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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: 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.