“We Need To Rewild The Internet”
An absolutely excellent read (and great analogy) by @mariafarrell and @robin Probably the best piece I’ve read all year.
I often struggle to think of a term for “appearing messy from a distance is often, on a human scale, healthy actually.” Comparing the social web to an ecosystem is exactly it.
@JustinH @mariafarrell @fediverse Thank you! Yes — “this chaotic-seeming thing is good, actually” is a tough message :)
@robin @mariafarrell @fediverse Yes! Sometimes people lament the loss of an internet “monoculture” but I see that as an indicator of maturity and health.
Is there anything individual users can do?
@Amphobet Well, I think just participating in the Fediverse is a good start. It’s certainly “wild” out here. For example we’re not even using the same apps to talk with each other! Imagine Twitter being interoperable with Reddit, and how different and inventive things can be when humans aren’t forced into silos.
I’m building a sort of new internet protocol, so that we can do away with registrars and dns servers (so everyone can have their “web site”). But I’m quite abysmal when it comes to get people interested :-p
You’re doing what again?! Insert obligatory 15 standards XKCD (edited because you can’t link images directly?)
Jokes aside, tell us more!
Ha ha yeah if there were only more competition :-D
The idea is people run nodes (the hard part: routing incoming internet traffic to your PC) and nodes chit chat (any new nodes? Hey I just changed IP address!, … etc) so that there is a lots if known nodes. Identities rely on RSA keys (like ssh does).
Then on top of that (thus making it useful) you can propose a deal for another node: you share my data and I’ll share yours.
Which means people can access your data from your PC or from that other node sharing it for you.
Share it with several nodes (you obviously are sharing theirs) and there will a very high probability your data is accessible all the time.
The sharing is completely trust-less, if a node stops sharing your data, you just stops sharing theirs and gets a new partner, no hard feelings.
Added bonus is that it might be shared all over the world, so hard to take down.
All traffic and data is encrypted, so no node even knows what they are sharing.
You can change IP:port address, and update your data easily (that was the big work to be fair).
That’s about it, the implementation is written in python3 + cryptodome and uses RSA & AES-CTR.
The basic use could be to host a website, or a chat for example.
What do you think?
You should check out https://solidproject.org/ and see how much overlap you have?
Interesting!
I poked around in the (slightly verbose) documentation and stumbled onto this:
Servers should not re-use URIs, regardless of the mechanism by which resources are created. Certain specific cases exist where URIs may be reinstated when it identifies the same resource,
So I wonder if it has the same inbuilt limitation that IPFS has, which means you cannot just update the data you are sharing, without also having to create a whole new link (I know IPFS are trying to work around that, but have seen no decentralised solution yet).
I’ll poke around some more!
Thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard of them before.
Cheers
Isn’t that what Freenet or ToR do in a similar way? https://staging.freenetproject.org/pages/download.html https://www.torproject.org/
Though I guess with yours its smaller on the scale of individuals interacting.
Now this is interesting, I know about Tor ofc, with all problems surrounding it (exit nodes etc) but I guess an onion website could be made well protected and shared & updated. You have to host it yourself though I guess.
Freenet, gotta dig down and see how it works under the surface, it looks very promising but it’s kind of complex and I haven’t yet figured out if it is all benevolent sharing for example and what happend if some random node sharing your stuff goes offline.
Very interesting!
I think (I’ll dig more to see if it stands) my advantage would be the redundancy (so the data always stays up and is hard to take down), the no need of benevolent nodes, and potentially the ease if use.
Thanks!
