The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

It&#x27;s simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won&#x27;t imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on.<p>It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be <i>peers</i>, not producers and consumers.

Software is the result of business models. Business models are the result of risk management around desired outcomes. Making more money, for example. Making more money is the reason we&#x27;ve had bubbles and new business layers appear. MSPs were the precursor to SaaS, for example.<p>Software sucks because business models must frequently be addressed before customer&#x27;s needs are addressed. Of course this is a simplification of the process, but no company continues writing software if their business models for that software fail and they run out of money or is threatened with shutdown if they don&#x27;t comply with the government.<p>To &quot;reinvent&quot; the &quot;web&quot; (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. New models of work storage and exchange must be created to allow developers to write code for the people who need it. When a user relies on a feature, there should always be a clear path for them to a) continue using that feature for as long as they see fit and b) enter into a contractual agreements with a developers to develop new features they need. This should be able to be done without a corporation or business model getting in the way.<p>It also implies all the software down the stack is reinvented in the same way to support this new methodology. Deployments&#x2F;installs, for example, will need to be done differently moving forward.<p>This is obviously bad news for the &quot;startup&quot; scene, but good news for humanity. Things are getting complicated and clearly don&#x27;t scale well doing it the old way. It&#x27;s time for a change.

Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc).<p>Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on :<p>a) user input b) stateful server<p>With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there&#x27;s trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem.<p>With new technologies like bitcoin showing trust can be based in mathematics, and ethereum showing that interactions can be based around mathematical rules, we definitely have the technological raw power to built a scalable, trustable, non-censorable alternative to www.<p>I do hope these new technologies are not too-hampered by how ubiquitous and entrenched www is.

I think the way the web has been conceived once and then evolved around a relatively small set of core concepts is amazing. I find it hard to imagine though that after 20 years of evolution we could go back to a point where we apply another round of centralized planning how it <i>actually</i> should look like. The existence of centralized services is the result of demand and evolution, not of false planning in the beginning.<p>20 years is still a very short timespan, and we should probably admit that for huge societal changes like this we simply need more experimentation and more time. The rapid changes in technology sometimes lead people to the misconception that everything else would move similarly fast, but our human world is still slow. I&#x27;d rather see more people just try out different options on the web as it is and then have the most successful win rather than putting a bunch of clever people in a room and plan for everybody else.

&quot;People assume today&#x27;s consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for &#x27;free,&#x27; even if they&#x27;re horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t see that friction is the problem. It&#x27;s easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the same thing for free.<p>The challenge with the web is as is noted at the end, not one of technology, but one of society. Making a better web means making how people work with each other through the web, what we expect of it, and how we want it to work better.<p>Unfortunately, time and time again we&#x27;ve seen people prefer free, lousy web content to even a ludicrously small payment for something really good.<p>How you fix <i>that</i> (getting people to value what they get from the web and to be willing to pay for it), I don&#x27;t know. Spotify, Netflix, The FT et al have shown that it&#x27;s possible to get people to pay, but I can&#x27;t imagine even the majority of the web going that way for now. Hopefully that changes in the future.

Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it.<p>No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wallet provider. This will not change until new ethics of decentralization forms in the society. And that will happen eventually, but it could take a lot of time.

More than &quot;reinventing the web&quot;, I would worry about finding strategies to keep the web open against the strong pull towards (semi) walled gardens that is coming from Facebook and others.

The end of the article said it best. It isn&#x27;t an infrastructure problem. It&#x27;s a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don&#x27;t give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren&#x27;t usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.

With a computer in every pocket, we&#x27;re ready for a peer-to-peer Internet. I&#x27;d rather host my own wall and email than rely on Facebook and Google. Of course I would still rely heavily on some good open-source software. And for most people this open-source software would have to be packaged nice and simple, like &quot;apps.&quot;<p>Also I&#x27;ve read that distributed networks (or &quot;meshes&quot;?) are much harder to get working well than centralized ones. I don&#x27;t know much about them, though. We might need to wait for another battery breakthrough, too, if my phone will be doubling as a server. I guess we would also need more blockchains, sharding and encryption like with Tor, and a greater comfort with eventual consistency.

I don&#x27;t like how the article completely left out IPFS.

<p><pre><code> “The web is already decentralized,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.” One that can, perhaps, be solved by more technology. </code></pre> This is a very confused article. It&#x27;s a social problem! But we&#x27;re going to solve it with technology!<p>I&#x27;m sure Tim Berners-Lee has a great understanding of the situation, but since it didn&#x27;t come across in the article let&#x27;s try to build our own description of the problem here in the comments. To do this we&#x27;ll go through the most interesting projects in the &quot;fix the web&quot; space and steal their key insights.<p># Camlistore - All Your Data Should Be in One Place<p>I probably have important data in two dozen different places. Google, FB, Dropbox, Reddit, GitHub, Mint, Stack Exchange, Amazon, etc. This is crazy!<p>All my personal data should go into a personal data store. I&#x27;m not sure how we&#x27;ll ever approach a sane system without this step. Camlistore is all about making that data store.<p>More info here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;camlistore.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;camlistore.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;overview</a> &quot; Camlistore is your personal storage system for life. &quot;<p># Urbit - Everyone Should Have a Name<p>Right now only techies own their names. We do it in two ways -- the total ownership way where we make a private key and identify ourselves with it, and the &quot;technically renting but basically ownership&quot; way where we buy a domain. You can reach me at &lt;myname&gt;@&lt;mydomain&gt; today, tomorrow, and probably for the rest of my life.<p>Most non-techies get by with Gmail and a FB page. This isn&#x27;t the worst, but it&#x27;s not ideal.<p>And for every different service we use we get a different name. I don&#x27;t want 20 names! I want to use my name! (Or sometimes one of my pseudonyms, which Urbit has first-class support for).<p>In Urbit everyone has a name[1]. Even better, this name maps to their computer, so if I know my friends name I can connect to their computer -- the foundation of getting an actual peer-to-peer network back from the current mess.<p>[1] Connected to a private key and human readable! But often silly, eg: ~gumdob-tumlub<p># Sandstorm - Everyone Needs a Server<p>Servers are necessary to be real internet citizens. I think this is basically self-explanatory. If your entire internet presence disappears when you close your laptop lid you&#x27;re basically beyond helping, and will always need some kind of walled-garden to watch out for you.<p>The problem is that Linux servers are a pain to host. With Sandstorm you can set up a server with one click. You can install apps with one click. This is . . . basically such an obviously good idea it&#x27;s hard to find more to say about it.<p>If there are more interesting projects in this space please mention them, I&#x27;m going back to coding:)<p>EDIT: I wasn&#x27;t really sure what to write for a conclusion, but now I&#x27;ve thought of one: The web evolved, what we get next will be _built_. This is very exciting.

What&#x27;s the killer app?