The first web page went live on August 6, 1991. It was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project. The engineer behind the project was ...
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Decentralization is not a virtue per se. The Web did not become ubiquitous and successful because it was decentralized. Another attempt at decentralization for decentralization's sake will not succeed.
In the context of early internet (ARPANet), decentralization meant eliminating single points of failure, in the face of a nuclear threat. In the context of bitcoin, decentralization means eliminating single points of responsibility, in the face of legal threats. In the context of smart contracts, decentralization means eliminating enforcement bottlenecks, in the face of shortage of court resources. In each case decentralization serves a use case other than for the sake of decentralization.
What has made the world wide web as we know it so successful? It was not the fact that it could still remain in operation after a nuclear strike. Ironically now we have built such a brittle network that a BGP configuration mistake can cripple half of it. No, it was Netscape and Internet Explorer, popularizing web browsing. It was AOL, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, helping laypeople reach into and make use of the information on the WWW. It was Adobe Flash, Chrome, iPhone, pushing the limit of what use cases the WWW can deliver.
IPv6 had all the resources in the world to replace IPv4. To this day IPv6 adoption has just climbed to around 40%, mostly in internal networks, and IPv4 has seen no decline, with prices for IPv4 addresses increasing. That was an official effort to replace the Internet. Nothing else has even come close to it. Ethereum is still an experiment after 4 years. IPFS is a glorified archive.org. Is anyone still using Namecoin? How many know ZeroNet?
Research it, push the distributed system frontier forward, cool. Like ZeroTier, maybe you can make a better VPN. Just don't expect it to be "the next generation internet".
I can't even comprehend how a peer-to-peer network would be implemented, how we would make a transition from a current state and many other mind-melting things come to my mind.
It is, however, a very compelling idea. I imagine that the web would then behave kind of like the economy. Internet itself would be a real web, not just the world-wide-web. What that brings on the table, is the inherent instability when one or more nodes come into problems, which, if the circumstances are right, could potentially bring down a big part of the system.
What are your opinions about this?
Fully agree, I think there are a lot of parts to get right before we can build a robust peer-to-peer web, but it's super cool to me that people are trying.
In terms of ensuring the stability of the network / ability to trust nodes, the BlockchainTM solution to this is to essentially incentivize people to run them / check that things are alright. In projects like Tor though, nodes are maintained by a stalwart group of volunteers who believe in the mission. I think the fact that Bitcoin / Ethereum and Tor have both persisted shows that at least in some scenarios both of these models can work, but there's definitely additional work to be done.
I always thought that Web3 was the semantic web - where did that go, did I miss something?
I think the decentralised web is interesting, but it will only happy in my view either with someone with extremely deep pockets, or someone aligns some commercial interests (lets face it, peer to peer and decentralised technologies today came out of wanting to create un-regulated, hidden market places or the sharing of assets without the need to prove you had the rights to share those assets (and correspondingly, folks wanting them!)
Hey Ricardo -- I'd check out this talk from Juan Benet, specifically, the last 10 minutes where he discusses how the blockchain movement is built out of the Semantic Web movement: youtube.com/watch?v=l44z35vabvA&t=19s
Also, a brief of the talk if you are interested in written content: notion.so/gitcoin/Lock-the-Web-Ope...
Thanks. I watched this but not sure he truely represented what the semantic web as I understood it - I’m no expert but did get involved in projects in the late 2009. It’s also not dead at all and very much still going. It felt that this speaker was trying to shoe horn the distributed idea into this and I am not at all convinced by his arguments. Thanks for sharing though, interesting talk.
I love personal websites, they're like meeting random people all around the world, and it's fascinating.
Some other projects like the gemini project are really interesting because they allow to focus on the content and not on tracking/advertising.
Oh that’s a real shame to hear that SOLID didn’t take off and looks like development work has stopped, I remember the fanfare around it when it came out originally and it looked really promising if too early to actually work with.
Well,
Here is my personal opinion.
It will become possible once it will be easy to create and deploy a decentralised network.
My 2cts ^^
This, my friend, is very true :)
This is a very interesting topic.
I thought the team at Pied Piper pulled it off???
I'm in. I'm building a dweb search engine. People can search ipfs/ipns CC RSS blogs site-with-api ... all kinds of sites which are more open there. And there are many other features. All data of the search engine is open too...
I think it's a great project. Look at this post :
Turns a Web Browser into a Web Server with WebRTC
manish srivastava ・ Jun 11 ・ 2 min read
Also, an addition of service worker may accomplish a stable system.
Great text, Justin. It aims right where it's needed.
Adding my two cents here: we will never create a fully decentralized Internet. I think the proposition, despite being theoretically ethical and purposeful, overlooks the costs (financial and not-financial) to do it beyond a tiny fraction of hyperconnected, tech-savvy companies and individuals. The offline world establishment is still too strong to allow a third Internet wave, where the current powers have little influence.
But there is another option I can envisage: a new layer that connects to the current model of Internet in many points and then becomes a sub-network which can manage to become a new, decentralized network in the future. This is perfectly possible, it may have feasible costs and makes the new 3.0 Internet become an everlasting process instead of a new thing. We can think about it as an alternative network that, at least for starters, retrieve data from the Web but, within its own domains, determine and enforce rules using tools like dat://, Matrix, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc, until it has traction to really become a new entity.
Thanks for the article, I am glad to see more people writing on this topic :]