[HN Gopher] Decentralizing Schemes
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       Decentralizing Schemes
        
       Author : NotInOurNames
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2025-04-21 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tbray.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org)
        
       | sambroner wrote:
       | When I was working on the Fluid Framework, now basically
       | Microsoft's Copilot Pages, we built a URI Schema to let in-app
       | widgets specify the code that would let users interact with the
       | underlying data.
       | 
       | Example: you open the app and load a specific document.
       | Simplified, but this loads a "boot loader" and connects to the
       | data feed of the document. The boot loader reads the first few
       | operations which contains the widget/app code to load all the UX
       | of the application. Examples of widgets would be a whiteboard, a
       | text editor, a table widget, an identity card, a latex widget,
       | etc.
       | 
       | Widgets could be posted outside of the document because any
       | loader that could read the URI could parse it and understand the
       | app code to load and data feed to connect to.
       | 
       | I'm still somewhat infatuated with the design and I'd like to see
       | it much more widely adopted. Security issues were, of course, a
       | major issue.
        
       | immibis wrote:
       | They _used_ to be decentralized. I remember a game making
       | platform called BYOND. The website had a list of games. If you
       | clicked on a button to play one, it pointed to a URL like byond:
       | //Author.Game?server=1.2.3.4 and if you had the BYOND software
       | installed, it would open. And this wasn't just what BYOND did -
       | it was just what apps were expected to do in order to integrate
       | with the web. I suppose it went away when the apps could run
       | inside the browser instead of being launched outside it.
        
       | janandonly wrote:
       | I am surprised that the comments on that blog don't menstion
       | Nostr as a solution to the given pain points.
       | 
       | Unlike traditional federated systems, Nostr is built around a
       | protocol where users have a single cryptographic identity not
       | tied to any particular server. This means that when a user shares
       | a post, anyone with a Nostr client can interact with it--like,
       | comment, or repost--regardless of which relay (server) they are
       | connected to, solving the "can't interact across instances"
       | problem.
       | 
       | Moreover, Nostr posts are identified by content hashes and public
       | keys, not by server-dependent URLs. This makes posts portable and
       | resilient: if a relay goes offline or a user migrates, their
       | content and identity remain intact and accessible via other
       | relays, addressing the "post portability pain" and "migration
       | pain" described in the article.
       | 
       | And because Nostr clients can register themselves as handlers for
       | Nostr-specific links (e.g., nostr: URIs), clicking a Nostr link
       | can automatically open the post in the user's preferred client,
       | improving the user experience across different devices and apps.
        
         | quantadev wrote:
         | I read your post after posting my own. Yeah the lack of any
         | mention of Nostr shows a genuine ignorance about the Social
         | Media Protocol landscape or else an intentional dislike of
         | Nostr, and thus not wanting to do any shout-outs.
        
       | quantadev wrote:
       | Nostr solves the identity problem, and IPFS solves the data
       | sharing problem.
       | 
       | Unfortunately the guy who created Nostr wasn't an IPFS fan, and
       | the IPFS guys who played the key role in developing Blue Sky
       | weren't fans of _simplicity_ like the Nostr dude was. So we ended
       | up with a mess, where there could 've been a big synergy.
       | 
       | And to make matters even worse everyone in the ActivityPub world
       | (i.e. Fediverse, Mastodon,et all) is of the opinion that having a
       | DNS name embedded into Usernames is congruent with freedom of
       | movement and censorship resistance, even though it's not.
       | 
       | In fact, most of the Fediverse is full of super-woke types who
       | love censorship as much as antifa loves the color black, so
       | they're a hopeless cause as well. So once again, what a mess.
       | 
       | We were so so close. I mean even one slight tweak of how the
       | Nostr Hash is generated COULD HAVE made it's message hashes
       | genuine IPFS CIDs and made everything perfectly interoperable. No
       | one to this day has gotten it right yet, but we're close.
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-21 23:01 UTC)