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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: 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.