that it must always be on, and always be connected. Using cell phones (which certainly have the capacity for most individuals) would make that easy, and also refocuses "my data" into a physical concept. When you used to unplug your phone, the entry in the phonebook would fail. Now, when you turn off your phone, you "go dark" in the truest sense. It would be very easy to have a secondary battery that powers a low power coprocessor optimized for this task so that even when your phone dies, the server lasts a while longer (say 48 hours?).

I think ultimately if we're going to live in a world of personal data ownership in the truest sense, our data must be something tangible we can carry with us (and that isn't an extra thing to carry).

Of course, you'd want to back up that server config and your data, so there would be monetized services for that. Celebrities and business owners would have substantially more traffic or need to be online all the time, and as a result would need to actually pay for hosting and maintenance as a function of their utility. This introduces yet another market.

And throughout this whole system, you are now explicitly trusting your data as an object to a company for their services. You are not participating on their platform while they farm your interactions.

Any thoughts or criticisms?

More realistic title. It would make for a shorter article though.

--

Two ideas for how we can help decentralization win.

1. Don't just clone an existing app.

The two decentralized protocols with the most adoption by far are Bitcoin and BitTorrent. Both of them have capabilities that no centralized system can match. Same with Ethereum, Namecoin, etc. So the goal of a decentralized system should be to exceed the functionality of what came before, not just to clone an existing centralized service.

2. Run your open source project like a startup.

That means gathering metrics, tracking week-on-week growth, getting press hits, creating a brand, caring about product and UX.

I've seen cool decentralized projects get no adoption because the people running them focus on the technical aspects and ignore things like usability. BitMessage, for example, is impressive technology, but the client is called "PyBitMessage" and it looks lolbad: http://i.imgur.com/ydY6PIX.png

Congrats, you've found the reason why a 100% decentralized web is more like fairy tale. The reason why vast majority of people use services like Facebook, SnapChat or Uber is because they are so easy to use. Good UX is not free, service stability is not free and new features are also not free.

People don't care about the underlying technology. If one wants a decentralized web, they must demonstrate a 10x increase, not a tiny bit shitty alternative service.

GitLab and Sandstorm.io are both examples of startups, which make open sourcing their core 'product' a part of the plan.

You have to motivate designers etc. in a similar way as you motivate coders to work on the project.

What about email? It's become quite centralised in practice, but it is ultimately a decentralised protocol, and it is used by pretty much everyone on the internet.

And even in its semi-centralised form, it's nowhere near the walled garden of Facebook.

That's a really good idea! Email is an good existing source of messaging and "identity." People can choose to participate in the "network" either using one of the big hosted providers, a privacy-oriented email host, and eventually over time, using self-hosted email.

Project idea: what if all the social shit could be sent over email? You'd need to setup your email client to hide emails that represent the "data packets" for the social communications so they don't pollute your INBOX. A completely separate personal browsing interface (client side .js) would be used to browse the social stream you receive at your email address.

It's already happening a bit like that with the "Social" tab in gmail, but instead of containing links to walled garden URLs, the proposed new "social email" packets will contain the full content and won't require access to any external servers. Perhaps we wouldn't even need a "central" browsing interface, since each social item can come with its own .js to render a simple UI adapted for the social item (e.g. message, photos, album, event, links).

To make the picture more concrete, let's analyze the Event data type. Alice wants to host a party, so she invites Bob, Betty, and Boris, by sending each of them a paragraph of invitation text, some images(<1MB), two RSVP links I'm going || Not going, and a [FWD] button. When Bob clicks "I'm going" Alice is notified by email. When Bob clicks [FWD] and sends to Charlie, and Charlie clicks "I'm going" Alice will be notified again. Social functionality. No central servers.

The last really popular decentralized service was email, and users migrated to large providers because they had better spam filters. Also, setting up your own mail server has become increasingly difficult, due in part to anti-spam measures. As a side effect, email has become pretty lossy.

Centralized services are far from perfect on this, but they have a somewhat easier time of it. They can fund dedicated teams to deal with abuse. So, the result is feudalism, where you join a larger organization that provides some measure of protection. (Not enough protection, according to many people.)

I'm hopeful that Sandstorm (or something like it) will make it easier for people to run their own server-side software, but it seems more for private use; you can publish a blog but it's not designed for large-scale sharing like a social network. That still seems like an unsolved problem.

Imagine that email didn't exist, and you were designing it from scratch. There are many easy solutions to the spam problem if you start with a clean slate. The problem is that nobody would ever adopt email today if it was new.

More recent decentralized solutions haven't failed because of spam, but through lack of adoption.

Using external services in your build process has little to do with centralization. People that do not realize that having an external dependency in there is bad, will also not realize that having two or more of them is bad. That does not mean that you are not allowed to sync stuff in from github, but your release should be buildable without internet connection from local data.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it is a valid concern.

I am certain that some white men don't even bother applying there, because they don't wish to handle a prejudicial environment.

At the very least people need to be trained that it's unethical to surf the web without using an adblocker.

Why we don't, instead, make that free, decentralized Web 3.0 better than the current one, so the people will willingly use it? To borrow the example from the article, people are using git over subversion not because it's more ethical, but because it's more convenient.

It's easy sitting on a high horse and preaching about freedom and liberty. Making something that ordinary people, who don't give a flying fuck about ethical implication of software use but just want to see the picture of the grandchild or want to share the pie recipe on the internet would want to use without being "trained" or marked as "illegal" - well, that's the hard part.

> we don't have liberal newspapers anymore in the U.S.

Most conservatives would say the papers and media outlets are _all_ liberal. Would you expand on that spectrum?

> it's unethical to surf the web without using an adblocker

It's also unethical to insert malware into ads, or to hire syndication services that allow it. I'll continue to block until that's fixed.

I think this effect can be best demonstrated by a conversation I had with a Google fan last week. In particular, I've had an ongoing banter with him about his choice to refer to The Verge as "iVerge". I find this very odd, that people believe The Verge has a strong Apple bias.

You see, The Verge regularly gets exclusive interviews and opportunities from Google. When the Pixel was announced, The Verge staff had already been sent a demo unit, and they had a ton of quotes from senior Google employees available to use in their article, written in advance. Why would an Apple-biased blog be given so much direct access to Google? And this isn't new by any stretch of the imagination.

What I've come to recognize is that The Verge will shill for anyone who gives them the goods. Exclusives are as valuable as Google or Apple outright cutting them a check, because it guarantees a ton of page views. Apple and Google both are pretty manipulative when it comes to their press, and unsurprisingly, The Verge rarely posts hard-hitting critical material of either, because hurting a company's reputation in an article is a great way to get blacklisted by their PR team.

Anyways, the point of the story: The Google fan stated that even though The Verge seemed equally positive about both companies, that it was Google, in his opinion, which was innovative and did amazing things. So by giving Apple similar coverage, The Verge was being biased towards Apple. Because in his opinion, Apple didn't deserve the praise, but Google did.

If you are a biased viewer, a moderate voice can be quickly confused with bias for the other side. This is also, for instance, why liberals think I'm a conservative, and conservatives think I'm a liberal.

If someone gets an exclusive review before the actual launch and doesn't even have the commodity to spend enough time with the product, that will absolutely have an effect to the review result.

The good old cool headed reviewing style like Anandtech, where they take the time, perhaps even wait for an software update or two, then state the verdict is more reliable. Or perhaps even some reviewers where they repeat the test after 6 months and review the unit how it stood the test of time and what's changed. That's proper, adult way to examine something.

But it sure as hell doesn't bring up all the marketing hype and SEO numbers. Modern media is SHIT.