Well, the author is talking about the "mainstream internet" that most people think of: we used to have to point out that the internet wasn't the same thing as the world wide web, now we have to point out that it isn't the same thing as facebook, twitter and amazon. There's nothing inevitable about a centralized internet technologically: packet-switched networking is by it's nature decentralized. However, my pipe dream of someday seeing a truly decentralized mesh network that nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day - not because it's technically infeasible, but because it would require more people to get on board than I believe people have the will for.
Essentially, the tradeoffs don't make it worthwhile for the average user: having to do more work to interoperate with fewer people? "Sign me up," says almost nobody.
As a schoolboy, I had friends whose parents consciously didn't bring broadcast TV into their house. They did have a vcr. They didn't want TV.
You won't reach Carol Couchpotato, but there will always be a core of people willing to living outside the FAANG coral.
If you care about the decentral internet, set yourself realistic expectations. Work with the coalition of the willing. Make it as welcoming as you can. It'll be fun times!
It isn't clear to me that we've got a good technical, never mind social solution, to the problem of anonymous actors.
I suspect that "be careful what you wish for" is applicable to the idea of a communication medium that "nobody can ever control or censor". We already have numerous problems caused by anonymity with our existing infrastructure (DDOS, ransomware, threats, defamation, etc.).
I think neither extreme, a completely anonymous infrastructure or a completely non-anonymous infrastructure, is desirable.
Scuttlebutt [1] is the Decentralized Mesh you're looking for. Still early stages but will only improve over time. Has a few thousand users (approx, it's a mesh after all), and is developed completely in the open with clients written in multiple languages.
It can't be censored or shut down because all communication spreads through peers, with few central points that can be blocked.
Even if you had a mesh network, global low-latency communication requires undersea cables, and regional high-bandwidth hubs. Besides the undersea cables, local hub-and-spoke networks are needed to provide low-latency regional communication.
Centralization of network infrastructure is shaped by the physics and capital costs of communication technology.
Indeed. There are dozens if not hundreds of people consistently working on decentralized tools that fit the current laws/social climate. Not even China can fully centralize the actual internet, so what hope does anyone else?
i used to be part of a decentralized mesh network. I see that part as less likely each year.
Things centralize, then when the central node gets corrupted, everything is perturbed for a while and somewhat decentralized, until the next centralization begins. Same as disruption theory.
Network effects apply to centralized networks moreso than to decentralized effects. Cost to add a new node to a decentralized network generally remains higher than onboarding a new customer to a centralized network. And that kills it over time.
(Consider for example that the "new node" may be malicious... a decentralized network needs a lot of duplication of effort to fight malicious actors, a central network can do this cheaper over time.)
Even git, built on the very idea of decentralization, centralizes onto github and gets a lot of value out of that.
Your pipe dream is thought of and echoed by many, but the problem I see on an all-too regular basis is that many/most worthy projects never seem to reach critical mass. It's not as if we don't have enough people to make it grow and achieve liftoff - we just seem to lack the impetus to all push at the same time.
One possible parallel is that we have many roads/highways all essentially built and controlled by centralised authorities and this is used not only by law-abiding citizens but also by criminals. By criminals you could also include people that don't have the same ideology as the State.
If you read Tim Woo's master switch you will get everything is designed to be centralised. Internet is designed to be centralised.
The bottom line is that the infrastructure (the cable and the cell towers are centralised). Until we can legally encrypt over Ham radio and quality peer reviewed open sourced post-quantum encryption algorithm Internet is centralised!
Almost all Internet users have an organization between them and the people they would communicate with. Hell, your registrar can punt you for your content, which means that it's a vanishingly small number of people, those on the dark web and a few other places, who have access to a truly decentralized internet.
The phase transition takes place when open infrastructure, bandwidth and compute capacity together reach a critical threshold; new ICs will emerge through virtual infrastructure and resource sharing.
Completely agree. Amazing what was unthinkable in the early days and optimism of the net, has been replaced by near dystopia.
It seems that New tech has an advantage over the incumbents when
1) The early population of users is all experts or hackers of some sort (so diversity of use cases is low)
2) the regulators, are in no way or form able to project force, because they simply cannot recruit people as fast as new tech firms.
Eventually, the tech firms start hitting various frontiers, either slowing down, or failing and ejecting workers. New classes of workers catch up, and government projects start getting built.
Once the Frontier advantages disappear - the extra degrees of freedom new firms enjoyed get captured or shared with other powers, and become common place. Unless you find new degrees of freedom (With market/rule disrupting power) are found, the new dominant firms and the old political powers will start acting on each other.
This is where we are. The thought of a centralized net is pretty troubling, especially where it will end up as tech develops. It has only been 20 years since 2000 and web 2.0. There are countries which don't know that Facebook isn't the internet.
Well, it's only a dystopia if you want freedom over prosperity.
Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity.
The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense, so few people care, and I suspect many of them are on this forum.
I'm finding it rather unlikely that decentralized institutions like blogs, forums (the PHPbb kind, not subreddits), personal websites will disappear as a class. What has been happening is that people have taken the parts of their communication that does not require such tools into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit -- commercial entities that (for perfectly valid commercial reasons) focus on the 80% of communications that they can service with 20% of the work. If these behemoths were really trying to become universal content archives, they'd behave very differently. I don't think they're losing any sleep over the existence of 4chan, Dreamwidth or Simple Machines Forum; it's a different world, and not one they could easily make any money in. They have centralized the internet to the extent that helps making them money and no step further.
I wouldn't be surprised if states start playing this game, but if government IT so far has been any indication, the results won't last long. Most likely, servers in rogue countries will be used for all sufficiently hot potatoes (just as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are operating from Russia but used all over the world), whereas the rest of online activity that doesn't fit well into the big walled gardens will keep happening semi-anonymously as it is now. Governments will probably keep downloading and hoarding everything, but this has been going on for years and everyone just adapted. Downloading is but a first step on the long road to controlling (and, unlike the former, the latter cannot easily be automated). Encryption bans will be undermined in practice by steganography, surveillance by fake data, and censorship by various forms of illegibilization. I'm not saying it will be a great world to live in...
> into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit
I don't think "convenience" explains it.
Take for example talking with the local group of emergency food delivery volunteers. I picked that example because if you really need to talk with them, it's not optional.
I can't avoid Facebook to do that. It's not a convenience issue. The local group is on Facebook, so I have to use Facebook to achieve my task. There isn't a "less convenient" alternative for me to use, if I need to talk to those people as a group.
I could try phoning someone in the group, or emailing. That might get something to happen. But it won't let me achieve the basic task, which is to communicate with a particular group of people, i.e. all of them identified by some common interest. The alternatives will just let me talk to one person who is connected to the group, with a different effect.
Well, that's just my side. But can we say the reason the group is on Facebook is due to convenience for the people who created the group?
It's arguable, but I think probably not any more. Most likely, the group was formed on Facebook because the people forming it were already on Facebook due to similar network effect pressures for other things they got involved in at some time, and for this new group, if they picked a different platform, a lot of people they want to reach wouldn't have the same level of access to the service they aim to provide. The task for them was to pick a platform lots of local people could realistically join. If they had picked some forum on a private domain, or even a mailing list these days, realistically it wouldn't have been as effective for the service they are aiming to provide locally.
So it's network effects over many layers, and I don't think it's accurate to sum that up as convenience any more.
Lots of comments about internet infrastructure being decentralised. In my opinion, there is a difference between decentralised architecture and decentralised control.
For instance, a single company could deploy a decentralised system. It may suit their use case better, be more fault tolerant, whatever. But they still control all of it. If they want to take the system down, there's nothing about it being decentralised that prevents them from doing that.
The same thing happens with decentralised internet services. Yes, many services are decentralised. But it ends up being easier letting a small number of groups control the majority of the nodes. This is just centralisation with extra steps.
Take Cloudflare for instance. It's decentralised, there are servers everywhere, it makes the internet for resilient and faster. But if Cloudflare decided it wanted to take a piece of content down, they could do so right away (cache times notwithstanding).
Solving the centralised control problem is very different to creating good decentralised architectures. Most tech people focus on the latter and think in doing so they have solved the former (they haven't).
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the Internet is decentralized, and in a far more fault-tolerant fashion than the meshnet-of-the-day. The fact that anyone can fire up a server and make it accessible to anyone else on the Internet should be indicative of that.
Maybe what we mean when we say we want a 'decentralized internet' is implicitly, that we want the popular nodes of the Internet Graph to be decentralized. That would be nice.
But I think we could realize that right now, the Internet is comprised of a ton of competing protocols, and as long as there's a translation interface that enables cross-communication, the internet will remain decentralized. That's impressive resillience. Kudos to the designers.
It seems to me that what would actually bring the most benefit to the structure of the Internet would be long-range wireless communication. Basically, the ability to use HAM radio to bypass ISPs. That would bring about a sea change in how the Internet is structured.
The author of this article, Samo Burja, also gave a great lecture in 2018 called “Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future” (https://youtu.be/OiNmTVThNEY) which was mentioned in Jon Blow’s popular 2019 talk on software complexity, “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” (https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk). Burja’s talk is worth watching if you’re interested in his analysis of technology and history over an even longer period, and it provides some context for his remarks at the end of the article about intellectual institutions and the benefits of centralisation.
Decades ago, the average person considered AOL as the "internet". Today it's Facebook/Google etc. In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0?
My point is that the pendulum will swing away again. It's already happening. Blogging, podcasts and a long-tail of businesses that are not Facebook or Google are thriving. In some sense they never went away in the first place. In the coming years, this long-tail is likely to garner a lot more attention than it has so far.
> In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0?
You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites.
The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel.
Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.
I really like this article, and especially the calling into question that smaller/decentralized is always better. I've had the intuition for a while that decentralization is sort of a hope of end-running around power structures, but as the article hints at, the power structures don't really go away, they just becoming less legible. Think about the failings of holocracy, or tyranny of structurelessness, or even the way framework-less software projects tend to end up with ad-hoc, buggy frameworks implemented in them. In other words, the structure is there, you've just reduced your ability to influence it.
A fine criticism but I always see people cite "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and not Reinventing Organizations, a book documenting 12 >50 people companies that run successfully in non-hierarchical ways: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-righ...
Why should centralisation and decentralisation be mutually exclusive? The author makes an excellent point that many things in our society are centralised for the better (police, infrastructure, etc.), but the entire point of those who oppose excess of centralisation online is that people should be able to choose for themselves. There's enough room for both types of services.
The Internet is an uneven playing field - each individual human mind trying to find optimal behaviours against centralised ranks of programmers and algorithms picking them off one by one.
But there is hope - we need to build agents that are designed and regulated to act in our best interests - and operate in a world where certain practises get banned - for example should the price for a given item on an e-commerce site fluctuate each visit making price comparison shopping all but impossible? Should facebook be required to publish the feed in machine readable format so my phone can ignore most of it and let me know if there is anything i want to read by my rules ?
I think Activity Pub would work well if the federation servers were run by real towns / cities / states.
One of the things that I like about Movim[1] is that the servers that are currently running it are literally just named after countries.
If my town can uses tax money to run a server for all residents, I think that's pretty cool.
It feels more subsidiary. It maintains some amount of connection to the real world while also providing a genuine service. It feels more like a road or trash pick up service.
Think lawmakers and operating within the law can be untangled as a separate topic, part of the problem appearing is that the platforms are now using their own set of rules.
This becomes a problem when the platforms are essentially the gateways for the mainstream to access information. The early days of the web had a bit of 'build it and they will come'- if you had something interesting it would eventually get seen and linked to. Now you have to 'pay to play'. There are numerous stats about how much % per dollar goes to Facebook and Google when advertising. If you don't pay, you're much, much less likely to be seen.
The platforms are in a position of power and perhaps regulation can curtail that power. We are essentially looking at the information on the web via a lens that the platforms and their algos provide, and there aren't that many dominant platforms to provide the number of perspectives we perhaps need.
It's easier than ever to get content online thanks to the likes of Wordpress, but harder than ever to get people to see it.
Most webmasters who have an inkling of some information about SEO are too scared to link out in fear of receiving a penalty from Google. Now social media platforms are acting as the Internet police. This kind of thinking stifles the way the web was supposed to work.
I'd probably go even further than the author. Not only is the internet a centralising technology but virtually all technology is centralising. Ted Kaczynski was a little bit crazy but not wrong, technology with its facilitation of scale, interdependence, relationships across space and time and creation of division of labour and complexity creates hierarchies and the need for organisation. The places on earth that are distinctly free of centralisation are places that are in the literal sense of the word primitive.
However unlike Ted and like the author I don't think this is a negative thing. I never understood the sentiment by Barlow mentioned in the article, I just thought it's juvenile. Most people when faced with the decision of living in the frontier town with a gunfight next to your house or suburb where the garbage truck comes every morning chose the latter and I don't blame them
This assume the push for more "moderation" comes from the users of these services.
I'd argue the push for moderation isn't coming from the users, but from various government and media organisations who want to control what information the public is consuming. They have no interest in you being able to click a button and see media outlets reporting on the wrong things.
Personally I believe we need regulation that require these platforms to allow users to opt-out of moderation and timeline manipulation. But again, this assumes those in power have an interest in freedom of speech which isn't the case.
The problem is mismatched incentives. There's no reason for Facebook or Twitter to let you hide content that wastes your time when they profit from wasting your time (a better word for "engagement").
Remove the "engagement" revenue source (or make it unprofitable due to liability, regulation regarding privacy, etc) and most problems with centralized social media will go away (centralization isn't actually that big of an issue - plenty of things we use on a daily basis are centralized and it's not causing any issues as long as incentives are aligned).
It is missing one crucial truth that dispels the thesis: The fact that a social network does not need to be owned by one entity for everyone on it to be able to interact with each other. See Federation[0], federated social networks like Mastodon[1], PeerTube[2], Pleroma: where you have an account on a Mastodon "instance" (computer), but you can talk to anyone speaking the same protocol, ActivityPub[3]. A Mastodon account can follow PeerTube accounts and Pleroma accounts. And no one controls all Mastodon servers, your Mastodon server is controlled by your server administrator.
The author does not seem to understand the internet fundamentally.
Email is an example of a federated communications protocol.
[0]: https://fediverse.party/
[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/
[2]: https://joinpeertube.org/
[3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
Nobody thinks about the security of the users. None of our computers are secure, we all know that. We won't click on links to unfamiliar sites, or open unexpected attachments. There is safety in sticking to stuff that is centrally moderated in terms of just plain malware, if not politics or decency.
I'll be honest and say I lost interest in the article when they made the assumption that Twitter is a news platform. It's not, regardless of what Jack Dorsey says to courts or the US senate. Same for Facebook. These aren't "news platforms" so they can justify their abhorrent behavior, they are vanity communication platforms that have little to no moderation and now that they are starting to moderate their platform from misinformation, the right cries violation of "Freedom of Speech". Freedom of Speech only goes so far as to limit what people can tell you you can say. You can say anything you want. But to say it, or post it, once said, is no longer under your control but society's.
> The dreamers of the decentralized internet now place their hopes in blockchain technology, which promises to break governments’ control of currency and the tech giants’ control of the internet. Many intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and investors, from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have staked their reputation, careers, and plans on this vision.
The article linked for Tim Berners-Lee talks about Solid[0]. Lumping that in with cryptocurrencies is a bit much, unless I'm missing something.
Organized, coordinated power with talent and capital behind it seems to win, and this maps onto the centralized vs. decentralized distinction fairly well. I don't disagree. But in the conclusion, the author talks about finding ways to conceive of a positive future, or what a positive centralized internet looks like, and I'm having a hard time doing so.
To me, the more the internet centralizes, the more likely we get extremes. This means Good Judgment Internet Regime, and it also means Exponential Stasi Regime. I guess we'll see. Anyone have ideas here?
[+] [-] commandlinefan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markvdb|5 years ago|reply
You won't reach Carol Couchpotato, but there will always be a core of people willing to living outside the FAANG coral.
If you care about the decentral internet, set yourself realistic expectations. Work with the coalition of the willing. Make it as welcoming as you can. It'll be fun times!
[+] [-] readme|5 years ago|reply
Set this up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-a-longdis...
I'm game.
[+] [-] treis|5 years ago|reply
Any communication medium that isn't controlled or censored will break under a deluge of spam.
[+] [-] gwright|5 years ago|reply
I suspect that "be careful what you wish for" is applicable to the idea of a communication medium that "nobody can ever control or censor". We already have numerous problems caused by anonymity with our existing infrastructure (DDOS, ransomware, threats, defamation, etc.).
I think neither extreme, a completely anonymous infrastructure or a completely non-anonymous infrastructure, is desirable.
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
Sounds like i2p: https://geti2p.net, except it's done on top of the Internet (but would also work on a mesh network).
[+] [-] TimJRobinson|5 years ago|reply
It can't be censored or shut down because all communication spreads through peers, with few central points that can be blocked.
1. https://scuttlebutt.nz
[+] [-] cdancette|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexmingoia|5 years ago|reply
Centralization of network infrastructure is shaped by the physics and capital costs of communication technology.
[+] [-] joshspankit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeonB|5 years ago|reply
Things centralize, then when the central node gets corrupted, everything is perturbed for a while and somewhat decentralized, until the next centralization begins. Same as disruption theory.
Network effects apply to centralized networks moreso than to decentralized effects. Cost to add a new node to a decentralized network generally remains higher than onboarding a new customer to a centralized network. And that kills it over time.
(Consider for example that the "new node" may be malicious... a decentralized network needs a lot of duplication of effort to fight malicious actors, a central network can do this cheaper over time.)
Even git, built on the very idea of decentralization, centralizes onto github and gets a lot of value out of that.
[+] [-] FerretFred|5 years ago|reply
One possible parallel is that we have many roads/highways all essentially built and controlled by centralised authorities and this is used not only by law-abiding citizens but also by criminals. By criminals you could also include people that don't have the same ideology as the State.
[+] [-] type0|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk
[+] [-] rellekio|5 years ago|reply
The most difficult aspect of this is it is hard to compete against free.
[+] [-] deepstack|5 years ago|reply
The bottom line is that the infrastructure (the cable and the cell towers are centralised). Until we can legally encrypt over Ham radio and quality peer reviewed open sourced post-quantum encryption algorithm Internet is centralised!
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcb1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morceauxdebois|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rblion|5 years ago|reply
Is the Internet itself leading to more freedom or less? Or is it human nature spilling into bits and functions that is?
[+] [-] intended|5 years ago|reply
It seems that New tech has an advantage over the incumbents when
1) The early population of users is all experts or hackers of some sort (so diversity of use cases is low)
2) the regulators, are in no way or form able to project force, because they simply cannot recruit people as fast as new tech firms.
Eventually, the tech firms start hitting various frontiers, either slowing down, or failing and ejecting workers. New classes of workers catch up, and government projects start getting built.
Once the Frontier advantages disappear - the extra degrees of freedom new firms enjoyed get captured or shared with other powers, and become common place. Unless you find new degrees of freedom (With market/rule disrupting power) are found, the new dominant firms and the old political powers will start acting on each other.
This is where we are. The thought of a centralized net is pretty troubling, especially where it will end up as tech develops. It has only been 20 years since 2000 and web 2.0. There are countries which don't know that Facebook isn't the internet.
[+] [-] oblio|5 years ago|reply
Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity.
The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense, so few people care, and I suspect many of them are on this forum.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepstack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] generationP|5 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be surprised if states start playing this game, but if government IT so far has been any indication, the results won't last long. Most likely, servers in rogue countries will be used for all sufficiently hot potatoes (just as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are operating from Russia but used all over the world), whereas the rest of online activity that doesn't fit well into the big walled gardens will keep happening semi-anonymously as it is now. Governments will probably keep downloading and hoarding everything, but this has been going on for years and everyone just adapted. Downloading is but a first step on the long road to controlling (and, unlike the former, the latter cannot easily be automated). Encryption bans will be undermined in practice by steganography, surveillance by fake data, and censorship by various forms of illegibilization. I'm not saying it will be a great world to live in...
[+] [-] jlokier|5 years ago|reply
I don't think "convenience" explains it.
Take for example talking with the local group of emergency food delivery volunteers. I picked that example because if you really need to talk with them, it's not optional.
I can't avoid Facebook to do that. It's not a convenience issue. The local group is on Facebook, so I have to use Facebook to achieve my task. There isn't a "less convenient" alternative for me to use, if I need to talk to those people as a group.
I could try phoning someone in the group, or emailing. That might get something to happen. But it won't let me achieve the basic task, which is to communicate with a particular group of people, i.e. all of them identified by some common interest. The alternatives will just let me talk to one person who is connected to the group, with a different effect.
Well, that's just my side. But can we say the reason the group is on Facebook is due to convenience for the people who created the group?
It's arguable, but I think probably not any more. Most likely, the group was formed on Facebook because the people forming it were already on Facebook due to similar network effect pressures for other things they got involved in at some time, and for this new group, if they picked a different platform, a lot of people they want to reach wouldn't have the same level of access to the service they aim to provide. The task for them was to pick a platform lots of local people could realistically join. If they had picked some forum on a private domain, or even a mailing list these days, realistically it wouldn't have been as effective for the service they are aiming to provide locally.
So it's network effects over many layers, and I don't think it's accurate to sum that up as convenience any more.
[+] [-] Thorentis|5 years ago|reply
For instance, a single company could deploy a decentralised system. It may suit their use case better, be more fault tolerant, whatever. But they still control all of it. If they want to take the system down, there's nothing about it being decentralised that prevents them from doing that.
The same thing happens with decentralised internet services. Yes, many services are decentralised. But it ends up being easier letting a small number of groups control the majority of the nodes. This is just centralisation with extra steps.
Take Cloudflare for instance. It's decentralised, there are servers everywhere, it makes the internet for resilient and faster. But if Cloudflare decided it wanted to take a piece of content down, they could do so right away (cache times notwithstanding).
Solving the centralised control problem is very different to creating good decentralised architectures. Most tech people focus on the latter and think in doing so they have solved the former (they haven't).
[+] [-] ColanR|5 years ago|reply
Maybe what we mean when we say we want a 'decentralized internet' is implicitly, that we want the popular nodes of the Internet Graph to be decentralized. That would be nice.
But I think we could realize that right now, the Internet is comprised of a ton of competing protocols, and as long as there's a translation interface that enables cross-communication, the internet will remain decentralized. That's impressive resillience. Kudos to the designers.
It seems to me that what would actually bring the most benefit to the structure of the Internet would be long-range wireless communication. Basically, the ability to use HAM radio to bypass ISPs. That would bring about a sea change in how the Internet is structured.
[+] [-] sjy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luthfur|5 years ago|reply
My point is that the pendulum will swing away again. It's already happening. Blogging, podcasts and a long-tail of businesses that are not Facebook or Google are thriving. In some sense they never went away in the first place. In the coming years, this long-tail is likely to garner a lot more attention than it has so far.
[+] [-] giantrobot|5 years ago|reply
You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites.
The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel.
Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.
[+] [-] notJim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Glench|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qsort|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
But there is hope - we need to build agents that are designed and regulated to act in our best interests - and operate in a world where certain practises get banned - for example should the price for a given item on an e-commerce site fluctuate each visit making price comparison shopping all but impossible? Should facebook be required to publish the feed in machine readable format so my phone can ignore most of it and let me know if there is anything i want to read by my rules ?
[+] [-] olah_1|5 years ago|reply
One of the things that I like about Movim[1] is that the servers that are currently running it are literally just named after countries.
If my town can uses tax money to run a server for all residents, I think that's pretty cool.
It feels more subsidiary. It maintains some amount of connection to the real world while also providing a genuine service. It feels more like a road or trash pick up service.
[1]: https://movim.eu/#try
[+] [-] ricardo81|5 years ago|reply
This becomes a problem when the platforms are essentially the gateways for the mainstream to access information. The early days of the web had a bit of 'build it and they will come'- if you had something interesting it would eventually get seen and linked to. Now you have to 'pay to play'. There are numerous stats about how much % per dollar goes to Facebook and Google when advertising. If you don't pay, you're much, much less likely to be seen.
The platforms are in a position of power and perhaps regulation can curtail that power. We are essentially looking at the information on the web via a lens that the platforms and their algos provide, and there aren't that many dominant platforms to provide the number of perspectives we perhaps need.
It's easier than ever to get content online thanks to the likes of Wordpress, but harder than ever to get people to see it.
Most webmasters who have an inkling of some information about SEO are too scared to link out in fear of receiving a penalty from Google. Now social media platforms are acting as the Internet police. This kind of thinking stifles the way the web was supposed to work.
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
However unlike Ted and like the author I don't think this is a negative thing. I never understood the sentiment by Barlow mentioned in the article, I just thought it's juvenile. Most people when faced with the decision of living in the frontier town with a gunfight next to your house or suburb where the garbage truck comes every morning chose the latter and I don't blame them
[+] [-] phkahler|5 years ago|reply
Well that's what twitter, facebook and the rest are. They're just not small and they're not republics.
[+] [-] username3|5 years ago|reply
Twitter has a toggle for obscene material. Give us a toggle for misinformation.
[+] [-] kypro|5 years ago|reply
I'd argue the push for moderation isn't coming from the users, but from various government and media organisations who want to control what information the public is consuming. They have no interest in you being able to click a button and see media outlets reporting on the wrong things.
Personally I believe we need regulation that require these platforms to allow users to opt-out of moderation and timeline manipulation. But again, this assumes those in power have an interest in freedom of speech which isn't the case.
[+] [-] mattowen_uk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
Remove the "engagement" revenue source (or make it unprofitable due to liability, regulation regarding privacy, etc) and most problems with centralized social media will go away (centralization isn't actually that big of an issue - plenty of things we use on a daily basis are centralized and it's not causing any issues as long as incentives are aligned).
[+] [-] hawkoy|5 years ago|reply
https://getaether.net/
[+] [-] December_Stars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|5 years ago|reply
Nobody thinks about the security of the users. None of our computers are secure, we all know that. We won't click on links to unfamiliar sites, or open unexpected attachments. There is safety in sticking to stuff that is centrally moderated in terms of just plain malware, if not politics or decency.
[+] [-] gabereiser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anderspitman|5 years ago|reply
The article linked for Tim Berners-Lee talks about Solid[0]. Lumping that in with cryptocurrencies is a bit much, unless I'm missing something.
[0]: https://inrupt.com/solid
[+] [-] hyperion2|5 years ago|reply
To me, the more the internet centralizes, the more likely we get extremes. This means Good Judgment Internet Regime, and it also means Exponential Stasi Regime. I guess we'll see. Anyone have ideas here?