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Comment by mStreamTeam | Hacker News Reader

This a problem I’ve something I’ve been working on my free time. The biggest problem with the decentralized web right now is that setting up a server is a huge pain and your average person lacks the knowledge and resources to do so.

I’ve been working on a simple music streaming server called mStream. The goal is to make a server even my mom could setup.

I publish binaries for every major OS which means you don’t need to rent a server or buy more hardware. You can just run it on your home computer. mStream is configurable entirely through the GUI, so you do not need to open a terminal to get it running.

The hard part is making that server easily accessible on the internet. Setting up SSL and dealing with NATs still requires tech knowledge. I’ve been making some beer money selling hole punching software, but that still requires me to host a server so other people can access their servers.

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Your first paragraph is absolutely correct. The issue I see with your solution is that there's no fault tolerance, so the service is likely to be unreliable, and then of course there's dynamic IP which means it will be difficult to connect to from the public internet.

Honestly, the real issue is getting people to pay for things. Running web services has a cost, but it's hard to "see" it. If you're mom is going to want that server to be available 24/7, then she has to pay for a computer to run it on and an internet connection (which she has probably already done) as well as the electricity to keep it all powered on 24/7, and that doesn't add any fault tolerance to the system. If you can convince her that all that cost it worth it to stream music, then why can't you convince her spend a similar amount to let someone else deal with the hassle and get better reliability?

The best solution is to simply pay a service to do the hosting and take advantage of economies of scale to provide an always-on service at a great value.

"free" services that aren't actually free are the problem.

In fact I would be interested to see if it's possible to protect consumers by regulating marketing of software and services as "free", where it can only done if strict data handling policies are applied.

I saw someone mention this a while ago and at first I thought it was stupid but over time I've come to agree:

Asymetric internet connections should be forbidden. They assume that users consume more than they create, and the internet should be a place where everyone has equal footing. In addition, IPv6 firewalls in routers should either be disabled by default or have a forced API to selectively disable them [^1]. (IPv4 for the "decentralized internet" is pretty much a lost cause because of NAT). In my opinion, this should be a part of net neutrality. The current definition of what constitutes "internet" is far too loose.

Many applications of decentralized hosting of websites or other content is much harder because most people have a very shitty upstream. If you could use all smartphones around the world that are currently connected to WiFi and an outlet, you could host whole websites (or at least chunked static content) over those. Currently, this is unrealistic because you can't NAT punch for every 100kb chunk and you won't get any good speeds.

[^1] My router by defaults blocks all incoming IPv6 connections to devices

Tor is often a valid workaround for both NAT and SSL.

>dealing with NATs still requires tech knowledge

Have you considered MiniUPnP library? It's very easy to use. Of course, the modem has to support UPnP(the most of are) and has it enabled by default(not sure how many are, mine is).

I have, and it works well for some people but not everyone. You also get a problem where these ports close after several hours, leaving the user confused to why things just stopped working.

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