Society Needs an Alternative Web

Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale.<p>Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet)<p>For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight&#x2F;out-of-mind. It also can&#x27;t be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it&#x27;ll just get centralized again.<p>Even cryptocurrencies fail this. They have terrible efficiency, but at least they were supposed to be relatively flat, instead of centralized and hierarchical, but instead, a majority of the hashing power is owned by a few large entities, so in effect, back to large financial players controlling much of the power.<p>I think one day we&#x27;ll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you&#x27;ll achieve cyber&#x2F;crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won&#x27;t be able to rubber-hose-cryptanalyze you, is a dangerous belief that diverts us away from demanding the government and society agree to the goals of freedom. If everyone wants unfreedom, underground internet usage is a slim consolation.

I agree with the title - we do need an alternative web, but not the kind the author wants. We need an alternative web that has less censorship and regulation. The current internet is turning more and more into TV.

Nerds need a new web because &quot;their space&quot; was taken over and they feel left out. That&#x27;s basically the gist of all this talk about decentralization.<p>Even the difficulty of getting rid of certain videos like the mosque shooting shows that censorship isn&#x27;t as easy as it&#x27;s being portrayed.<p>Big decentralized networks would be &#x2F;b&#x2F; and &#x2F;thedonald, 8chan, Alex Jones and other shitholes of the internet, but on steroids, without anyone being able to at least make it more difficult for these people to get an audience.

One of the worst mistakes that the original web made was getting rid of the editing component in the early stages, probably once corporate entities and their cut-up picture sites got big (yet note that the reference web implementation &quot;Amaya&quot; was also an editor).<p>And in a similar note, a distributed web needs ubiquitous editing <i>and</i> publishing. Right now I think that both are better served by something really lightweight. A distributed web publisher should be able to run on an ESP32. The editing and display component should run on old laptops or mobile phones. That probably means good riddance to JS everywhere...<p>Distributed WAP?

I see this come up time and time again in technical circles and I just do not understand the issue. My first exposure to the Internet was in 1993, when it was dominated by usenet and hobby websites. It was a happy place, full of independent thoughts, discussion, and cooperation. As time went on, people started to establish businesses and make profit on the Internet. That was the turning point.<p>Do you want an Alternative Web? We have it. The infrastructure is there. Go back to the good old days. Run your own webserver, your own email server. Turn it back into a hobby, like it used to be. Establish &quot;web rings&quot; with your buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for techies to establish communities of their own.<p>Leave the terrible modern Internet to the masses. We have endless frontiers to homestead. All this hand-wringing about the loss of innocence and the ravaging hordes of anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists is just silly.<p>Edit: The way I see it, once the Internet becomes your job, you have lost. When the web was a hobby, it was a great place. Profit motive drove the loss of innocence and was the beginning of the end of the hobby web.

&gt; Tim Berners Lee had this Pollyannaish view once upon a time that went like this: What if we could develop a web that was free to use for everyone and that would fuel creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism across the globe?<p>It&#x27;s wrong to describe that as &quot;polyannaish&quot;, since much of it has come to pass. Despite its shortcomings and abuses, could anyone say the web has not fuelled &quot;creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism&quot;?<p>Berners-Lee is an optimist, but he is not blind to the downside of his creation. What happens next is another question.

As much as I like to consider myself a pro-freedom, anti-censorship type of person, articles such as this one rarely fail to amuse me. As long as the system of payoffs stays unchanged, the end result is inevitably going to be the same, and if the decentralized web does change the system of payoffs, there might be no incentives to motivate development and adoption of such a d-web beyond a small number of technically adept people. How many times have there been calls and widespread memes to abandon Facebook [remember Diaspora?], and yet it&#x27;s still there.<p>It&#x27;s all not doom and gloom, but what society desperately needs is to stop producing&#x2F;consuming pointless articles such as this one or idiocy like &quot;We should break up Google and Amazon&quot; [Oh yeah? Go ahead and break them up them, I&#x27;ll watch. Will you be selling tickets?], and to start performing _real_ economic and game-theoretic analysis of possible alternatives.

Can&#x27;t be hard. I run my own personal web site and don&#x27;t use Facebook or Google. Not because I&#x27;m trying to go all distributed or something, but because I think the products just aren&#x27;t as good as the ones I happen to use.<p>I realize my profession and skillset put me into a minority that can even do this. And I realize this last statement is in contradiction to the first sentence of my post.<p>Oh and if there was a site that did a version of Facebook like it was in 2007, I&#x27;d sign up to that for sure.

I’ve done some proof of concepts with IoT in the Danish public sector, and to do it, we’ve had to build our own wireless internet because the current ISP controlled one is just terrible, and it’s mobile&#x2F;wireless version is frankly too unreliable.<p>So now we operate a miniplacity wide internet. Setting it up was fairly easy, because we own a lot of network infrastructure and a lot of locations that are spread out over our entire county (might be the wrong word, sorry if it is), and it just works.<p>Unfortunately we have laws protecting ISPs in Denmark, so we can’t exceed certain speeds without violating these. It’s made me wonder though, and this is my personal opinion, if we shouldn’t rethink the way we do internet infrastructure to be much more democratic and citizen owned.

A key quote from the article:<p>&gt; Adoption of a decentralized web cannot play by the old rules. New experiences and interactions that are outside of current norms needs to appeal to individual values, that enable trust and ease of adoption. Pulling users away from convention is not an easy task.<p>They seem to suggest Decentralization is at odds with &quot;conventional&quot; consumer experiences.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have to be that way.<p>For instance:<p>- D.Tube (decentralized YouTube)<p>- notabug.io (P2P Reddit)<p>Both look, feel, and act very much like their &quot;conventional&quot; versions. Yet both of these are fully decentralized using GUN (my project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amark&#x2F;gun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amark&#x2F;gun</a> ). Most users would not even know there is a difference.<p>So it is certainly possible to both appeal to the masses&#x2F;convention, while being private&#x2F;secure and free&#x2F;open-source and decentralized.<p>Although I do think we do need NEW and DIFFERENT experiences, things that are &quot;fresh&quot; and fun. Facebook basically looks corporate now. We need to build new UI&#x2F;UX experiences that define a new &quot;era&quot; of the web, in the same way people look back and remember the 80s or 90s. This doesn&#x27;t have to be something we look back to, it is something we can engineer from the start. :)

This is why I really like what Beaker Browser is doing. It feels like when I first discovered the Internet in the 90&#x27;s. I highly recommend you check it out, if you&#x27;re into decentralized and easy to use web: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beakerbrowser.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beakerbrowser.com&#x2F;</a>

Lot of orphan statistics in that article. For example, there&#x27;s been an 11 percent increase in cyber bullying between 2006 and 2016,but what was the percentage increase in how much time an average teen spends online? Bet it&#x27;s bigger than 11 percent. Every other statistic is similarly without companion data.<p>There&#x27;s also no concrete support for the central premise that big tech companies are to blame. One could just as easily make a case that the massive increase in time parents spend online instead of with their kids is entirely to blame.

IIRC this current web technologies are already decentralized, we dont need an alternative. We need more nodes, so it can live up to its potentials. Perhaps start by buying a fixed computer, something that can be up 24&#x2F;7 and then add services on top of it. But when 80% of the chatter even among developers is about how to use the latest centralizing cloud service, this is not going to happen.

While I agree with FAANG being way too powerful (and that they are all US-controlled with no viable European competitor in sight!), there is one elephant in the room that no one has been able to solve at all: the potential of abuse for non-centralized sites that cannot afford (or technically support!) any kind of moderation.<p>The TOR network is a prime example - markets dealing in anything from cannabis to war-grade weapons, huge child porn dumps, malware coordination servers. Or the same stuff in the &quot;clearnet&quot;, where as an addition there are huge problems with absolutely vile Nazi propaganda (e.g. Stormfront), Russian propaganda disrupting Western elections, &quot;anti vaxxers&quot; that literally kill people and other conspiracy bullshit.<p>Society doesn&#x27;t just need an &quot;alternative web&quot;, society needs an alternative society that doesn&#x27;t make anything devolve into dumpster fires.

It would be great if more research would be made into un-centralizable systems and technologies instead of just &quot;distributed systems&quot;.<p>If we could build technology out of building blocks for which <i>dis</i>-economies-of-scale (&quot;the larger the more expensive&quot;, or &quot;the more you own, the more expensive it&#x27;s to buy more&quot;) would apply, and for which any kind of centralization would <i>increase</i> cost the world would be a much more interesting place, and I mean in general, not juts IT, but food production and architecture too... I guess we&#x27;ll have it when we&#x27;ll have self-replicable autonomous drones too but that will be the dusk of humanity so there won&#x27;t be much time for us dinosaurs to enjoy its benefits :(

A decentralized web would not mean a safer web. Those two concepts are irrelevant to each other.<p>In fact, a decentralized web would be more dangerous than the centralized web, from the perspective of bringing closer together people with the same ideas and reenforcing them through the echo chamber effect.<p>A decentralized web would mean that there would physically be no opportunity to come in contact with the opposite view, which will enhance the problems that we now have with the spreading of false ideas.<p>The dichotomies that would be created would be so enormous that the opposing view would loet any humanity status. The opponents would be aliens, and exterminating aliens would not sound as bad as exterminating other people.

I have worked 10 years in this direction, see PJON <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gioblu&#x2F;PJON" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gioblu&#x2F;PJON</a>

IMO the only way to decentralize the web is to rovide tech that has better uX than centralized solutions and that&#x27;s hard. Centralization didn&#x27;t arise because companies are evil, it did because decentralization is inherently complex. Preventing decentralization is another story, though. IMO technology is not enough here, we need the law too. I don&#x27;t mean regulation, god forbid, that will only make it worse. I mean something like inter-server agreements saying that a server may not lock users in etc. with the appropriate legalese. Those could be enforced i.e. by only federating with servers that send an &quot;agrees-to: &lt;list of sha xxx license hashes&gt;&quot; header. Getting people to adopt it is another story, though.

&quot;I see a society that is crumbling&quot; - texts that begin with a conclusion, are propaganda, because they are designed to intimidate and that shapes the reader&#x27;s view before even laying out the problem. Of course you can expect a politically biased solution after every scare. The pattern in a loop is: SCARE-&gt;OFFER SOLUTION. Every sentence in that article is designed, not to let you think, not to offer some insight, but to tell you _how_ to think instead. Maybe there is a case to be made but it does not seem to be the author&#x27;s intention to search for the truth in the matter, but rather to influence an already established position.

&gt; Business needs to change its mindset<p>We are past this. Business today is a faceless online giant, nothing human, no mindset at all. Only goal is share price. I think major driver for this is financial markets, a.k.a legalized gambling.

I am curious what widespread 5G adoption could mean if it was used generally as the last mile solution. Why wouldn&#x27;t the high speed of the network allow for people to do significant self publishing? 1000 megabit internet could support 200 live hd streams even from the same server. Getting that many live viewers is pretty tough. So for most people, it could make self hosting at home more meaningful. People could even form collectives of synced nginx backends if they had really large audiences.

Hi everyone, this is Hessie Jones. I wrote the piece on Forbes. I&#x27;ll go through your comments today! Love that this is sparking discussion. Cheers!

100% decentralization is an utopia. But with the Fediverse, we have the best of the both worlds: most people will register to a &quot;centralized&quot; instance like mastodon.social and people who want will be able to run their own instances&#x2F;nodes with their rules, their policies, ... and federate it. Pretty much like any email server.

A basic internet where people are taught and then tested on logic and bias. Take nations as an example. Nations survive economic hardships by inducing in the population a sense of insular self-defense and struggle for existence (of the nation). When a nation is economically prosperous suddenly it&#x27;s borders are not so well defined and people naturally develop a cosmopolitan outward and international view based around common union and empire with weaker nations which become absorbed or vassals.<p>Nationalism is neither bad or good, it&#x27;s a system wide response to mostly economic signals in a given population or subgroup. If the average internet user understood this, public discourse would be more civil and solutions oriented. Since the issue is not clearly addressed because the political and intellectual class have been purchased by the business elite which engage in transnational profit, the entire concept of the nation state is being undermined from first principles in order to prop up new exploitative economic zones. This will lead to popular uprising and revolutionary war, as it has in the past.<p>You can of course replace the nation with something better for the individual. America did this in the 1960s by replacing the nation as a people (race) with the nation as an idea (free markets, individualism, equality), this influenced many other nations and won the cold war. And we are probably in a similar replacement phase now, as an Anglo -American -European identity emerges in order to face the challenges of central and east Asia, Africa and South America. The intellectual framework for this new union is not there yet since it is unclear why nations and world zones are in constant competition- far left is offering freedom far right is offering tradition both are struggling to sell the middle who simply want stability.

Is the web (all its corresponding data) public or private?<p>Answering that question determines how data flows and thus what&#x27;s currently wrong. Answering that question also predicts why an alternative web would equally fail to achieve separate merits.

Thanks everyone for your comments. My name is Hessie Jones and I have written this article on Forbes. I will weigh in on these thoughtful comments as I go through them. Thank you again!

Pipe dreams of a generation that would happily live in free apartments with hidden cameras and microphones in every room. They even put their Alexas everwhere for just a little convenience now.<p>Free (as in beer) trumps convenience trumps any sort of rational idealism. It&#x27;s a materialistic world. Incidentally, it also provides all the tools to &quot;opt out&quot; at a low price. But if you want everyone to opt out (which is what the author seems to want), you&#x27;ll have to pay for them too.

We&#x27;re never going to have a decentralized and alternative web until we figure out the economic model behind it.

Yep it should have stayed straight HTML + CSS, leaving all the rest for Internet protocols, but here we are.

My view on this:<p>1) Technology makes bad people as efficient as good people. Let&#x27;s define &quot;good people&quot; as honest, productive workers who value universal virtues like freedom, well-accepted scientific findings, and necessary progress. Now let&#x27;s define &quot;bad people&quot; as selfish, dysfunctional news-site commenters who think Hillary Clinton is producing vaccines in a pizza shop on the moon, and demand that you equate their ignorance with your well-reasoned opinions.<p>2) Perhaps my most controversial assumption, the &quot;everyman&quot; that deranged populism appeals to tends to be more of the &quot;bad person&quot; than the &quot;good person&quot;.<p>3) From 1991 to present, the proportion of &quot;everymen&quot; to &quot;professionals&quot; using the Web has steadily increased, empowering more &quot;bad people&quot; than &quot;good people&quot;.<p>So is it any surprise then, that we&#x27;re at where we&#x27;re at? The problem isn&#x27;t the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the problem is that we don&#x27;t seem to have the courage to admit that the vast majority of people we hoped would use it constructively have chosen to misuse it, empowering them even more to demand ignorance and fear be elevated back to the position of a movement demanding political power.<p>The problem is our so-called neighbours, and their jubilant disregard for everything that free society once stood for.

Cool: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.fabric.pub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.fabric.pub</a>

Tl;dr: The world and the web suck; Tim Berner-Lee was a clueless Pollyanna; We&#x27;re gonna solve everything with DECENTRALISATION that will come to pass by (makes vague hand gestures, draws ballon shaped objects).<p>What a bunch of useless drivel.