Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

That makes for good science fiction, because Quantum Mechanics is so poorly understood by most people, but it’s in no way possible or implied by the theory. Any entangled channel of communication would appear to be random noise without a Classical channel of communication, which effectively limits entanglement to light speed.

The first answer gives a nice explanation in depth. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-commu...

The key point is this:

Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall! Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns...

That comparison is what requires the Classical channel, and we’re back to light speed. If you try to use a Quantum channel to compare you just have two things to compare and a lot of noise.

But I think it's not particularly accurate, in that, while latency would be extreme, that doesn't necessarily translate to bandwidth - and bandwidth constraints shaped Usenet and especially FidoNet as much as latency.

I think a more likely primary mode of operation would be WWW-like, but only your local part is actually real-time; everything else is synced in bulk as and when possible, with some creative approaches to update conflicts for writable resources.

So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection of offline networks, and when the planets align -- quite literally -- those networks will exchange all their new blocks.

It's a neat concept.

However, a total ordering of events seems plausible only from the relative perspective of an observer and we would need to figure out, how to think about how things like transfer duration affect each oberservers understanding of ordering.

The clock is not used to say that the time is exactly the same on all nodes, it is used to guarantee that if two events have timestamps whose difference is larger than some threshold they can be ordered reliably. You don't need an atomic clock to do it, for instance CockroachDB only requires NTP, but of course, the smaller the error margin, the faster the system is.

That being said, given that speed will be limited by the distance traveled by information and the speed of light, I suppose those systems won't have much edge over purely causality-based ones. In other words, CRDTs will rule Space :)

So you would just have to agree that one observer's clock is the "master clock", and then everyone translates their local clock time into the corresponding master clock time (and all timestamps are written with respect to the 'time zone' of the master clock).

Look up Tara Vancil's talk on "A Web Without Servers" if you need a crystal clear explanation - don't know if I'm doing adequately. And my blog is at kickscondor.com if you're curious why I had to write my own blog warez. Also, there is a resurgence in blogging happening right now with the shakedown of social media. It's great.

* You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites

* Integrity checks & signatures within the protocol which enables multiple untrusted peers to 'host'. This also means the protocol scales horizontally to meet demand.

* Versioned URLs

* Protocol methods to read site listings and the revision history

* Offline writes which sync to the network asynchronously

* Standard Web APIs for reading, writing, and watching the files on Websites from the browser. This means the dat network can be used as the primary data store for apps. It's a networked data store, so you can build multi-user applications with dat and client-size JS alone.

I'm probably forgetting some. You do still need devices which provide uptime, but they can be abstracted into the background and effectively act as dumb/thin CDNs. And, if you don't want to do that, it is still possible to use your home device as the primary host, which isn't very easy with HTTP.

The real cost is scale, $20 year will cover a few thousand users but if you want googles scale it will cost you in bandwidth and complexity. p2p like torrents radically reduces the cost of bandwidth by distributing it, but more importantly it reduces complexity by standardising it.

Once the complexity is standardised budget web hosting can provide google scale for dirt cheap, and there are millions of budget hosting companies too many to shutdown them all giving you censorship resistance.

Wiki markup is different from HTML markup, but it represents many of the same (early) text-formatting and resource-linking concepts, while limiting the excessively powerful features of arbitrary layout, scripting, etc.

Access control in Beaker is through that private key - you need it in order to edit the 'dat' (name for a synced folder). So, no, there aren't a lot of complex permissions available - but you can also separate an app into several dats and use a master one to manage the permissions of those. Not terribly complex, but it's actually surprising how much you can do. (It's tough to wrap your head around not having a server - but it's actually true.)

But help me out - I think alot of the Web falls into this category:

* User logs in to edit their data (has private key to their dat). * User shares their data (blog, photo feed, whatever) with others (who don't have the key). * Those others merge all incoming feeds into a single master feed.

You could replicate YouTube, Facebook, Twitter this way - usually there are not complex permissions in these apps, are there? (Not that you'd want to replicate them...)

Really cool point about extending Twine! That had never occurred to me. Amazing.

(As an aside, I originally didn't like using Webmentions on a static site - I had planned on making a cron to periodically check for Webmentions and republish. But now I really appreciate that it goes hand-in-hand with moderating comments. I look over the incoming Webmentions, nuke any spam, and republish. No bad feelings about comments that sat in the queue for a day - they are still out on the web at their original URL.)

Fully agree with this. The link to identity is not often brought up. I run a university lab focussed on re-decentralisation of the Internet as a day job. We focus on identity & p2p + trust.

Beaker browser is impressive early work focussed on the raw bit transport. It re-uses DNS for global discovery, its hard to do everything decentralised at once. How to do global search on a decentralised Twitter or spam control?

The hard issue we need to solve in the coming decade is the governance of such systems. Ideally it would rule itself. Definition of a self-governance system as: a distributed system in which autonomous individuals can collectively exercise all of the necessary functions of power without intervention from any authority which they cannot themselves alter.

The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them...

You can choose to ignore this when you see it, but the victims can't, and it's for their freedom that I'm concerned for.

Just because it can't be dealt with by threatening the odd CEO or two, doesn't mean that it won't be dealt with some other way. Now, it may be the case that governments react to a change like this and just accept that they can't control terrorism, child porn etc etc. But it would be astonishingly naive to assume that that's the most likely outcome.

You can make some nice proof-of-concepts with a group of volunteers, but the effort required to provide a UX comparable to centralized services is going to take more than a handful of people working evenings and weekends.

Decentralized services generally do not afford the same monetization opportunities as central services. Decentralized proponents consider this a feature rather than a bug, but it leaves open the question: Who is going to pay for all of this?

Decentralized serving has just as much bandwidth, storage, and iron (if not more). Does it somehow make those resources cheaper?

> It's a hard technical challenge, and today the answer is no.

This is why I completely dismiss almost every "distributed" solution. If you can show me a business model/design document for a distributed service that can scale to big tech levels, deliver a user experience that matches current solutions, while also incentivizing developers enough with money to get them to build it, I will be swayed. However, every solution I have seen makes massive tradeoffs that negatively affect all 3 criterias compared to current centralized solutions.

So is bitcoin. Only 3 or 4 companies own the majority of mining.

Companies on the internet are centralized, but not the internet itself.

The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants.

Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role.

The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations.

It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.

My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website.

But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA.

It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opportunity costs) to set up and maintain an instance in the cloud, or a serverless site.

And if you don’t like the big cloud providers, there are many smaller outfits that can do the basics - compute and object storage are all you really need for a small site.

Consumer hardware and software are not really well suited to running publicly faceing websites.

If you’re only willing to offer me the “Lector” package, I’m going to pass.

When you pick a random tld like .io for example you are not getting the reliability of a .com. .io had a few big issues last year (1/5 of dns queries were failing, ex-google employee bought ns-a1.io and was able to take over all .ios).

As more tlds come from good and bad faith actors people will flock to .com as a known respected entity. Limiting to .com, .org, .net and country codes and slowly introducing new tlds made more sense and gave time to estiblish trust / create brand awareness. 500 a year creates noise and forces distrust of any unusual or new tld.

Even if lawsuits didn't kill p2p networks, Virus / safety concerns would have. Imo, trust is a bigger issue than discovery, hence need for curation - centralization.

The reputation system of thepiratebay makes it my primary torrent site.

Laziness, convenience is more of a trust than a search issue.

Many uploads are viruses/adware/ransomware masquerading as movies, books, games...

This necessitates multiple downloads - it's frustrating. I remember downloading several gigs of rar and encrypted .avi movies files, only to be greeted with a message asking me to fill a survey to get password.

Yify - a reputable source eliminated this concern for movies.

If decentralization works out, I believe specialized search engines will emerge.

But note, trust is the bigger issue than search or content discovery for decentralization. If not, iTunes store, app stores and other walled gardens would have long failed.