If you’re frustrated about what the online world has become, and you remember “the good old days” with nostalgia (rightly or wrongly), and you despair about our collective ability to find a way forward, this by @molly0xfff offers an important perspective. With reason for hope. She has become an essential voice, along with @pluralistic and Jaron Lanier.
@JamesGleick@molly0xfff@pluralistic I agree. I started reading Molly’s writing because I really enjoyed her dispatches about cryptocurrency, but this article shows me that she will be a valuable voice on many topics going forward. (Also, she has the best username.)
@currentbias@JamesGleick@molly0xfff@pluralistic@aral After reading the article, I think that P2P technology like Bittorrent, IPFS, Tribler, Zeronet, Freenet, Webtorrent, Cabal, Holepunch and other technologies are the logical conclusion of the small web. With P2P technology, if your file goes mega viral, you don't get a giant web hosting bill because everyone else helped share the burden with their own connection.
I initially started with the same assumption and prototyped the early versions using the hypercore protocol (e.g., see https://github.com/indie-mirror/hypha-spike-multiwriter-2/tree/master). I thought at the time that a replicated directed acyclic graph could be core of such a system but it has a huge downside: the data structure must be replicated on all nodes. (2/5)
Add to that the universal issues with peer to peer (findability and availability) and you can see how my design evolved to take advantage of the inherent strengths of the web (an always on node at a simple address – a domain name). (With any highly available peer to peer system you still need an always on fallback node for findability and availability/relay so why not make that a node you own and make that the core of the system?) (3/5)
The issue, of course, then becomes: how do we make it as simple as possible to setup and use such a place, without any technical knowledge. How do we make it as easy to own your own place on the web as it is to sign up for a Facebook account? How do we make it ten seconds and zero technical knowledge? How do we make it so these places can communicate with each directly. In other words, how do we build a peer to peer web (the Small Web)? (4/5)
Further, how do we ensure that as this system scales no one entity/organisations scales alongside it? In other words, how do we make it scale horizontally not vertically? That’s what I’ve spent the last six years working on. And it’s exciting to finally feel like it’s getting to a point where I can open it up to a larger group of people this year. (5/5)
@benjamin_egon We can make a capitalism-free search engine, sure. But why instead? We can do both. In fact, since we’ve been working for over half the past decade specifically on realising one of them and have our (only two pairs of) hands full with it, someone else (maybe you?) can do the other.
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