It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".<p>We're obviously a long way off from colonizing space and needing the Internet to spread, but we still have the physics problems here on Earth.<p>I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run. As we saw with the recent Azure outage in South Central US, even the huge infrastructure can have problems too.<p>Secure decentralization has seemed like a panacea for a long time - for all things that resemble a public utility. Even things like the power grid.
Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess:<p>* The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done.<p>* It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "editable copy" of a website. It's a choice in the address bar.<p>* Making an "editable copy" doesn't have to mean you're now editing raw HTML. An editable copy can direct how it is edited through JS. (See the recently released "dead-lite" for an example of this.)<p>All these attempts are exciting but I'm actually starting to use Beaker because it's so useful even without adoption.
When we think about decentralization, we sometime think about uncontrolled extreme decentralization. That's the ideal : no single point of failure, with everyone hosting their data where they want, and deciding who access what about them.<p>Practically, as pointed in the article, there are laws to comply with and those are IMHO the biggest lock to decentralization.<p>The fair middle ground between extreme centralization à la Facebook/Twitter and total network anarchy is something based on federation, like emails and Mastodon. With federations, there are several providers for the same end-user application, with native data exchange and interoperability. The idea is to give the power to anyone with hosting capabilities to compete with the Giants, even if only a few domains will actually survive (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc because of network effects and funds, probably).<p>What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance.
This seems to miss the problem completely to me. The internet essentially solved the problem of _distribution_. That meant disintermediating away from publishers, and allowed anyone to publish.<p>The problem then moved onto being one of _curation_. Companies such as google, facebook, amazon are in the business of providing curation: i.e. taking away the leg-work of what we should attend to.<p>A de-centralized web doesn't appear to decentralize the problem of curation at all, which means we are going to still end up with centralized curation and the same or similar monopolies on attention that we have now.
This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P...<p>...feels, to me, like a huge mistake.<p>How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom ends where another's begins, and hate speech, toxic content, illegal content, not being able to have what you said or did forgotten online, all these things curtail someone's freedom.<p>And by making it decentralised, they're just making it harder for people who are the victims of these problems to hold the people responsible accountable and to stop them. These technologists want freedom of speech at the expense of everyone else's freedom.
I'm all for decentralized apps, but before venturing into that kind of complexity, how about getting back control over the Web? It was created as decentralized net (if not in the blockchain sense) and is the work of an entire generation.
A good recent podcast about the decentralized web, with a technical focus, is JS Party #42, <a href="https://changelog.com/jsparty/42" rel="nofollow">https://changelog.com/jsparty/42</a>.<p>Featuring Mathias Buus and Paul Frazee from the Beaker project.
How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others?<p>This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online.<p>Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe.<p>Fix the users - save the Internet! :)
Large systems want to centralize for the sake of efficiency. I was among the first wave of P2P hackers in the 2000s and we learned the hard way that decentralization leaves a LOT to be desired.
There is an easy contrarian view about decentralization: even if a decentralized protocol wins, at the end it is all about the UI/UX/Aggregation which clearly cannot be decentralized. For example, OpenBazaar can be great but the one who develop the best UI and search engine will win.
Repeat after me: The Internet is already decentralized. The web is already decentralized.<p>Blockchains do not have a monopoly on decentralization. People who assert this are trying to redefine the term to mean some kind of extreme P2P model that fits their narrative.
> And one of those is speed. Because of the way the DWeb works differently from the current web, it should intrinsically be faster<p>This seems wrong to me.
There are inherent benefits to large, centralized platforms. Users, especially content creators, desire a large network of users and excellent UX, both of which have typically been properties of centralized systems or at least far easier to achieve with centralized systems. Every decentralized social network thus far has failed, and the modestly successful ones (Mastodon, for example) are in fact federated.<p>Many of the problems alluded to in this article, in particular the privacy risk of centralized data, are more effectively solved by policy changes and iterated technology (differential privacy as well as bread-and-butter cryptography) rather than furious hand-waving about blockchain protocols.
Handshake.org is tackling this problem by decentralizing DNS and removing the need for (and vulnerabilities associated with) certificate authorities.<p>Disclosure: I founded Namebase which is a registrar for Handshake
Complete decentralization as a philosophical and absolute goal misses the point. There are great benefits to decentralization, for sure, just as there are benefits to centralization. Projects that aim to decentralize everything “for the sake of it” are doomed to failure. I want control over my privacy, my spending, my choice of content. But at the same time, I want a great user interface; I want curated content; I want performance. I want a service, and I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t have a fundamental problem that there are big companies out there who provide that service to me, and who make money doing so. Even, in some cases, a whole lot of money. Good for them.<p>It boils down to: what’s the best way to provide services that I want?<p>I’m working on a project to provide a decentralized marketplace for software and infrastructure services, competing with AWS and Azure. The marketplace itself is blockchain-based: partially decentralized, but with a permissioned blockchain that still allows governance, legal compliance, removal of bad actors, KYC compliance, etc. The kind of things that customers (corporations) need for them to use the marketplace.<p>I think we need to be pragmatic about it and figure out where technologies like blockchains can help build better services, instead of trying to cram decentralized systems into everything whether it makes sense or not.
Hasnt half of the decentralisation problem been already solved by the Tor network which is encrypted and already decentralised? And they still regularly identify and stop tor servers. What makes them so sure that the decentralised nodes on a bitcoin network cannot be physically identified and stopped ? A truly decentralised network cannot be built on borrowed network. A truly decentralised interruption free, government free Internet would probably be built on a satellite based network not this.
With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone.<p>And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers.<p>So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.
I hadn't heard of the Dweb, the term appears to have been coined by Mozilla [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/" rel="nofollow">https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/</a>
Can there be a truly decentralized web without decentralized physical layer? Mesh networks etc.<p>Which, of course, will not necessarily be connected... but that's a part of decentralization and freedom. "Diamond Age" and its virtual polities come to mind.
I have started a project as a way to explore how web applications can become more decentralized. In the blockchain the starting point are dapps, so I’m calling mine ddapps. Would love any constructive criticism (not quite ready for ShowHN yet):<p>ddapp.org
Is there anywhere we can track the growth of these platforms though? For entrepreneurs, we need to understand the opportunity, not to menation OS developers adding support to their browsers to make this mainstream.
"lose your password and you lose access to everything" - I'm sorry but this UX blunder just won't fly. If we are to have decentralized web we'll need services for key recovery.
I think the web is still so new that people will really struggle to understand a decentralized web. Even 20 years on and .com still reigns supreme as the best TLD around.<p>I'm in tech and I'm interested in a decentralized web but I also feel that throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a great idea. The article says, "The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms." To me it sounds like we're basically saying, "ok Facebook/Google/Twitter/Instagram... you're all too big to regulate so we're going to build A WHOLE NEW INTERNET". If they're smart enough to pollute the current system, they're smart enough to pollute a new system. In fact, these corporations are so big that you'll find out eventually that they've funded quite a bit of this decentralized web.<p>As a parent, I would feel at least a little better seeing some bankers, Pharma bros, tech execs, etc. actually go to jail and have their lives ruined for their blatant disregard of pretty much everything. I don't want to tell my kids, "well, we're too dumb to regulate the internet so we made another one.. and that one got messed up too... herp derp"
IMO, there are two key barriers to a decentralized internet (other factors are minor in comparison.)<p>(1) IPv4 (2) Bandwidth limits<p>IPv6 makes NAT unnecessary. With IP scarcity gone, IP addresses might become permanent like phone numbers.<p>ISPs are currently making money off fixed IP addresses. Market forces would change that eventually.
The web has some parts that are decentralized, and I think it’s worth noting the bad aspects of what exists today.<p>Perhaps the most decentralized part of the internet today is BitTorrent. It’s a very efficient way of sharing files and has a lot of success. One can see how BitTorrent could become the backbone of a decentralized web. However:<p>1 BitTorrent “naturally” throttles popular files over anything else. Niche items which are hosted by fewer people will be slower to download => BitTorrent makes a cultural echo chamber<p>2 BitTorrent needs some kind of centralized search engine: it’s not possible for everyone on the network to host a copy of the entire index of files on the network. The only way is to have a search engine, much like Pirate Bay. In fact one could say that google was this in the first place.<p>3 decentralized social media would be much more polluted with fake accounts since no “authority” would be able to fix it.<p>People have been excited by decentralized web for at least 5 years. The technology has existed for at least 10 years. If it was to happen, I think it would have happened already...
Just use WebRTC? Built in to most browsers (Chrome 28+, Firefox 22+, Edge 12+).
Main hurdle is the UDP hole punching of NAT for users behind it needing a third party to help initiate the peer to peer connection.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching</a>
The next big step?<p>The fundamental technologies were designed with decentralization in mind<p>Mastodon is just peered IRC all over again<p>The ISPs have poopooed running shared services from home connections.<p>DNS and the core protocols can run in decentralized ways no problem<p>It’s the social order that doesn’t enable it
May be a bit philosophical but I feel real decentralization can only be achieved if it’s created by not human. Like air , no one controls it and its free to breathe. Blockchain started this way to be totally decentralized but as we know if someone gets control of the 51% of the mines then its game over.