Solid – Re-decentralizing the web

I enjoyed hearing about Solid and other &quot;de-centralizing technologies&quot; at the Decentralized Web Conference last June in SF.<p>That said, I think that there is a less elegant but far simpler approach that I use: I write articles for my own blog and often I decide to license my books using a Creative Commons license. I then use traditional social media (Gnu Social, FB, Twitter, G+) to link to my own content.<p>It bothers me (a little) when I see people putting a large amount of effort into generating content for platforms they don&#x27;t own. I personally think that social media is OK for posting vacation pictures and simple stuff, but for anything you work hard on, why not have your own content on your own domain?

There are a lot of efforts to &quot;re-decentralize the web&quot; and none of them seem successful. In my opinion, that&#x27;s because their authors are trying to implement some elves fantasies.<p>1. Has anyone of the &quot;redecentralizers&quot; ever thought about how developers would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale, Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that?<p>2. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah, that&#x27;s non-trivial, but wouldn&#x27;t it be cool if with minimal effort we could move existing software to a more decentralized model?<p>3. Don&#x27;t tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to build JS SPAs.<p>4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it&#x27;s centralized, not just like &quot;Facebook but federated&quot;. How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?

The web decentralization movement hasn&#x27;t gotten very far as far as adoption goes. But that is because it is pretty new and the technology is still being worked out.<p>There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to decentralized ones. What I am hoping is that once the tech gets solid, one or more people who are good at thinking about ordinary users will come up with some ways to win them over.<p>My own thought is to figure out what it is that people value that centralized services, by their very nature, cannot provide, but that decentralized services can.<p>Along these lines, maybe what will happen is Facebook will get hacked, millions of people will suffer as a consequence, and then people will be in a frame of mind to listen to arguments for decentralization.

I think WebDAV would be a much more natural fit for this problem. When people think WebDAV they usually think Microsoft, but it&#x27;s actually a very mature, open HTTP extension standard.<p>RDF has a high barrier to entry, and it&#x27;s going to take a lot of work to get this REST API to even come close to what WebDAV already does-<p><pre><code> * Locking * Versioning * Expressive ACLs * Expressive search * Quotas * Simple distributed data structures </code></pre> Granted, some of those features use an equally arcane XML syntax, but at least there&#x27;s already tooling.

The web already is decentralized. It&#x27;s literally possible for anyone to create their own content, platform etc.<p>It seems to me that these re-decentralizing attempts are really just marketing in open-source wolf-clothes.<p>Furthermore you don&#x27;t re-decentralize the web my making a tool whos value proposition is just that. Create something which has value, which people want to use instead of something else. Thats decentralization in reality.

I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-Berners Lee story. In any case, I&#x27;ll state again that decentralization is really a <i>&quot;game-theory-economics&quot;</i> puzzle and not a &quot;protocol&quot; or &quot;node software stack&quot; problem. Most software projects and essays on this subject keep analyzing the situation in terms of the software tech.<p>That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts. (E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.) However, that framework won&#x27;t be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized social over something like Facebook.<p>In a previous comment I wrote: Thinking in terms of technology &amp; software like the &quot;fathers of Internet&quot;[1] have done to try and &quot;solve&quot; the adoption of decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the &quot;software stack&quot;, think about the <i>economics</i>. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don&#x27;t seem to ever address the economics of why a billion people won&#x27;t choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc.<p>My theory on why those scientists don&#x27;t put economics at the forefront of their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was <i>sponsored by the government and universities</i>. So to them, it just seems like today&#x27;s problem can be solved with &quot;technology&quot;.<p>As another example of how &quot;protocols&quot; &amp; &quot;specifications&quot; don&#x27;t really solve decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982. As you read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc. <i>The technical stuff.</i> But there is nothing about how people <i>pay</i> for pushing SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives. To be fair, the &quot;economics&quot; are out of scope for a RFC. But knowing what we know now, you can see that a computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and <i>not predict</i> that centralized email like Gmail&#x2F;Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior. (E.g. the word &quot;spam&quot; is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential internet.)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;view-from-the-valley&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;internet&#x2F;the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;view-from-the-valley&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;intern...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc821" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc821</a>

Rule of thumb: if you want people to do X, make people to have economic incentives to do so.<p>If you want to make the web decentralized again, then think about how would you pitch it to consumers and companies, no tech guys like us.

I guess everyone has their own take on how to do this. (Here&#x27;s mine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;issues&#x2F;6697#issuecomment-280750050" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;issues&#x2F;6697#issuecommen...</a>)<p>What&#x27;s missing from many of these projects is the ability to remix &#x2F; mashup people&#x27;s peice of this goal. Imo, these efforts often seem to attract grand visions instead of utilitarians. I talked to one guy and he was pretty hostile about me using his <i>open source</i> code in a way he didn&#x27;t approve.

At first I thought this was just reinventing the wheel, but now I realize what they&#x27;re really doing: taking what was formally an incompatible, proprietary set of enterprise solutions and turning it into a set of standards that can sit on top of any platform.<p>The big win is actually cross-platform compatibility for user, system &amp; network management protocols. I don&#x27;t think the goals they want to achieve matter to users, and are antithetical to corporate interests. But it&#x27;ll be neat to have these protocols work with so many existing systems.<p>This is going to be a fucking security nightmare, though.

I view a centralised web as a similar to à biological system of clones. A few large cloud actors are running similar systems that are essentially copy pasted blueprints. Such a system in the analogy of an biological immune system is vulnerable to diseases. A decentralized web is more resilient because each node is slightly different.<p>&quot;Monocrop agricultural systems provide an ideal environment for pathogen evolution, because they offer a high density of target specimens with similar&#x2F;identical genotype&quot; source: Wikipedia

We developing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bubblehunt.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bubblehunt.com</a> - it&#x27;s search platform, where every user can create own search system without coding. And main idea - web decentralization, you can get information by users, where every become independent information provider, like miniGoogle. Maybe you can give us advice, how we can using Solid on our platform?

Anybody know how this relates to ipfs? Is it an alternative, or something that could be built on top of ipfs, or what?

&gt; Solid (derived from &quot;social linked data&quot;) is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles.<p>Try to imagine a set of proposed conventions and tools for building decentralized (or distributed) digital cryptocurrencies written <i>before</i> the Bitcoin whitepaper. All the hard problems-- consensus, reducing trust in third parties, defending against Sybil, etc.-- are outside of the scope of this proposal.<p>What are the chances that such a proposal would be not only relevant but also significantly improve the design of future distributed cryptocurrencies?<p>This is relevant because many of the same hard problems are still outstanding when it comes to building secure social applications where the user has some semblance of control over their data.

Related to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14125090" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14125090</a>.

Where can one find a simple &quot;Hello world&quot; example of an app built upon Solid?

Sell this to me as a user.

How about, instead of trying to come up with protocols, just make forums and blogging sure that are so good that people prefer them to other mediums like facebook&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;twitter?<p>Make them available to install (like traditional forums) instead of a good service. And build into them methods for users to liberate their data and&#x2F;cross-link their identities from one software to another?