can someone explain why anyone would need this? just like bitcoin, the time you really need it is to avoid government oversight or censorship. if successful, wouldnt we all see the black market thrive while all regular use cases for the internet would continue on the regular distributed internet?
Your bandwidth at home would determine if your profile was reachable. If something you post goes viral, just imagine the fun your family will have as their available bandwidth
slows to almost nothing!
There might be competition on providing a nice "experience" but you would either pay for it, have it be ad-supported or it'd turn in to a Linux-desktop shitshow.
Imagine how much more fun spam filtering could be if it didn't have a dedicated team but it would just be you (or your grandmother) going up against the legions of determined spammers.
> Your grandmother would have to run her own node!
Answered by others.
...
> There might be competition on providing a nice "experience" but you would either pay for it,
... yes please
> have it be ad-supported
... our only choice with the current Facebook
> or it'd turn in to a Linux-desktop shitshow.
... and this is were you earned my downvote. Stop spreading FUD. Please! The Linux desktop is quite usable to the point were many of us prefer it over Windows or Mac.
> Imagine how much more fun spam filtering could be if it didn't have a dedicated team but it would just be you (or your grandmother) going up against the legions of determined spammers.
Indeed, and so can I. However, there is a huge crowd outside of HN that is neither capable of running their own servers, nor are they remotely interested in learning to do so.
Also, I would argue that in practice email is very much centralized, with a few large providers that manage all the complexity for their users (such as spam blocking and maintaining servers).
The point is that social networking could become a decentralized protocol similar to email. Imagine browsing something that looks just like Facebook but underneath each friend's profile it would say "Hosted by Facebook" or "Hosted by Microsoft" or "Hosted by [Startup]". It's feasible technically although Facebook's closed network effect is extremely strong.
As long as our legal structure allows walled gardens and enforced incompatibility, that's what we'll get.
We need to look at websites as service providers/data carriers akin to telcos. The government has issued a slew of regulations to prevent artificially strong network lock-in with telcos, mandating wireless number portability and certain levels of device compatibility.
We need to recognize that Facebook is not a content creator as such, but a neutral carrier who transmits the data generated by its users, and that the users need their freedom and mobility to be respected if we're going to have a free and competitive market in cyberspace. There is no good reason that Facebook or Google should have such excessive unnatural ownership and access blockage rights.
n.b.: I say this as someone who is very conservative politically. Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly that we have let run far afield.
I don't resent property ownership in the slightest, nor do I resent profit-making. I do resent an oligopoly exploiting regulatory capture and public technical ignorance (cf. Clarke's Law) to pass laws that allow them to arbitrarily and brutally crush innovative and competitive entrepreneurs.
The government is involved. The CFAA and similar laws allow Facebook et al to crush anyone who attempts to break their stranglehold. That's exactly the problem. Alternatives to Facebook that may have otherwise been wildly successful were sued out of existence this way.
The government has given Facebook offensive weapons against competitors. They either need to respond by giving the consumer defensive weapons against corporations whose zeal for intellectual property seeks to block or subsume the consumer's access to the marketplace, or they need to remove their interference all together.
Was. Now it's mostly Gmail, and even if you do run your own SMTP server,
you're still dancing to Google's tune or else your mail lands marked as spam
for many (most?) of your recipients, and even then you don't have any
guarantee and you don't have diagnostic tools why Gmail acts on your mail as
it does.
Had you read the article you would know that blockstack doesn't require running your own node but instead repurposes cloud storage providers such as Dropbox.
> Your grandmother would have to run her own node!
Imagine if she had to have her own USPS mailbox, or worse, if she had to setup and manage a globally visible server[1] on an incredibly complex circuit-switched telephony network. POTS telephone service used to be more complicated, but it quickly became very easy to setup and use because a lot of the complexity was successfully hidden behind various goods and services.
The same should be true for basic network, but true network software was only developed for professional or niche use cases because NAT severely damaged the network. Imagine if the telephone network was almost always "party lines"[2] in residential areas. Entire categories of telephone-related goods and services wouldn't have happened.
> as their available bandwidth slows to almost nothing!
That's why there used to be a lot of research into different types of multicast[3]
routing. We even see
> pay for it
Just like POTS.
> you would either ... or it'd turn
You're trying to apply examples from our current, highly centralized network services, when a truly decentralized Facebook would be very different, both as a service and the environment in which the service exists.
[1] where "server" is anything that listens for requests (in this case, the "called party")
>> can someone explain why anyone would need this?
> Imagine if Facebook was decentralized. You could own your data.
But is blockchain really an effective solution for this kind of use cases? Can't you own your data without it? Isn't it too expensive and redundant?
I can see a value in a blockchain based DNS alternative (though it would be useless without mass adoption). But Facebook killer platform in my opinion can have only one reason to use blockchain: just to use blockchain.
This is a political and legal problem, not a technical one. The internet already has the ability to make Facebook "decentralized". People have tried it to varying extents, and they've either languished outside of the walled garden or gotten crushed by Facebook's lawyers when they've tried to make runs to the inside for data (cf. Facebook v. Power Ventures).
Our choice to analogize requests to a public HTTP server as trespass to physical property has deeply constrained the growth of the internet as a free platform that benefits its users.
The EU has new data portability restrictions going in next year, and these may help some, but they aren't quite strong enough to resolve the issue.
The same sort of competition that brought us gimps old UI? And gits various laggy gui-software?
Yep. It seems to be well aligned with those who actually cared.
Often when a project gets to focused on ux it goes downhill IMO. Ref gnome spatial revelation etc.
Im sorry, but when it comes to UI- i'm for some mighty fascistic designer taking it all into his hands.
Fine. As long as there are alternatives for the rest of us.
Example: As far as I'm aware Mac OS X is really good - but I don't like it. I really want it to be there for people who like it, but I'm happy that Windows and a number of Lknux distros exist for people like me.
We need this because internet is currently centralized and an authority in power can control the flow of information. Blockstack aims to provide decentralized internet using blockchain and that is a good thing as it makes the internet stronger.
Any new tech "using blockchain" is a non-starter for general use; they are constraining themselves automatically by adopting "blockchain" technology.
People assume that "blockchain" is inherently good due to the buzz created by rampant speculation among Bitcoin traders, but the blockchain itself is an experimental platform that is dubiously fitted even to the narrow constraints of bitcoin, let alone forming the foundation of a "new internet".
