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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

The decentralized approach removes a hard binding between the app provider and the user. When you post to Twitter, you add content to their site. When you post using the P2P web, you add content to a site you own. You retain ownership of the content; the content URL remains independent of any service; and the content remains local. You can move a P2P site to a new frontend application, and you can switch to a different aggregator for a global view. For that matter, you can skip the aggregator service, and use the pure P2P arch, and even crawl locally.

It's quite a bit more than "mak[ing] the client be your web server." It's about independent publishing.

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While the decorrelation of user data and application provider is important, I feel like the proposition is relying a bit too much on a centralized service. Perhaps reusing some ideas of OStatus would be helpful ? Something like that:

- UserA starts a feed at dat://UserA, and publishes stuff in Activity Streams format

- UserB follows dat://UserA

- UserB comments on UserA feed: it creates dat://CommentsFromUserBonUserA, and publishes a comment in Activity Streams format there

- UserB pings UserA telling them about dat://CommentsFromUserBonUserA: UserA is naturally interested, so they just subscribe to this feed, and republishes stuff into dat://UserA

- UserC subscribes to dat://UserA. They get UserA's posts, along with UserB's comments, without every subscribing to dat://UserB. All activity about UserA is in one place, completely under UserA control, with no dependency on a centralized service

- Same can be done for mentions of UserA

This obviously assumes pinging is easy, which it isn't. Perhaps some polling of a DHT ? It also doesn't solve the issue of hashtags... but it makes dependency on centralized service less important

A purely p2p ping would help with non-centralized discovery, but it isn't easy. I'd be receptive to a proposal.

Web Crawling is a reliable federated system that doesn't impede user freedoms. The crawlers are so fungible that anything centralized about them doesn't really concern me.

Thanks for the article and the project. I also was skeptical at first of requiring one or more centralized web crawlers to add functionality based on global knowledge of posts. Still your proposal has the advantage of user control of content. To some degree you can get this with the current web by "following" the Feeds of certain blogs and construction a timeline for yourself.

What do you think of GNU Social? I am a fan and enjoy it.

Off topic but, I would like to thank the people who created the Decentralized Web Conference in SF in June. Really nice conference, and I look forward to the next one.

> To some degree you can get this with the current web by "following" the Feeds of certain blogs and construction a timeline for yourself.

Yes definitely, the problem with the current Web is that you cant deploy sites cheaply enough. P2P tech makes domain allocation free and fast, so it can fit into a typical application's flow. (The Dat protocol also caches data really well, so read latency is less prohibitive.)

> What do you think of GNU Social? I am a fan and enjoy it.

What I know about GNU Social, I like. I think its impact will be limited because it's still the old model of federation that binds user identity & data to a specific server. But I still support it.

> Off topic but, I would like to thank the people who created the Decentralized Web Conference in SF in June

See you at the next one!

Sure I get that. What you call "The P2P Web", I call "The Web". Now if you want to talk about P2P Twitter, that is a different animal.

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