Overall, this made me wonder - given the current state of the internet (rampant AI cannibalizing its own training data, everything being forced to clouds/server farms to discourage ownership of both your own data, software and hardware, …) - why not start fresh and try again with an alternative, decentralized internet with some securities built-in to prevent a second big tech takeover of it.
Apart from the philosophical part, I am generally interested in the hardware and software requirements to set this up in a scalable way. For instance if some users on this forum or me and some friends would want to set this up, would we be able to rely on just running this on personal computers/consumer hardware (while this still exists) or again fall into the trap of relying on powerful servers that are centralized somewhere and increasingly controlled by ISPs controlling the network you need, 3rd party hosts controlling the servers, …
Curious to hear if some of you already have such a setup and otherwise some thoughts. And while full privacy is nice, it might be worthwhile to consider the dark side of having people share stuff in the shadows that is not OK.
The internet is fundamentally already inherently decentralized but nothing is immune to corruption or abuse. I’m afraid the philosophical part would be all that differs, the scalable hardware and software you’re looking for already exists. It’s people gravitating towards centralized services on the internet that seems to be the issue you’re looking to solve but I don’t think that problem has a technical solution. It’s right in the name, “re-decentralize” implies that the internet was inherently decentralized from inception.
The lack of decentralisation, and the rise of caching CDN’s, have further centralised control of the web, to just a few companies, like cloudflare.
They do an amazing job, making the web a MUCH faster, responsive, fluid experience.
We have become used to the speed which the CDNs allow
Unfortunately, if one actually went back to a decentralised network, one may loose the snappiness, immediately responsiveness that one has gotten used to.
Anyone who chooses to switch, knowingly, will understand and (I presume) accept the quality of service, as a necessary part of removing such fundamental control from the few companies that basically “are” running the web.
(Apologies for confusing “web” and “internet”… I mix them up)
I think that there is some merit to individuals, and organizations for that matter. looking into ways to use alternatives to provide some level of connectivity even if you can not be reached on the internet.
I have been exploring the world of LoRa handheld communications recently, fascinating stuff. the bandwidth is fairly low. but interesting none-the-less. its faster than dial up at least.
This is that “pod” thing right? I heard about it quite a long time ago and signed up but nothing ever came of it. Which is sad, but in the end it wouldnt matter anyway. This would end in the exact same way we already have laws now that require acceptance of cookies and features before the companies are allowed to access y your specific data or tracking cookie info, but if you dont accept then the website simply wont load for you or you get told you are not allowed to use the site unless you accept.
The problem is, genie’s out of the bottle with regard to legislation; even if Solid came to be, governments would immediately slap their Online Safety Act-equivalent all over anybody who tried to provide a communication service on there. As soon as it became apparent that they wouldn’t be able to actively control a completely decentralised system, they’d just make it illegal to provide any services to people who haven’t verified their age or authenticated with their government ID, and start chipping away at it until they’ve smothered it before it truly had a chance to live.
That’s the trouble with this new breed of laws: they don’t need to be able to detect usage in the past, they just need to prove that it happened at some point and then they can get on with the sentencing.
I have to say, I’ve been wondering about Meshtastic et al - it’s like going back 30 years in terms of data rates, but…is that necessarily a bad thing? Out of the many-MB that just viewing a single text-based page forces you to download, how much actually ends up as useful visible information?
Let’s face it, a decentralised radio mesh made up entirely of DIY nodes is going to be a lot harder to break than an physical network that - no matter how you cut it - is always going to be centralised at least at a local level (ISPs, datacentres etc).
Really interesting stuff here! Indeed the reliance on cables makes the current internet quite vulnerable in general I suppose.
I was not aware of Meshtastic and similar initiatives. This is interesting, reminds me a bit of Dorsey’s Bitchat service (although I am not a huge Bluetooth fan).
Would it perhaps be more viable to create a hybrid here, for instance take the way of working from something like the Dark Web for the wired part running on the existing network infrastructure, but have some sort of “keys” on a separate, alternative network such as the mesh one? Not sure if this makes any sense or if there are better alternatives.
If I’m understanding this thought experiment, in order for it to be truly decentralized it couldn’t be dependent on existing infra (e.g. power, data, regulation…) but could benefit from them under conditions that maintain decentralization (i.e. fail over). It sounds a lot like Tor that fails over to Meshtastic.
I fall more on @tk11 's line of thought; what we’re facing is a behavioural issue, not technical. Even if we did successfully start a “decentralization” movement, over time consolidation would occur once more. And the bureaucrats would clamp down on the network again.
As usual, there always is CB and ham radios. I’ve heard of VarAC, which is a chat app over standard amateur radio signals. But I haven’t tested it myself, yet.
Indeed - because some level of consolidation is convenient and even desirable, because of naturally-uneven distribution of resources. The problem is that humans will always find a justification for taking anything to its extreme, and then using that extreme to game what little is left of the system.
I never looked at it from this perspective, but it does make sense to consider this more as a human behavioural issue than something limited by technology. If people would be again in control of their own data, I can imagine it would indeed not take them long before starting to centralise it or trade this in again for convenience, security or other benefits.
Perhaps a bit of the tribal mentality where individual freedom was traded in for security and which was then (ab)used to form governments, bureaucracy, organised religion and elevate the people involved above their fellow men in escalating fashion an create levels, divisions and monopolies.
So I guess as long as we do not find a way to raise awareness and induce a behavioural change, any platform that is established will eventually fall victim to this. This turned out more philosophical than I expected, but interesting one nonetheless .
The idea of a more decentralized internet is an interesting idea. I had this thought many years ago when John McAfee first talked about his idea called D-Central, which was like a 1/4 mile or so range wifi router basically. At the time I was also learning about pirate box, darknets, DMZ and other things. In any case. I could see a more modern decentralized internet or maybe local wide web (instead of World) using something like Hallowlink2. People could host public info servers in something like a DMZ for others to take, maybe a place to dump info to share with the host of a node. I dunno, I am sorta imagining what would it be like if there was no internet in the current state, or so untrustworthy as to not be worth it. Like in a world without the internet, info like wikipedia could be useful to share for others.
However I dont actually think it will be a thing personally. By the time the masses think or learn something like that is needed for their daily life, it will likely be too hard or impossible to do. But maybe that’s a bit too tinfoil hat of a thought.
Everyone with a wifi router is about an hour away from already qualifying as their own fully independent intranet. Just setup a local web or media server and unplug the WAN. Maybe you allow others to connect, maybe you allow them to run their own servers… maybe you don’t, it’s your network.
The best decentralized hardware/software remains based on the good old TCP/IP protocol suite though.
Tunnelling is for protecting the individual, or individual services. Decentralisation prevents bad actors from shutting the entire shebang down or controlling it.
Alot of the perceived problems here are because of how TCP/IP works. There are technologies that address a lot of the issues identified here, and even have interoperability with the TCP/IP based internet as it currently stands via bridge gateways like NDN.
The inventers of the internet themselves are driving this move away from TCP/IP.
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