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Researcher Ruben Verborgh explains how to re-decentralize the World-Wide Web, for good this time. He argues that decentralization is foremost about choice and thus people should be free to join large or small communities and talks up Solid as a primary option.
Originally designed as a decentralized network, the Web has undergone a significant centralization in recent years. In order to regain freedom and control over the digital aspects of our lives, we should understand how we arrived at this point and how we can get back on track. This chapter explains the history of decentralization in a Web context, and details Tim Berners-Lee’s role in the continued battle for a free and open Web. The challenges and solutions are not purely technical in nature, but rather fit into a larger socio-economic puzzle, to which all of us are invited to contribute. Let us take back the Web for good, and leverage its full potential as envisioned by its creator.
Earlier on SN:
Tim Berners-Lee Launches Inrupt, Aims to Create a Decentralized Web (2018)
Decentralized Sharing (2014)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @12:14PM (3 children)
I mean, I don't think the 10% of the non-crap on the internet is more centralized now than it was 10 years ago.
If I'm right (am I?), then having 90% rest of it centralized is an advantage: you know where not to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @12:24PM (2 children)
WTH? Nobody is forcing people to join a closed space, "where we pay with our personal data", you are still as free as 10 years ago to bring up your own web and/or mail server - maybe even cheaper than in the past. And yet, sheeple flock to Facebook/Twitter.
As such, the existence of yet-another-solution (like yet-another-standard [xkcd.com]) will convince people to stop using Facebook... exactly how?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @02:24PM (1 child)
It’s called the network effect. Once in place it is a virtual lock-in: you choose Facebook because most of the people you know are already there. You stay at Facebook because all your connections are there. Think back to the early days, Facebook had several competitors, all gone now. Even Google+ Is now throwing in the towel. It is a lock-in that can only be cracked by something drastic like decentralization.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @10:43PM
And what's the incentive for the overwhelming majority of the population to get out of FB and jump into the decentralized 'escape pods'?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @12:34PM
Kudos for whoever chose the dept line!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Tuesday January 22 2019, @12:35PM (1 child)
what problem are they trying to solve?
Social media?
Paywalls?
Balkanization?
hosting?
ISPs?
If a robot can crawl through a web page, it will be indexed and you will (eventually) find it using a search engine.
The main problem most people who want to access the internet seem to have is the ISP as gatekeeper.
Nothing about their suggestions gets around the ISP..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @03:42PM
The more I analyze how the WWW evolved, the more I see how much luck it had that it evolved first in a way different than a TV.
There was an access to FAQs - a starter for beginners in any domain to start learning a new skill.
There was an innovation in hypertext - to make people publish it was needed to learn only a simple language.
There was a big mistake of marketing industry, who saw WWW as medium for "business cards".
And there was lots of geeks initiative.
Today if we make Internet decentralized, we'll get the same spam sh*t as in centralized web as we won't have such coincidences.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday January 22 2019, @01:08PM (1 child)
decentralization is foremost about choice and thus people should be free to join large or small communities and talks up Solid as a primary option.
The reason why we have huge nefarious internet conglomerates is because people allow it and want it, for the sake of convenience, because lolcats and sharing their stories of their brother's best friend's latest bowel movements is more important than principles of freedom and privacy.
Decentralization won't happen again, because it hasn't happened before, because people don't give a shit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday January 22 2019, @02:18PM
This. As Douglas Adams put it - "To summarise the summary of the summary, people are a problem".
If you want a website to publish your own interests, completely devoid of data-slurping and ad-targetting, the cost is a couple of beers per month and a bit of effort - its not like you have to learn HTML at all, with Wordpress and other point-and-drool website builders available - although even html is hardly rocket science. If you're willing to compromise and put up with a few banner ads you can probably find it for free.
Certainly quicker that wading through all of those words on the Solid website to find out what it actually is (and its clearly not a point-and-drool web publishing tool for the masses yet - maybe it will grow into a useful tool).
Yup, its worth remembering that the "good old days" were pretty much restricted to people who worked or studied at universities and other large institutions (even after dial-up internet 'went public' that's still what you needed if you wanted to do more than, maybe, create a forum on a bulletin board). Its never been so easy to set up your own web presence. Getting people to visit your site is another matter - even some hypothetical non-evil, decentralised version of Google won't do that if you are one voice amongst millions and don't have some other way of pump-priming the traffic.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @01:32PM
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/17/52 [lkml.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday January 22 2019, @01:36PM
I am still trying to wrap my head around how this might work. I guess something like facebook would be called an App which asks me for permission to access (part) of my data. Once granted it would have to copy and index my data on own servers at the very least for performance reasons. So that would be business as usual. The only difference I could see is that my data would not be locked in. I could grant permission to yet another site but my data would still reside with the first one and I do not see anything in the proposals that would allow to enforce retraction of data. Most likely on granting permission companies would try to funnel in the right to hold the data perpetually. The main challenge it seems is to make the *Apps* decentralized, rather than the data. Only if Apps would run in a peer-to-peer fashion (cashing my friends) and would be cryptographically verified so that there are guarantees to be able to retract data, true decentralization seems achievable.
(Score: 3, Funny) by AssCork on Tuesday January 22 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
So...Tor? This guy's going to invent Tor again?
Wait, wait, wait. Let me tell him.
Just popped-out of a tight spot. Came out mostly clean, too.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:10AM
Yeah, I think these ideologues don't get that so many people are not in a position to have symmetric upload/download speeds on their Internet connection. Decentralization would mean chopping off at least three quarters of the effective bandwidth available to the web.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @04:15PM (1 child)
From the website:
"it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols."
You can't take a system that is evolved at every level to exploit consumer ignorance, and make it secure. It didn't start that way, but that is where it is now. So the premise is utterly flawed to begin with. You have to start at a lower layer than that. And if that lower layer doesn't include completely redesigning the DNS system, you're wasting your time. The lower layer problems dictate design decisions at the higher layers. Only fools build houses on fault lines.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Tuesday January 22 2019, @04:25PM
I would not expect anything else from TBL, who was the principal force behind adopting digital handcuffs into HTML5 standard. I shuddered when I saw that the #1 feature of Sordid is "true data ownership". Coming from TBL, we know who's the primary benefactor of this "feature" going to be (hint: not users).
For my money, TBL can either apologize to users worldwide and recognize his mistake, or else go fuck himself. Almost anyone else would be better fitted for the role of making the semantic hyperlinked web user-friendlier in the 21st century. Anyone besides a newly corrupt inventor of the less-than-robust tag soup known as HTML.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @04:28PM (3 children)
From the docs on the Solid Community pages. This makes it so much more attractive to me </sarcasm>
(Score: 4, Insightful) by captain normal on Tuesday January 22 2019, @06:03PM (2 children)
Yeah, well look at who the sponsors of Solid are: MasterCard and Qatar Computing Research Institute. The reason the web is such a mess is because of marketing monkeys seeking a scam.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:49PM
It's the company that forced Paypal to cut service to David Horowitz and Robert Spencer for researching and blogging about the terrorist organizations that Qatar supports, and the exact site that Ethan Zuckerman shipped all of the censorship-opposing Gamergate users' data to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:42AM
To be fair, Qatar are Moderate Muslims
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:02AM
Is there a guide to the various possibly interconnectable distributed open-source social networks?
I can get lists of them, but I have yet to find reviews of them. Which ones do what?