Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale.
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)
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/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again.
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.
I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won'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.
> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites.
I think this is what federation looks like when it works. Yeah, everyone uses Gmail, but it's also ok to use another service. It still works and delivers a pretty similar experience. Your messages make it out of the Gmail garden.
> 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)
Geocities was one of many roughly equivalent services. It was sort of a social network, but it was mostly just free hosting. Anyone could still link to anywhere and being on geocities wasn't a requirement for being on the web.
Squarespace is a pretty good product and not what I would consider harmul centralization, because it's still interoperable with other websites and they don't prevent people from hosting elsewhere. The web is still federated.
Something different has happened with social media. Different social media services aren't interoperable. I can't message you on Twitter from Facebook, or tweet at you on LinkedIn. You must stay in their walled garden to interact with their users. They're at such a critical mass that almost everyone is in their garden.
It seems like federation is a happy middle ground between decentralization and centralized walled gardens.
Maybe something like Mastodon will some day become so popular that Twitter is forced to become part of the federation and compete on features and marketing instead of vendor lock-in.
With a federated version of any type of social media clone, eventually new entrants will prefer to join the federation instead of trying to make a new walled garden. It wasn't really an option for Hotmail to only let you interact with other Hotmail users, because the federation was already established.
There was tremendous demand for social media services, but no federation to provide those services when the demand hit and explosive growth happened, so now we have a centralization problem.
It’s becoming less OK to use a small service. Gmail and office365 will often classify mail from small provider as spam, with no feedback to the sender.
I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).
I gave up and moved to FastMail because I don’t have the time to deal with this (and solving it once is no guarantee it won’t happen again)
So, email is federated but effectively not decentralized - unless you use one of the central services, you are at risk from being obliviously blackholed at any second (that happens to large providers too, but there’s safety in numbers - it will be discovered sooner by someone)
> I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).
Looks like Google will have to keep the 5bn "fines for stupid things we do to EU citizens and companies" line on their budget for years to come.
I don't think this will fly when the relevant authorities finds out (a nice mix of protecting local business and punishing an annoying company that have ignored the rules too many times).
And frankly I think that is great!
Hoping Google will sooner or later return to their roots as Internet superhero.
Meanwhile get ready for more fines, I'm especially looking forward to the almost-destroying-browser-competition-on-desktop fine that I've been waiting for a while. : )
> I don't think this will fly when the relevant authorities finds out
I've seen public entities switch to Office 365 in order to "get rid of spam" and thereby losing a lot of incoming legitimate mails in the same process. A fact that is worsened by users using the "Mark as spam" button to delete legitimate emails from their inbox (a practice that is horribly common).
Going from that to billion-EUR fines to Google and Microsoft is a very, very long way.
I get spam from legitimate companies, probably because they don't validate the email addresses their customers give them, and thus incorrectly assume that I have a business relationship with them. I do not, thus it's spam.
Companies need to validate email addresses.
I get AT&T bills, OnStar notifications, etc. I have never used any of their services. Someone else probably signed up with my email address.
Additionally, other companies are violating the CAN SPAM Act by hiding the unsubscribe ability behind a log in. Nextdoor does this.
I don't know a single person that uses the mark as spam option to "delete legitimate emails". In fact, almost everybody just leaves those emails in their inbox after reading them. A small fraction of users use the archive function.
I do however know lots of people (me being one of them) who use mark as spam for unsolicited emails. And no, spam is not legitimate, no matter how hard online marketing people are trying to make it so.
You should try working at an abuse desk for an business providing email services at some point. :)
You are, of course, absolutely right re. spam and rightfully so. On the other hand, I regularly get spam reports re. 100% legitimate mails, often in the middle of longer email conversations and so on, and where one side of the conversation marks entire email threads as spam.
We always follow up on spam complaints and the one thing we do get often in cases like that is that the other party only wanted to delete the emails and didn't realise there were other consequences.
Yes, there's a lot of people that knows how to use the "Mark as spam button". I still, however, maintain the position that a lot of other people don't know how to use such features.
In theory, I agree with the parent post and the sibling reply. If I didn't ask for email, then it doesn't belong in my inbox. In practice, I do what you do - unsubscribe and delete. If I get any more mail after that...
When I get the old "you'll be removed from our list within 10 days" message, I generally reply to it with a quick message: "Please remove me immediately or your next message will be marked as spam". Many times the sender has complied with a personal response provided someone saw my message, even for some large companies with "no-reply" emails.
For smaller companies - especially the mom and pop type operations - I'll usually give them a friendlier notice. "Hi, I unsubscribed and I'm still getting emails. Please remove me as I'd really rather not mark your messages as spam". I usually get a friendly personal response with apologies and a removal.
In all cases, after the company has been warned, I don't think twice about sending them to spam.
I thought this too while using a small provider, as my messages were frequently not delivered to Gmail or Office365.
Then I discovered my provider didn't set up SPF and DKIM correctly so emails were failing authentication.
There are many factors affecting email delivery beyond SPF and DKIM, and it can be difficult for a small provider to get everything right.
So if you're having delivery issues I'd start with that, not by assuming without evidence that the big guys are intentionally classifying spam just because it's from a small provider.
Been running my own mail for a long time, and with one big exception[1] and occasionally spotting misconfigured systems, any time I've had delivery trouble it has been my fault.
If someone is bouncing you, make sure your ducks are in a row. One easy thing to do that won't catch everything but will help is to send mail to a Spamassassin-protected account, and look at how it classifies things.
[1] The Deathstar has been bouncing me for a long time, and their postmaster appears to be /dev/null. Given that I've had exactly one person using them I wanted to mail, they can bite me.
Except sometimes, like when Comcast looks at your DMARC policy that specifically says "p=none" and decides that means "reject all mail from this domain". Gotta love those guys.
I did, they had no idea why, they weren’t on any Blacklist, and google did not respond to their or my inquiries.
It was only google, only non-response emails, so it is a google specific thing and not general IP reputation.
Switching to fastmail, otherwise exactly the same (domain, equiv dkim and spf setup) solved everything.
Sure looks like I was on the scoring edge, with fastmail being better (or some special trust arrangement) than my previous provider. Which is fine if I had gotten feedback and had a way to resolve this - but practically I didn’t.
Edit: I had a catchall on that domain forward to an account on gmail. It was suggested to me that may have been the problem. But i still do from fastmail, and everything is fine, so it’s more likely that overall reputation or special fastmail arrangements were the issue. Either way, i’m far from being alone with this issue - as evidenced even i this subthread. It is federated but not practically open to everyone, which is an implicit attribute most people associate with decentralization.
> I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).
Same here. Perhaps I should switch to a larger provider too.
That sounds like a stretch even by EU standards when a acting openly envious. Google can warn or ban their misbehaving users for repeated spam violations. They can't ban people on other people's domains. "Legitimate addresses" can still send spam and it could have been caused by ignorant users who think "junk" is for non-immediate deletion and use it to keep their inbox tidy. In fact they /did/ deliver it but prefiltered.
Even if they could kangaroo court it for standard business practices they wouldn't since they don't want to be known as "the dumb fuckers who banned domain based spam filtering" and face pressure from annoyed constituents now receiving piles of spam.
(Edit: just realised GP was probably not referring to email providers, but I’ll leave my question here with apologies)
Microsoft, Apple. I’d move my mail to one of these to get away from Google but I can’t find a way to do so. I already pay for Office 365 and iCloud but I don’t get to bring my own domain for email. Unless I’m missing something.
I don’t pay Google for my email on my own domain because I got in early enough on Google Apps for your Domain or whatever it was called.
I’m happy to pay a reasonable price - I just don’t know whether it’s possible.
I like the idea of IPFS. I also came from Yahoo and the GeoCities and YahooClubs remained autonomous communities for the most part. Y!'s model was to integrate but not to fully take over the communities but let them reside where they were. That model changed over the years as monetization became a problem.
I've also tried Mastadon but their interface leaves something to be desired. The experience is not there yet.
I do agree on interoperability -- and while Zuckerberg is doing this with Whatsapp and Messenger, we should really take this across most messaging app.
I fear for increasing centralization ONLY because they have the resources and money to do this. This will not change unless we develop a consortium that has the numbers to make it work.
>I think this is what federation looks like when it works. Yeah, everyone uses Gmail, but it's also ok to use another service. It still works and delivers a pretty similar experience. Your messages make it out of the Gmail garden.
That's not true "federation" the way the OP meant. What's happened with email is that it's turned into an oligopoly: you can have email from Gmail, Apple, Yahoo (if you're elderly), or Microsoft, and that's it, unless you have a corporate address for work. If you want to run your own personal email server, forget it: you'll be considered a spammer and your emails will go into the bit-bucket.
> I can't message you on Twitter from Facebook, or tweet at you on LinkedIn. You must stay in their walled garden
Speaking of Facebook and whatsapp, a while ago I read that you couldn't post links to some other social networks. Is it true and if so which sites are affected?
> 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/out-of-mind.
Imagine your ISP bundling a full node together with your modem etc. That would be a start.
> I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization
Centralization unfortunately is still at the core, but we should strive to add more nodes so we can achieve more distribution. The more distributed the system, the less corruptible it would be.
As much as I hate censorship and blocking of content, I believe there is a place for it, for example, you don't want kids seeing pornography and the likes but I do hate it when they do it for political reasons, blocking campaigns or even conspiracy theories, I believe the mind should be able to explore and be critical of everything, this means being able to see/watch everything and analyze.
good decentralized architecture is pretty well undermined by ISPs capping upstream bandwidth. you already can't host a popular website from home - your upstream bandwidth can't handle the traffic
Another problem of decentralized is search, even if the web remained decentralized in hypothetical world, each one hosts their own web-site being their own web-master and blog-hoster, searching in the decentralized-web would still be centralized. Why tho? If there was many decentralized-search-engines (YaCy is one or some such name), someone would still make a meta-engine which would be the one people use, since each one wouldnt want to lose out connections/indexes of any other search-engine, again leading to centralization due to cost and scale as you say.
We laud Google for being our goto for everything, but it surprises me that search hasn't fragmented into specialised fields. Building a Google just for farming for example, seems like it could be better at serving that niche than gigantic Google, and people definitely have enough headspace for a few more websites if they provide value.
Well yeah, but existence of Google and similar warps people's usage of the web. Search is not just typing something into search field. You can search by surfing, by going through a link dictionary, by going through links on websites.
People say, that most people are connected by i don't know how many direct relationships (6?). The same may have been true for web pages.
When the search engines were much worse, people were using webrings, pingbacks, whatever - I remember going through lists of links at the end of paper magazines. Web was optimized for this kind of searching. It was called surfing for a reason.
Search engines like google hugely distorted the incentives on the web. In the name of seo and adsense people did crazy things to the web (as an ecosystem). There has been an entire cottage industry of individuals creating websites specialized just for getting pagerank for other websites, or for capturing audiences via other tricks (mirroring other websites or public/national databases), or for making the website a soup of boldened keywords.
Anyway, there are specialized searches all around, if you look. Product searches, torrent searches, Shodan, whois, transportation, pretty much anything that's annoying to search for in Google has a better alternative somewhere.
Google has one killer feature: It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. And so on. Google also understands simple plain language questions ("how do i do ... on ford mondeo mk4" works perfectly - but only Google can do that). It is even able to detect irrelevant results - e.g. it really filters just MK4 mondeos when I am looking for something, but I also had MK3 and putting MK3 into the query really did filter MK4 results away. I never had such success and productivity with any other search engine, and I really tried to like DuckDuckGo.
I have to agree with the other commenter, Google understands semantics, DDG just replaces words, working even worse than without it in some cases. I seriously hope they will improve it soon (and I donated some money to them), I'd love to switch.
Don't count the servers. Count the people. Only people who work in tertiary industries tend to have corporate email accounts, and they rarely contain personal data, only data owned by their employers. Many businesses have switched to FAANG services, though, because having an IT department is costly for businesses, and has largely gone out of fashion.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers, not in FANG datacenters.
3-5 years ago I probably would have agreed with you. Today I'm not so sure. And even among the companies running their 'own' email servers, the physical hardware is very likely in a Microsoft/Amazon/Google datacenter.
The way to decentralise without the risk of inherent centralisation is to go p2p. If everyone installing an app runs their own instance and doesn’t need to pick a server, then the efficiency gains of a server drop off massively.
This is why we’re hoping to steer Matrix from being decentralised-at-the-servers to being decentralised-at-the-clients.
Something like Sandstorm[0] might be able to solve this, since then a person would hypothetically only need a single server (with a nice web interface) that they install all their decentralized apps into. In practice I think modifying the apps to be compatible is too much overhead. But I think something in the same vein could work.
I'm sure @kentonv has some ideas on what the main roadblocks to adoption are.
well, you don’t gave to have a tracker to seed p2p, and they don’t have to cause centralisation. search engines can and should also be decentralised :)
A swarm of insect-like drones maintaining a mesh network for client devices to tap into, and tree-shaped data storage towers connected with each other via fiber-optic roots (or a fungus-like substrate [0]) in a global network with a standard protocol for everyone to query/read/write.
A worldwide Bionet, built from an amalgamation of semi-self-sustaining, solar-powered organics, electronics and EM/radio.
> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites.
Well, federation is the sweet spot between distribution and centralization. I've run my own email service for quite some years now, it is just fine.
A lot of people have bad experiences running their own mail senders though, because they do not go through the checklists and deliverability tests to make sure things come through. Google's SMTP service will only accept mail over TLS, most good email services will reject mail from servers which do not have a matching rDNS on their IP, most will reject senders who have not set up SPF and DKIM, some will reject those which do not have a DMARC policy (including a reporting address).
If you use any good email deliverability testing tool, and iron these issues out in your configuration, you can fairly reliably deliver emails.
I don't see any decentralized services making a dent until the residential internet infrastructure improves by an order of magnitude. There is such a huge disparity between upload and download bandwidth that I fail to see any immediate future for decentralized or p2p replacements for things.
I suspect one thing that would help that is if upload bandwidth intensive activity grew in popularity. Also a matter of who they want to reach and why for demand. In terms of use cases decentralization is currently still in Cypherpunks (doing it for its own sake) and "connoisseurs" (doing it because what they want isn't available otherwise regardless if it is accessing paid content but bypassing geofences, infringing downloads, or banned content).
I would like to see decentralization be viable as well but it is fairly niche and a solution looking for a problem.
Currently media is downloading more than uploading even for video games. Client trust issues (and not allowing arbitrary cheating) encourage centralization to at least domain servers for the sake of validation and finding other players.
I think something ARGy like say Pokemon Go but strategic (you have fixed resource pools and open knowledge of everything thus cheaters can instantly be flagged as not playing the same rules). But that would also be niche.
One thing that really could use decentralization is IoT (along with actually making it worth useful and security).
Of course the whole domain is sadly a hot mess of greed often about gathering as much data from their customer, screwing them over with needless connectivity requirements and considering actual functionality an afterthought and security an afterthought to that and then wondering why it isn't catching on. That is a whole other rant.
> There is such a huge disparity between upload and download bandwidth that I fail to see any immediate future for decentralized or p2p replacements for things.
I believe there are valid technical reasons for this, at least for coax connections; fiber not-so-much. At the same time, I get what you are saying.
...and this is how they want it. In short, they keep the "last mile" from allowing true "peering".
The best you can do - and this is to mainly get around the TOS statements that (technically) prevent you from running servers (as well as physically blocking you from running anything on port 80 and 25 mainly, plus probably others) - is to purchase a business plan instead of a consumer plan.
Though I am sure they will try to (or do) block this if the installation address is for a home and not an office (then again, what about small home offices and such?).
I don't know a good way around any of these issues, as it seems all high-speed providers do similar things (most are aimed at prevention of spam and other similar reasons). Even the WISPs I've seen in my area have weird terms (one seems really great for the rural area they serve - until you come to the clause about not being allow to run BT because of "multiple streams"; I tend to wonder if they only allow a single user to use a browser - on a single page - or what).
Good point. But one way the internet is being decentralized is along national boundaries.
The chinese, russians, south koreans, japanese and even the EU are now looking to protect it's turf.
Wouldn't shock me if the internet truly becomes a network of national intranets. I suspect if the EU or any major player truly turns their nation into an intranet, it will accelerate the process with every nation controlling their own network and protecting their own interests, companies and information.
Though highyl unlikely, if china ever becomes a dominant player on the internet, I could even see us closing ourselves off to protect our internet.
I guess this is the price of success. It attracts political attention.
Sounds like nobody wants to do sysadmin work. If spinning your email server or web server would be as easy as opening a google or yahoo account then federetion would be a lot more affordable.
But not even professional sysadmins want to admin and maintain servers (at least for personal use).
Why several companies are trying to build self-driving cars but so few are building servers that you spin up and they're secure and work? We need "self-driving computers".
> Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale.
I’d add “or by network effects” since these aren’t “efficienciences of scale” (related to increased marginal value not decreased marginal cost) and are clearly at play with some (many!) centralized systems.
I wonder if we could build a decentralized system of a 6th dimension?
Based on the US military doctrine, we've got 5 dimensions: air, sea, land, space, and cyber. There are 4 dimensions designed by nature and 1 dimension designed by humans. And we're able to engage differently (e.g., at worst, becoming 'domains of warfare') in each of these dimensions.
Wouldn't it be neat to create a completely new 6th dimension, which is independent of the 5 we have, with distinctive features for its system? I'm curious if the brain-computer interface, like what Elon Musk is doing with Neuralink, could be that new dimension?
as there been any research about waves or oscillations between centralization and decentralization ?
computer started as one processor and distributed terminals, then cpu spread to terminals, then back to server/clients, then p2p. Lastly consoles are threatened by centralized gaming datacenters ..
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.
The author refers to a decentralized web, which cannot be controlled by any individual, state, or corporation. I think this implies less censorship and regulation.
That happens because these placed only attract extremes and let them stay among themselves. The key to a platform that does not become a cesspool is to disallow isolation and bubble building for extreme oppinions. Yet, this bubble building is what people desire and the only way to create a successful social online service is to cater to that group building.
Real life rarely provides similar comforting bubbles of likeminded and reaffirming people. You still need to interact with other people even if you disagree with their views. In front of your computer screen, the right forum for sharing your views is just a few button pressed away. It is too easy to avoid the rest.
To play devil's advocate and take an extreme position for the sake of discussion: we don't more free speech. Instead, we need a to introduce a duty to listen that goes both ways: if you want to express your opinions, you must also listen to what others have to say and especially, how others respond to what you say. And you do not get to pick and choose who you listen to. In essence, nobody must ever have full and exclusive control over the shape of the community they are part of.
A decade or two ago it was the left which was vying for free and uncensored. Political fortunes have changed and now it's the right. Censorship is not free of political bias, and those on the wrong side of the current trend will flood platforms where the censorship does not exist. Those who are in favour of censorship must consider that political trends change over time, and one day they might be the ones being censored.
How about free decentralised and self-policing - opinions are fine but creating a place where illegal activity can’t be stopped will lead to any platform (even with good intentions) being marginalised.
People commit far more serious crimes in public parks than could ever be committed on a website. Is that a reason to close or marginalize public parks?
Why not enforce the law on websites in a similar way: by arresting those responsible for illegal activity instead of attacking the venue?
Well if you squint and look closely I don’t think I said anything other than it’s better to make these platforms self policing as a way to stop illegal content from appearing. Personally, the only thing I would ban is child pornography, and probably insightment to terrorism from right wing and islamists as well.
From your link: "Incidents of left-wing terrorism dropped off at the end of the Cold War (circa 1989), partly due to the loss of support for communism.[14]"
Yes, left wing terrorism exists, but today people are increasingly associating terrorism with right-wing ideologies because it's in our face and happening with increasing frequency. It's the same reason one might associate terrorism with Islam in 2001.
I fail to see what any of this has to do with the other post. Should incitement to left wing terrorism somehow be ok on this new platform just because it may not currently be common?
Furthermore, from your own link, the 2000s saw a flood of left wing terror attacks. That was not that long ago.
It answers the question as to the qualification: because it is on people's mind due to recency and prevalence. If I asked you to name the first thing that comes to you mind when I say "Boeing" most would probably say the recent crash, not that they are headquartered in Washington.
It doesn't though, because the question wasn't about why they thought of right wing terrorism, the question is why they would limit it to right wing terrorism. Just say "terrorism".
I think it still does. The topic at hand was censoring content on the Internet. The original parent referred to "Islamic" and "right-wing" terrorism because those are the two most prevalent and growing sources of terrorist activity that foment on the Internet. Did the Weather Underground grow because of the Internet? Did left-wing communist terrorist grow because of the Internet? Even in the early 2000s the Internet wasn't that big of a thing, not like today.
Today, ISIS and right-wing terrorism follow a strikingly similar pattern: attract disaffected males on the Internet to communities where promises of former glory will be recaptured through the creation of an ethno-state. For ISIS, they coalesce behind the perceived dominance of the Muslim religion. For the alt-right they coalesce behind white supremacy.
Anyway, I thought this debate about calling out terrorism was had in the early 2010s. The left wanted to call ISIS simply "terrorism" because terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. But the right insisted that it be called "radical Islamic terrorism" because in the words of my family member "you have to call it what it is to defeat it". I agreed with that then, and I agree with it now. The left lost that debate and everyone started calling it "radical Islamic terrorism". Now all of a sudden the right wants to go back to blanket calling it "terrorism" because terrorism is terrorism is terrorism? I'm confused.
With the exception of the Congressional baseball shooting, none of those were called an act of terrorism. The word terrorism can't be found in any of the descriptions. They're just crimes. The Congressional baseball shooter specifically wasn't part of an online community the same way ISIS and alt-right terrorists are. How would censoring online recruitment of terrorist activities stop something like a crazy person showing up to a baseball game and shooting everyone?
> terrorism in general is rising, not any particular ideology.
The study I posted above from UMD says otherwise -- that religious and right wing terrorism is increasing in recent years.
Called an act of terrorism by who? They were acts of violence with a political motivation. That's terrorism. Even the SPLC called the BLM-related shootings terrorism. ("As details developed about the Dallas, Baton Rouge and St. Louis attacks, it was apparent that a domestic terrorist threat had re-emerged — a threat not seen since the 1970s.")[1]
> The study I posted above from UMD says otherwise
The study that (unlike the SPLC) doesn't acknowledge the existence of "violent black nationalism" (the SPLC's term), classifying those acts instead as merely "anti-police" and thus not counting them as left-wing terrorism? The study that separated environmental extremism from left-wing extremism? The study with a deceptive chart that depicts 210 where 250 should be and 190 where 150 should be? That study has many flaws.
Still, I must admit the study does seem to say that left-wing terrorism has decreased, after being out of control in the 2000s, accounting for about 75% of all attacks.
However, the DHS, under Obama's leadership, concluded that left wing terrorism is increasing:
"Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as domestic terrorist violence"
Previously unreported documents disclose that by April 2016, authorities believed that “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. They were blamed by authorities for attacks on the police, government and political institutions, along with symbols of “the capitalist system,” racism, social injustice and fascism, according to a confidential 2016 joint intelligence assessment by DHS and the FBI.[2]
> Congressional baseball shooter specifically wasn't part of an online community
He was part of several online communities where hating Trump and Republicans is the norm ("including the Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans, Donald Trump is Not My President, [and] Terminate the Republican Party"[3]).
> Called an act of terrorism by who? If you're allowing biased sources to decide what's terrorism for you
By the links you posted. But I mean, for example, I'm curious to know why you would consider the beating of a mentally disabled man terrorism. Or the shooting of a private company by someone with a grievance against said company.
> classifying those acts instead as merely "anti-police" and thus not counting them as left-wing terrorism? The study that separated environmental extremism from left-wing extremism?
Why do you want to lump everything together? Anti-police violence isn't necessarily left wing. I know several conservative black men who are anti-police (not to say they are violent). But if you want to play some sort of game with the numbers, then we can lump in religious terrorism and anti-abortion terrorism with right wing terrorism. Personally as far as I'm concerned I don't see much difference between anti-Muslim terrorists and Muslim terrorists and would classify both their views as right-wing. They're cut from the same cloth.
I'll agree 100% that anarchists and antifa are a problem. Although I don't know how anarchists would be considered right or left. Anarchists as I understand are anti-globalists, which would be something the right would be for. They're also anti-capitalist which is something the left would be for. So I don't know if they fit nicely into this right/left dichotomy.
Either way, every single antifa and anarchist could disappear tomorrow and almost no one would notice, and we would still be knee deep in high-profile terrorist activities. The US mail bombings last year paralyzed the nation for a week. Then there was the Squirrel Hill shooting at the same time that killed 11. Now a NZ shooter that kills 50. Each of these actors were clearly radicalized by the alt-right. The bomber frequently posted right-wing memes [1], the Squirrel Hill shooter was on Gab posting his insanity [2], and the NZ shooter conducted his whole attack for the benefit of social media like 8chan and Twitter.
It seems to me then, if we want to stop these kinds of things from happening, we should target the communities and recruitment methods that radicalize individuals to such extremes. A blanket condemnation of "terrorism of all kinds" while one kind specifically is racking up a body count by the dozens seems to miss the point.
> He was part of several online communities
You left out my qualification "same way ISIS and alt-right terrorists are". There's a difference between being a member of a Facebook group that's political, and being part of something like 8chan or gab. I mean, the secretary down the hall is part of the Donald Trump is Not My President Facebook group. She's not exactly becoming radicalized. The Terminate the Republican Party group in your link is quoted "It's terrible what he did," Pearlman said of the gunman. "I — and we as a group — do not condone this at all." That doesn't exactly sound like a radical terrorist recruiting group to me. Contrast this with the shooting in NZ last week and /r/The_Donald and 8chan are calling him a hero.
> I'm curious to know why you would consider the beating of a mentally disabled man terrorism
Because of the things the kidnappers said and forced him to say, and because the kidnappers broadcast the event live to send a political message.
> Personally as far as I'm concerned I don't see much difference between anti-Muslim terrorists and Muslim terrorists and would classify both their views as right-wing. They're cut from the same cloth.
Authoritarian and intolerant? Willing to kill those with different beliefs? That's something that exists on both the left and the right. (Witness the many communist holocausts...) Extremists from the American right-wing and Islamic jihadists share little to nothing in common, save a tactic that's used by desperate or unhinged people of all kinds.
> Although I don't know how anarchists would be considered right or left.
Those certainly are vague labels, inconsistently applied.
For example, there's good reason to call the NZ a left-wing white supremacist, according to his statements. He claimed to be an eco-fascist, a fan of communist China, and an opponent of Trump. But the possibility of a left-wing white supremacist is out of bounds for the media these days.
> You left out my qualification "same way ISIS and alt-right terrorists are"
Perhaps not by exactly the same mechanisms, but constantly equating Trump with Hitler is bound to have an effect on less stable individuals. Someone who hears that message is likely to think they'd be a hero for stopping "Hitler". So those groups probably did contribute, as much as they want to disassociate themselves now.
But I doubt we'll settle the world's issues here, and as interesting as this is, I have to go now.
> Did the Weather Underground grow because of the Internet? Did left-wing communist terrorist grow because of the Internet?
You're inferring a causal connection here? Where's your evidence? Where's your evidence that left wing terrorism won't similarly grow?
You're making a lot of assumptions to conclude that a medium which allows all people to congregate with like-minded individuals, will only foment aggression among a specific sub-population. Terrorism on all sides waxes and wanes due to many environmental factors. Assuming the internet is a causal factor, then when those environmental factors tilt against left-wing agendas, left-wing terrorism will also increase again.
If the idea is to implement some measures to reduce all forms of terrorism and extremism, then the qualifiers are not appropriate in that context. In so far as some forms of terrorism may require measures that differ from those required by other forms, then qualifiers are appropriate. That isn't the case when you're asserting a mission statement or a larger social goal.
However, the data suggests that left and right wing people are not that different, cognitively. They each exhibit similar motivations to deny science, a similar propensity to believe fake news. They differ primarily in their moral foundations, and so their propensity to violence will only increase when the environment is unfavourable to those foundations.
> The left wanted to call ISIS simply "terrorism" because terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. But the right insisted that it be called "radical Islamic terrorism" because in the words of my family member "you have to call it what it is to defeat it".
Because ISIS is a radical Islamic terrorist group. They're not left-wing terrorists. If the subject of a conversation is a specific group, then qualifiers are appropriate.
Before the term 'alt-right' was even coined there were AFA/Antifa plus a myriad of other leftist 'revolutionary' groups calling for the destruction of whatever happened to be in their way, islamists of every plumage vying for the position of the most vile representative of their ideology, a multitude of incarnations of Nazi-fetishism, etcetera.
In other words, no need to point at a specific ideology to personify the tragedy of the commons. When there is no censorship there will be places where things are said you'd rather not hear. The best advice I can give is to avoid those places, that way you won't hear what they're saying. Even without censorship there are laws which limit what can be said so a censorship-free 'net does not necessarily equate a cesspool.
Why should a billion dollar corporation get to decide which opinions are acceptable and which views don't get a platform?
I'm as far to the left as you can get. I used to support stricter moderation on social media platforms, but I'm putting my foot in my mouth now. In practice, these corporations are just as likely to censor leftist views as they are to censor right-wing views.
Even people who study history and politics don't agree on definitions of racism, sexism, etc. There's a lot of nuance that a $10/hr contractor who sat through a one-day training on offensive content at Facebook won't understand.
This type of censorship doesn't help progressives, it just lets corporations determine the window of acceptable discourse.
The only example I can think of is Gab, which became a “cesspool for the alt-right” because it specifically marketed itself to that demographic. There have also been internet communities for the far left where members could post opinions that didn’t have purchase in mainstream outlets since the beginning of the web.
8chan, jodel (local anonymous based message board popular in some parts of europe, similar to yikyak) to say few. I’m not trying to claim the others don’t exist.
Not just Nazi scum, but also piracy, child porn and gore/terror videos... turns out whenever you have a service that these four groups can use to spread their content they will flood it.
I personally have no big problem with piracy as these days most of it is self-defense against "copy protections" that actually hinder legitimate buyers, but I'd be happy if the other three groups would disappear from the planet rather sooner than later.
This is where someone usually says we need a decentralized web. But I wonder if we’re wasting time waiting for some new technology to save us. I’ve been waiting at least a decade and have seen project after project fail. Maybe instead we should focus on building a network of alternative, pro-liberty sites and apps using existing technology.
It's really just another manifestation of the tendency techies have to get overexcited about novel tech.
Which is hardly the worst vice in the world, but when you want to build something that will reliably make an impact at scale, you don't really want to use novel tech outside of very rare cases. You want to use stuff that is dependable and gets the job done.
I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough. You can still start a website anywhere on the planet in 5 minutes. The big distribution/promotion channels were always centralized long since before the web existed. A lot of these arguments seem to really boil down to "if the government passes a law I don't like, I can't evade it." Governments have been passing some bad laws lately, but they've done that for basically all of human history... I'm not at all against technology which resists bad or unjust laws, but we are never going to get to tech that is 100% effective at evading the law and probably shouldn't since the outcome would be anarchy.
My money is on the web becoming choked with monopoly-entrenching, innovation-crushing regulations, and then people flocking to something surprisingly mundane, imperfect, and not heavily based on novel technology -- simply because that thing is less regulated.
> I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough.
This is because it's not a technological problem. The path to an actual decentralized web is clean technologically. We just need to take what already exists which is currently massively used in a centralized way, and build the services UI on top of it. Of course there are still crypto to add and so on, but if the investment where going that way it would come fast.
The real problem is a business problem. Decentralized services don't pay unless there is something centralized. We cannot expect that (big) private companies will pay for something that's not in their interest.
I've been running an open source company for 15 years. I've see so many times in the voice or in the eyes of entrepreneurs that they saw us as philanthropists.
If we want de centralization, competition and control of our data and software we either or a combination of:
- need individuals or comapnies to pay for it (pay your software provider + hosted fairly)
- public funding
- laws restriction the oligopoly approach
- gdpr++++
- forcing standard based for big companies
- forbidding centralization
- forcing open-source
Some are voluntary extreme and have little chance to ever happen.
Thanks for injecting this sanity. People often to look to technology to solve something. At best, it can solve things temporarily. At worst, it introduces new ways for people to be cruel. (Twitter, facebook, etc)
What all of us can do is modify our behavior. This can mean building websites with currently-existing technology, or just turning off the computer more often.
> The current internet is turning more and more into TV.
You can build a working webserver using a $50 Raspberry Pi kit, to host whatever you want as long as it complies with the law.
I would think that the "free speech" people would put their money where their mouth is and learn how to do some of this stuff instead of making Youtube videos about how they're being held back by political correctness.
Yeah, it's not like you can lose your domains, get kicked off of the vast majority of web hosts and demoted in google search just for having the wrong opinions
This sort of victim mentality isn't helpful for you or your "cause". The only people it helps are the shysters who'll tell you these problems are created by the cultural marxist global elite or whatever, while shaking their e-tip jar.
Isn't it usually the "free speech" crew telling others that they don't know what 'real oppression' is? Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you.
The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line. Neither of those are necessary to run a functioning website.
Just because people in China have it worse doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about who can control what we see. And a dismissive 'learn to code' isn't a helpful rebuttal against losing a domain or dropping in search results, either.
I don't have a "cause". Are you trying to argue that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are apolitical?
> Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you
Someone has it worse, so we shouldn't try to be better? ISIS throws gay people off of rooftops. Does that make jailing them in the US okay, because it's not as bad?
> The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line.
Allowing domain registrars and hosting providers to arbitrarily take down websites based on political viewpoints is a horrific overreach. Don't act shocked when tomorrow it will be your opinion that's deemed "incorrect" and you're booted off the web for your perfectly legal libertarian blog
> We need an alternative web that has less censorship and regulation.
This is absolutely not an obviously true statement, and we have, in fact, quite a bit of situations to the contrary.
For example, if someone is following my persona online and harassing me, I very much want to be able to enforce an "internet restraining order". That almost certainly cannot be done without some level of regulation.
Your online persona can just block anyone who harassing him. In real life, you can't "block" people...That why I don't get how harassment on internet can be a thing.
Just block them !
This really just comes across as being ignorant of the harassment mobs that currently form on social media. It's impossible to block hundreds or thousands of different accounts spamming you with harassment and many, many people have been forced off of social media because of these sustained attacks.
You can say people shouldn't care about getting off social media but people form communities and connections that can be incredibly important to them. Telling them to just suck it up or leave is not a solution to harassment.
> Your online persona can just block anyone who harassing him. In real life, you can't "block" people...That why I don't get how harassment on internet can be a thing. Just block them !
You can't conceive of this because you have never been the victim of genuine harassment by someone who has nothing better to do but to harass you.
If the person harassing you is willing to invest the time, he can make your life profoundly miserable as you, rightfully, don't wish to spend the same amount of time fighting the harassment.
And, yes, you can block someone in real-life. It's called a restraining order.
Block them how? If you block someone they can just create a new persona to harass you with.
Edit: For everyone downvoting, can you please express how you think clicking a block button stops harassment? Have you actually ever been the victim of online harassment? Did simply clicking a button solve your problem?
Most service allow you to block users. Even my phone can block calling number...
If you are harassed online, just leave the "social" media, it's no big deal in fact...
So you block them, and they create another user who is unblocked and continue to harass you. Blocking doesn't stop harassment.
> Even my phone can block calling number
My wife was harassed by an ex who used Google to generate new numbers. Every time we blocked one, he would generate a new one. We had to show up to court with a stack of pages of thousands of auto generated text messages before he was forced to stop.
> If you are harassed online, just leave the "social" media
Thus the harasser wins. Why should the harasee be the one forced to change their life, while the harasser gets to do whatever they want?
> Keep blocking, never respond. At some point they will stop.
First of all, directly messaging someone doesn't encompass the universe of harassment. Harassers do things like post your schedule, your whereabouts, and your address, e-mail and phone number. They'll clone your persona and act as you online, trying to put words in your mouth. They'll contact your friends and family and spread lies about you. Blocking someone does nothing to solve this.
This was several years ago, but today it's even easier using a variety of platforms. Haven't you noticed an up-tick in robo-calls recently? Harassers use the same techniques to DOS your phone. My wife couldn't get legitimate calls because she was receiving a constant stream of automated texts and phone calls from her ex.
> Wins ? What exactly ?
The goal of the harasser is to control you and make you miserable. Forcing you off of platforms you enjoy gives them a feeling that they control you. It empowers them. Even if they do stop harassing you, they still move on to another victim. To suggest that the harassee should just run away and the problem is solved does nothing to curb the general atmosphere of harassment; it just creates another victim, and empowers more harassers.
> From my experience they lose a victim and move on to an other one.
Exactly. Victims get marginalized and forced off platforms, harassers are allowed to reign free and continue to victimize. It's no surprise then we have an Internet full of empowered harassers and a growing list of victims with no end in sight.
> Unless ofc they have access to you IRL...
Which they often attempt.
From your responses, I'm getting the impression you haven't been the victim of any serious harassment. This is more than just simple trolling I'm talking about here.
Offline restraining orders can't really be enforced either. In fact, according to a public health study, all the value came from asking for the order (basically scaring the perpetrator) - actually being granted one was not found to provide additional benefits.
> In fact, according to a public health study, all the value came from asking for the order (basically scaring the perpetrator) - actually being granted one was not found to provide additional benefits.
That is a completely different statement from "can't really be enforced".
The fact that something "self-enforces" because it might turn into a "legal enforces" is possibly the most effective enforcement.
Nerds need a new web because "their space" was taken over and they feel left out. That's basically the gist of all this talk about decentralization.
Even the difficulty of getting rid of certain videos like the mosque shooting shows that censorship isn't as easy as it's being portrayed.
Big decentralized networks would be /b/ and /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.
Correct, it isn't easy to censor because the web is decentralized. So it seems to me that "nerds" had more sophisticated views on the subject at hand.
You don't have to consume uncensored sources, but in most (all) parts of the world, that is a serious blessing.
If there are some people that cannot stomach the existence of Alex Jones, that is their problem. I think he exploits his audience, but that problem isn't to be solved with China tactics.
Heh, not totally wrong. I'd also mention that there's an ideological connection to free software. Centralization on the Web means using closed and proprietary software. The decentralization crowd is fairly motivated by that. It's also motivated by searching for new business opportunities.
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 "Amaya" was also an editor).
And in a similar note, a distributed web needs ubiquitous editing and 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...
The editing component died out well before that. The original WWW browser was bi-directional: it was as easy to publish or edit sites as it was to view them (much like Wikis are today, but with a WYSIWYG editor). Even up through about 1998 Netscape shipped with Composer, which made it relatively easy to generate & publish HTML without knowing much about technology.
I think the problem was just development effort and the pace of development in the early web (and particularly during the browser wars). Shipping an editor with the browser meant that every new feature available to websites needed both an easy implementation (in the browser) and a difficult implementation (in the editor). The editor implementation would often require a lot of uncertain design work as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look like. It forbade the browser vendors from shelling this hard task out to external programs. If you wanted to embed a photograph on a webpage, Photoshop had already spent decades solving that problem; was the browser vendor supposed to duplicate all that work? If you wanted to embed a Java applet, Sun and Borland and IBM had invested thousands of man-years on development tools; would you ship an IDE in the browser? Some content types are just now getting decent editing software, 20 years later.
When you have 150M users browsing and maybe 1.5M users creating content, the economics are pretty clear. There's no sense putting 80% of your development effort into tools that 1% of the population uses.
Interestingly, even after user-generated content became a huge thing and easy WYSIWYG editors became just a JS embed away, the 1:10:100:1000 ratio still roughly holds: for every person creating content daily, 10 people create content *occasionally, 100 register for the site, and 1000 people might view it as lurkers. That indicates that the problem might not be in the tools, and that creating content is just more difficult than consuming it.
> The editor implementation would often require a lot of uncertain design work as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look like.
Isn't this just a dodgy way to circumscribe the complete failure of the W3C to keep their specifications sane enough for them to provide a reference implementation, even for a simple browser? That's how we arrived at the mess we have today, where you need a 9 figure budget just to maintain a modern browser implementation.
Gopher is still a thing which would very much be editable and displayable on old laptops or mobile phones (even feature phones which only have J2ME [1]).
Some people have been working on a vaguely similar lightweight protocol and markup language [2], which should be simple enough to render in a sane manner even on very constrained systems. IMO, it'd be more interesting than something based on WAP/WML.
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.
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 "web rings" with your buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for techies to establish communities of their own.
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.
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.
People who hobby blog and don't expect to make money, nevertheless want to have some audience. They might be creating content for the benefit of a community.
However, discoverability has plunged because of changes in the way Google works, as I have found with blogs based on some of my special interests. Even when one searches for the exact words that appear in posts, Google might not show them at all! (DDG is often not much better.)
So, when people create detailed, useful content and find they are getting no visits at all, this is discouraging.
I remember this in the early day of blogging -- we were always leveraging community to drive organic reach. I was told by a FB person once that we need to stop chasing organic reach -- it ain't happening. The monetization to the forced FB feed meant everyone had to pay. For bloggers this is how they make money. It's become a staple for the industry.
The "web rings" that he references existed because discovery has always been horrible on the web. If you want to go back to the old web, you basically have to take the bad with the good.
My ISP (cox) blocks ports 80 and 25, and probably others. Also, in the TOS it explicitly states that running servers is prohibited, and could result in termination of services.
The first is mainly done - from what I understand - to combat spam and other nefarious things; to keep people from running malicious web sites, and/or hosting spamming mail servers or whatnot.
But the second is more of an "implied threat"; for the most part, they don't really care if you run a server off some other port, use some kind of DNS discovery service, etc - provided it has low usage, and isn't doing anything against their other terms in the TOS.
So basically, hobby sites or similar stuff are allowed to run; part of the reason of this is because there is (or was) a lot of software (games mainly - if I understand right - but other platforms too) that were essentially servers, and became popular with people. Plus you had things like home VOIP, media servers, etc - that people used and liked. So they kinda let some things "fly under the radar" of their TOS.
But they never removed the language from the document.
...and so, that Sword of Damocles is left hanging over our head as a threat: "Don't get too popular...it'd be a pity if something happened to your system".
There seems to be plenty of healthy competition in the VPS space. I agree being able to host from home would be nice as an option, but in reality upload bandwidth usually isn't good enough for anything I'd want to host anyhow.
Agreed. The indie web exists, but discovery is a problem since FAANG utterly dominates the consumer web landscape and makes it hard to find sites that aren't just badly disguised content marketing pieces.
At the end of the day, you can do all the decentralized node stuff you want to, but as soon as someone builds a sizable community independent of FAANG (I like G-MAFIA too), it will start to do whatever it can to protect that moat and with it, their monetization options. And then we're right back to square one.
> 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?
It's wrong to describe that as "polyannaish", since much of it has come to pass. Despite its shortcomings and abuses, could anyone say the web has not fuelled "creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism"?
Berners-Lee is an optimist, but he is not blind to the downside of his creation. What happens next is another question.
I stopped reading when I got to this point, because it is clearly an opinion piece masked as news. Regardless of whether I agree with the opinion, because it is classed improperly I can't take anything else in it seriously.
There's no masking, this is simply an op-ed. It's fairly clear even from the title (news are usually titled as "this happened" rather than "this should happen").
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's still there.
It's all not doom and gloom, but what society desperately needs is to stop producing/consuming pointless articles such as this one or idiocy like "We should break up Google and Amazon" [Oh yeah? Go ahead and break them up them, I'll watch. Will you be selling tickets?], and to start performing _real_ economic and game-theoretic analysis of possible alternatives.
Get ready for more of it. All twenty Democrat presidential hopefuls just watched Warren talk about splitting tech companies and are currently looking for someone to hold their beer. It’s going to be a long electional cycle :/
I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more.
Politicians promise all kinds of things in stump speeches that they know they cannot realistically deliver. Remember Bush I's "no new taxes?" Obama's public option healthcare plan? Trump's wall?
All gone by the wayside. What you say doesn't matter if you can't guarantee the right number of votes in the legislature.
> I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more.
Why do you think something will happen? All three platforms have a 'pro-leftwing' and 'anti-rightwing' bias, which also aligns with most of the mainstream media. As a result, their censorship is supported by a good majority of the population
Can't be hard. I run my own personal web site and don't use Facebook or Google. Not because I'm trying to go all distributed or something, but because I think the products just aren't as good as the ones I happen to use.
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.
Oh and if there was a site that did a version of Facebook like it was in 2007, I'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/wireless version is frankly too unreliable.
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.
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.
> 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.
They seem to suggest Decentralization is at odds with "conventional" consumer experiences.
It doesn't have to be that way.
For instance:
- D.Tube (decentralized YouTube)
- notabug.io (P2P Reddit)
Both look, feel, and act very much like their "conventional" versions. Yet both of these are fully decentralized using GUN (my project: https://github.com/amark/gun ). Most users would not even know there is a difference.
So it is certainly possible to both appeal to the masses/convention, while being private/secure and free/open-source and decentralized.
Although I do think we do need NEW and DIFFERENT experiences, things that are "fresh" and fun. Facebook basically looks corporate now. We need to build new UI/UX experiences that define a new "era" of the web, in the same way people look back and remember the 80s or 90s. This doesn't have to be something we look back to, it is something we can engineer from the start. :)
I wouldn't really say fully decentralised they require DNS and a webserver to point to for the website. Although the content may be decentralised, is inaccurate to claim its fully decentralised.
Decentralising domain names is not an easy task, as IPFS is discovering...
We've successfully done local multicast, Bluetooth, discovery. DNS is not necessary, IPv4 works, and with IPv6 there are even people hosting P2P reddit from their desktop - so no, servers not needed either.
And we have Identifi/Iris for naming, by Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin. The future is here, yesterday!
Airbnb's "Growth hacking" case study comes to mind. Their original web app allowed people to cross-post their listings to Craigslist so they didn't have to do it twice.
It's possible the same principle would work here. Post to [fediverse-friendly app] and it cross-posts to Youtube/medium/Twitter. Very likely that APIs would be locked down to prevent this though.
This is why I really like what Beaker Browser is doing. It feels like when I first discovered the Internet in the 90's. I highly recommend you check it out, if you're into decentralized and easy to use web: https://beakerbrowser.com/
Lot of orphan statistics in that article. For example, there'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's bigger than 11 percent. Every other statistic is similarly without companion data.
There'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 24/7 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.
Once you factor in ISPs blocking port 80, the need to configure port forwarding, and server maintenance, it's a hard sell for the average Joe. I think we need something like sandstorm.io if we're ever going to take self-hosted to the masses.
The problem is individually I’m better off using an edge cdn, and optimising seo for google than self hosting and ignoring google. Unless it’s a pure hobby site. Maybe then a raspberry pi server on my home “broadband” with 1Mb/s would suffice.
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.
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 "clearnet", where as an addition there are huge problems with absolutely vile Nazi propaganda (e.g. Stormfront), Russian propaganda disrupting Western elections, "anti vaxxers" that literally kill people and other conspiracy bullshit.
Society doesn't just need an "alternative web", society needs an alternative society that doesn't make anything devolve into dumpster fires.
Agreed. It's less about the possibility that the system can be exploited it always can), and more about the fact there are people out there actively wanting to exploit the system to serve their own ends.
It would be great if more research would be made into un-centralizable systems and technologies instead of just "distributed systems".
If we could build technology out of building blocks for which dis-economies-of-scale ("the larger the more expensive", or "the more you own, the more expensive it's to buy more") would apply, and for which any kind of centralization would increase 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'll have it when we'll have self-replicable autonomous drones too but that will be the dusk of humanity so there won'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.
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.
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.
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.
IMO the only way to decentralize the web is to rovide tech that has better uX than centralized solutions and that's hard. Centralization didn'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'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 "agrees-to: <list of sha xxx license hashes>" header. Getting people to adopt it is another story, though.
"I see a society that is crumbling" - texts that begin with a conclusion, are propaganda, because they are designed to intimidate and that shapes the reader'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->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's intention to search for the truth in the matter, but rather to influence an already established position.
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'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.
Bandwidth availability is not currently a limitation for people self-publishing. It's the cost of that bandwidth, and then the difficulty involved in hosting a web server.
Well certainly I'm no expert on internet broadcasting. I have experimented a little with nginx's rtmp server for hosting a live stream. Does nginx have the udp broadcasting ability? How many clients could it support? Pretty exciting if the 200 figure can be breached.
love the analogy to pollution - if you see someone dropping litter you would call them out, but people litter the web with poorly researched or otherwise ill-formed opinions constantly, not to mention giant corporations doing the equivalent of pumping high volumes of toxic waste into the air we breathe in the form of manipulative advertising. we need internet environmentalism
I like the term internet envirionmentalism -- what's good for me is good for the internet. But like climate change, unless it impacts the individual directly, few are likely to buy in. I met an environmental activist last week and she told me that people in Japan is a culture of cleanliness -- it's instilled in the child from a young age. And it perpetuates into society. For Singapore, that has translated into stricter laws. In North America, people have to care otherwise it's likely no real strong regulation will ever happen.
100% decentralization is an utopia. But with the Fediverse, we have the best of the both worlds: most people will register to a "centralized" instance like mastodon.social and people who want will be able to run their own instances/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'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.
Nationalism is neither bad or good, it'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.
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?
Answering that question determines how data flows and thus what'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.
Free (as in beer) trumps convenience trumps any sort of rational idealism. It's a materialistic world. Incidentally, it also provides all the tools to "opt out" at a low price. But if you want everyone to opt out (which is what the author seems to want), you'll have to pay for them too.
Agree it has to make money. Tech giants stifle innovation and competition by buying companies they see as threatening. We need a consortium. And we need a model that can't be easily penetrated by big tech. Money is a true motivator -- and doing the right thing doesn't fall on the same plane when people are enticed with this kind of incentive.
1) Technology makes bad people as efficient as good people. Let's define "good people" as honest, productive workers who value universal virtues like freedom, well-accepted scientific findings, and necessary progress. Now let's define "bad people" 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.
2) Perhaps my most controversial assumption, the "everyman" that deranged populism appeals to tends to be more of the "bad person" than the "good person".
3) From 1991 to present, the proportion of "everymen" to "professionals" using the Web has steadily increased, empowering more "bad people" than "good people".
So is it any surprise then, that we're at where we're at? The problem isn't the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the problem is that we don'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.
The problem is our so-called neighbours, and their jubilant disregard for everything that free society once stood for.
Tl;dr:
The world and the web suck;
Tim Berner-Lee was a clueless Pollyanna;
We're gonna solve everything with DECENTRALISATION that will come to pass by (makes vague hand gestures, draws ballon shaped objects).
It's only Pollyanna if you do nothing about it. Decentralization is more than an idea. There are many technologies developing privacy as an integrated feature on their platform. There is enough of an appetite to support it more widely than it has been.
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)
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/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again.
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.
I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won'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.