[HN Gopher] A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet (2017)
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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet (2017)
Author : freediver
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-07-18 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (staltz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staltz.com)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It's hard to pinpoint a cohesive thesis in this long, winding
| article. It's a mix of explanations about how the internet works
| (IP addresses, undersea cables) and talking about the scale of
| Facebook, Instagram, and other big tech companies. The author is
| concerned that too many internet users choose to use big tech
| websites, which he suggests is a threat to the open internet:
|
| > Those are large enough numbers to admit that the open Web is
| already rather irrelevant to Zuckerberg's products.
|
| But this claim doesn't make any sense, because with few
| exceptions people still need the open internet to access
| Facebook. Is Facebook really stopping any of us from using other
| parts of the internet? Sure, we can point to Facebook's
| initiatives to provide free internet access in some countries as
| a sign that they want to control some of the internet, but it's
| irrelevant for 99%+ of the population.
|
| As much as I love mesh networks, the idea that we're going to
| replace the internet with regional mesh networks is a pipe dream.
| Mesh networks could be fun as a relatively low-bandwidth
| alternative network, but there is zero incentive for the average
| consumer or even a tech person to give up their high speed
| internet access that already does everything they need.
|
| I'm getting tired of these articles that neglect to consider that
| maybe people who voluntarily choose to use products like Facebook
| do so because they actually want to. It's becoming a common theme
| to talk about the general public like sheep who are under the
| control of evil tech companies, and to pretend that us
| enlightened tech people need to use our hardware and software
| skills to stop people from choosing to use websites they enjoy.
| There are some legitimate concerns around things like privacy and
| tracking, but the solution isn't to create an alternate internet
| universe and hope that everyone decides to give up the main
| internet for this alternate, Facebook-free version of the
| internet.
| EGreg wrote:
| Do you want a practical approach? Something that will actually
| APPEAL to people and has a chance of working?
|
| https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
| waterproof wrote:
| +1, I also found it hard to follow the thread here. For
| instance, they spend a lot of time on IP address scarcity, and
| then imply - without explaining why - that it has something to
| do with Facebook or Google's dominance. Is a lack of IP
| addresses really preventing folks from competing with the
| giants? No, FB and Google are huge because they provide more
| value and people want to use them, not because Ello or Ask
| Jeeves were starved for IP addresses.
| IX-103 wrote:
| How much of the content on Facebook is indexed by someone other
| than Facebook and accessible to someone without a Facebook
| account? How much of it can be archived by a third party?
|
| Content that previously would have been on some personal
| geocities(?) page on the open web is behind Facebook's wall.
| Facebook has effectively taken something that was previously
| open and made it closed.
|
| While I also could not find a coherent solution in the OP, I
| have to agree with them that the proliferation of closed
| networks are detrimental to the web as a whole.
| root_axis wrote:
| I am skeptical of arguments based on MAUs. Just because someone
| opened up Facebook a few times in the month doesn't mean FB is an
| important part of their life. People point to these big numbers
| as if they represent an exhaustive measurement of the internet
| rather than a minuscule fraction of how the typical individual
| spends their time online.
| tomrod wrote:
| > It is hard to imagine how things could be different, yet the
| incentives for these businesses to exist were artificially
| erected. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any
| intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from
| their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a
| ride from a driver.
|
| This has a core flaw. While the service itself may be reasonably
| priced without the middling service, the information search costs
| are dramatically reduced.
|
| Couchsurf was a similar service in the mid-2000s for staying at
| strangers locations. But they were niche (couches) and didn't do
| much user protection. Along comes AirBnB with a model of services
| travelers want out of the middling service. Thus is thrives.
|
| This is wholly unconnected to IPv4+NAT
| [deleted]
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| To me, this seems totally backwards.
|
| The corporate presence on the (web|internet) isn't really taking
| advantage of IP (or TCP or any other internet transport-ish layer
| protocol). It's taken over the _web_ , loosely defined as a
| protocol with HTTP at its core.
|
| Switching away from "the internet" buys you only one thing: for
| now, most corporate online presence will not follow you. But most
| of the problems that the author and most other people have with
| this corporate presence relies only on the HTTP+above aspects of
| the current web. If we switched the web to run on, I dunno,
| DECnet, and corporations followed, not a single problem (ok,
| maybe 2 :) would be solved.
|
| All the chit chat in the article about IPv4 vs IPV6, about NAT,
| about cable ownership: this is just noise. What's wrong with the
| web, _if indeed there is actually wrong with the web at all_ does
| not originate in the internet. How many ways does the author
| think there will ever be of getting a packet across an ocean? The
| answer is destined to remain in the low single digits (i.e. a
| very small number of cables, controlled by _something_ , plus
| perhaps a couple of satellite routings).
|
| The author identifies NAT as the primary cause of some computers
| not being "first class citizens" online, but a much more
| fundamental issue is asymmetrical connections. Your computer can
| pull data at 100MB/sec, but can only push 5MB/sec ... ergo, it
| can't sensibly act as a server to any widely popular material.
| You can consume, you cannot publish (widely popular material),
| without using someone else's network connection. (This asymmetry
| is not universal, but is still typical).
|
| The "content-centric" alternative proposed by the author is a
| nice distributed caching scheme. It's fundamentally a technical
| detail that is of little actual consequence to anyone, other than
| any impact it has on apparent performance when accessing
| information. When I want to read an article that a friend just
| told me about, I _do not care_ where my computer gets it from, as
| long as it gets it. We already have this in a totally implicit
| way, via CDNs. The scheme proposed just makes this explicit, and
| in so doing adds an entirely new layer to content addressing.
| Anybody familiar with cache architectures is going to see the
| kinds of problems this can cause, and the potentially insane
| levels of complexity required to avoid them.
|
| How about we stop trying to "save the web" at all? How about we
| recognize that "the old web" continues to exist for those who
| care (and most do not). How about we recognize that the technical
| aspects of a distributed, hyperlinked content system are probably
| not likely to be the best substrate for other kinds of networked
| communication, and that therefore it doesn't matter if the web
| cannot "do it all".
| collaborative wrote:
| I admit to not caring too much about these things. Then Google
| removed my app without any warning last week (it is now back in
| the Store)
|
| This has convinced me to move my model to a web-based one
|
| Development is already underway. The scare I got last week fuels
| my efforts. And WASM is great (and fast!)
| thelandofrandom wrote:
| I think we have a lot of potential with this in Web 3.0 - the
| trick - of course is adoption.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Ironically, the "get rich fast" frenzy with crypto is making a
| lot of people join the distributed web without thinking about
| it.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >While Facebook was growing on the Web, Apple launched the iPhone
| in 2007, and the world was revolutionized by smartphones after
| that. Zuckerberg saw the mobile megatrend before many others did,
| and as early as 2009 there was a Facebook mobile app with
| explosive growth.
|
| That's not true; Zuckerberg spent a lot of time and resources
| pursuing HTML5 Facebook app which was meant for all smartphone
| devices. When he realized HTML5 web app it's not going to work
| [0] Instagram already emerged and started growing rapidly. That's
| when he figured out he needs to make native mobile Facebook app
| and purchase Instagram in order to gain foot in mobile space and
| in order to eliminate possible competition in social photo
| industry.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-
| bigges...
| bredren wrote:
| Ya, I'm not sure why Zuck is getting praise for foresight in
| mobile.
|
| He fought mobile, and left their mobile czar position open for
| years.
|
| I believe he's even explicitly stated he missed mobile.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| GP ultimately says exactly the opposite - Zuckerberg may have
| had different plans for mobile to start with but he reacted
| swiftly.
|
| How can anyone say he "missed mobile" when he led the biggest
| mobile play of any software company in the world, leading to
| a dominant position today? Top analysts like Ben Thomson
| widely give him credit for it.
|
| If he says he "missed mobile" it's possibly false humility
| and actual hubris, or he means something completely
| different.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I think the OP refers to Facebook waiting really long to
| offer a mobile app. Many others jumped into the gap (I
| personally used an app called "Friendly for Facebook").
|
| They were indeed really slow to recognise mobile as a
| worthwhile platform. So long that it would have jeopardised
| their position if it hadn't already been pretty much
| invincible.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| They released a dedicated iOS app on the same month the
| App Store launched (July 2008), about a year after the
| first iPhone was launched. They had m.facebook.com
| (dedicated mobile site) in time for the iPhone launch
| (Remember when Steve Jobs said web apps were the future?
| I remember!)
|
| Messenger as a standalone app was released in 2011. They
| bought Instagram pretty much within two years of birth.
|
| The UX of a lot of the mobile products might not have
| been good - I don't remember - but all things considered
| I would say they moved fast on mobile, at both the
| engineering and strategic levels, and it paid dividends.
| Natales wrote:
| Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to
| believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks
| were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going
| to change everything.
|
| I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined
| all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora,
| Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no
| bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies).
|
| In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink
| that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating
| either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of
| convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire
| instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up.
|
| Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because
| I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement.
| Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious,
| production-quality systems based on dweb techs.
|
| When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why".
| What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to
| be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing
| to pay to solve them.
|
| As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article
| are real, the great majority of people don't care _enough_ to
| make the effort required to change their habits.
| freediver wrote:
| > As I see it now, even if the problems described in the
| article are real, the great majority of people don't care
| enough to make the effort required to change their habits.
|
| In order for people to care, give them something to care about.
|
| It is hard to expect that an average person would 'care' about
| IPFS or Mastodon which are unpolished, hard to use
| technologies. But people care about their iPhones and Instagram
| accounts. It is our job as technologists to give people
| something to care about. The measured rate of 'caring' measures
| our own abilities, not the lack of theirs.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that
| customers would be willing to pay to solve them.
|
| The problems are clear but the _solutions_ need to be clear
| too. So far many of the alternatives tend to focus more on the
| _tech_ (decentralized protocols, this or that programming
| language, etc) than solving the problem. Even worse, sometimes
| the nature of the tech makes solving the problem more difficult
| or impossible (decentralized protocols brings a lot of
| challenges by itself for example).
|
| I made a comment back in the day about my thoughts on Mastodon
| and similar alternatives:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
| burnt_toast wrote:
| > the great majority of people don't care enough to make the
| effort required to change their habits.
|
| I've started to wonder if the web will split for this reason.
|
| Main stream stays on the normal web and techies move to their
| own. Almost like an end to the Eternal September but really it
| just feels like everything old is new again.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Web 3.0 and blockchain technology[1] is doing a great job
| getting people into dweb. If we remove the "get rich fast" part
| of it, dApps are doing a great work bringing users to
| distributed platforms.
|
| 1. https://ipfs.io/
| amelius wrote:
| I think the approach may be too radical for most users. Perhaps
| an approach like "embrace, extend, extinguish" might work
| better.
| [deleted]
| dsego wrote:
| 2017
| arcturus17 wrote:
| This is cool but it doesn't address the elephant in the room:
| regular folk don't care about any of this, they don't care about
| the web being more closed and privative or even having some of
| their rights trampled.
|
| So how do you get them to care? Or how do you offer enough value
| that they migrate to new systems and protocols?
| enriquto wrote:
| Millions of people do already care. Why do you want most people
| to care? Honest question.
|
| It is a really serious concern, even if a majority does not
| directly think about it. Just like water pollution or
| fertilizer runoff. Essential stuff, that affects everybody, but
| there's no real need for everybody to care about it. I don't
| understand why you paint this as a an elephant in the room to
| address. Not all battles are won by swinging public opinion.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Because what are ideas in technology without adoption?
|
| To your point, arguably not enough people have cared about
| climate issues for too long... It is only now that pressure
| is piling up on governments and corporations to change, and
| arguably it's late and much remains to be done.
|
| Similarly, the trends towards a gated web described in the
| article continue to grow.
|
| I want more people to care because my rights and those of my
| loved ones are better protected if enough people care.
|
| I also want people to care because I prefer to develop open
| web products and services, and the more demand there is for
| them, the easier designers and developers in the space can
| make a living.
|
| Why would anyone not want more people to care?
| SimeVidas wrote:
| Ad blockers are on the rise. DuckDucGo searches are on the
| rise. All browsers except Chrome are continuously getting
| better at protecting the user's privacy. Global Privacy Control
| (GPC) is gaining traction.
|
| I think privacy on the web is already heading in a good
| direction.
| donkarma wrote:
| They only care because it's very visible to them
| userbinator wrote:
| _All browsers except Chrome_
|
| You mean Firefox?
|
| That's another problem, the lack of any real browser
| diversity.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Samsung Internet are all quite
| popular.
| sli wrote:
| Edge and Samsung Internet are both still Chrome.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| Yes, but Microsoft and Samsung are adding privacy
| features to their browsers. Specifically, tracking
| protection. I can't imagine Google adding tracking
| protection to Chrome. That's the difference.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > regular folk don't care about any of this
|
| Regular people don't care about operating systems, yet many of
| us are able to have a superior desktop experience by using
| Linux.
|
| Regular people don't care about fine music, but we're still
| able to listen to Mussorgsky and are not forced to listen to
| Ariane Grande.
|
| Regular people don't care enough about technology to sit around
| discussing it in their spare time, and yet here we are.
|
| There's a lot of things that regular people don't care about.
| Let's concentrate on making something good, that _enough_
| people will use, rather than winning a popularity contest.
| rektide wrote:
| worrying about everyone else is a losers game. worry about
| yourself & building the healthiest "local" community you can
| first.
|
| there's a lot of neat little networks that are active, that
| have a community. even if you are just connecting with other
| p2p, decentralized, whatever folk, & the whole world hasn't
| adopted your platform, so what?
|
| open source doesn't have to scale. start with what beautiful
| ideas you have.
| pictur wrote:
| What will save the internet will probably be a project like the
| internet that millions of people can flock to at once. I love
| these kind of romantic articles, but I think they look at it
| from a romantic point of view.
| midasuni wrote:
| Millions didn't flock to the internet at once. People were
| trash talking Kirk vs Picard in 1987, they were be moaning
| Eternal September from 1993, in 1996 there was AOL for a few
| bleeding edge people, but the Internet was useful even with
| just 30 million people worldwide. even in 2000 the Internet
| was something Al Gore was waffling on about for the majority
| of even the western world.
|
| You don't need to reach a billion people to be useful.
| Wikipedia didn't have a billion users when it was first
| useful, nor did OSM, or slashdot, or
| alt.Wesley.crusher.die.die.die
| rektide wrote:
| the phrasing & core idea is epic. head over heels in love with
| the idea that the medium, pages made out of resources, is great,
| but that the transport system is bollocks. a very astute OSI
| Network Layer observation that i quite like.
|
| it has it's limitations but personally i believe servers
| generating signed bundles of content that we can transit as we
| like to each other ameliorates almost all the downside of the
| current web transport stack. That's happening under the
| WebPackage work:
|
| https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| (2017)
|
| Wrt decentralized/p2p networks mentioned in TFA I guess we're a
| bit more informed (disillusioned) today, seeing as even devs
| happily flock to github where they get shafted (copilot) and
| looking at the lack of beaker/hypercore (nee dat) and ipfs
| adoption. And also lack of any initiative to make HTML fit for
| non-js/doc-only delivery on protocols other than http. To the
| contrary, http/3 is even eating TCP/IP (DoH).
| u8mybrownies wrote:
| The big missing piece in this article is the economics
| perspective. Aka FB could dominate a mesh network just as well as
| a traditional one and for the same reasons.
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(page generated 2021-07-18 23:00 UTC)