

Unhosted: a protocol for decentralized web apps - clofresh
http://unhosted.org/

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rwhitman
Something about the way this is written just seems to make it really
confusing.

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mayank
From the article:

> If you are able to write an unhosted web app, then you will be one of the
> first people in the world to have done that.

Doesn't really inspire much faith in the idea.

Also, I'm a little tired of seeing this refrain:

> There is a limited number of big centralized websites, that we all connect
> to. This is not how the web was intended to be.

They are big and centralized because they did something well, and it's natural
for users to flock to something that is good (or at least innovative). I don't
see anything wrong with that. Should these big centralized websites turn evil,
vote with your traffic. If you don't, then clearly the benefit you're getting
from the evil website outweighs your desire to stop using it.

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loup-vaillant
You don't see anything wrong with that? _Really_? Then, either you're an
ignorant fool, or you're okay with (among other things) Gmail analysing your
whole correspondence, Hotmail looking at the cookies of its partners'
websites, Facebook's ever-changing un-privacy policy, Google keeping web
searches for months in a not-at-all-anonymous way, and users ignoring a large
parts of all that. Or you didn't _really_ try to see what's wrong. Or you're
lying to yourself, or to _us_. Or you casually threw a cached thought to make
your point. Or _something_.

Also, if people don't vote with their traffic, that's because they're hooked.
Immediate costs (switching) are always overestimated, and long term benefits
(privacy) are always underestimated. Only _perceived_ benefits and costs can
influence a decision. People's perceptions are off, therefore they make bad
decisions, therefore big companies own them.

Finally, if we had symmetrical, unfiltered broadband from the start, along
with easy to use mail and web servers, then self hosting would have been
ubiquitous by now. Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube wouldn't even exist (search
engines still resist to decentralization, though). _That_ is the way the
entire internet (not only the web) intended to remain (not just be: back when
it wasn't widespread, it was fully decentralized).

You are tired of seeing this refrain? I, am tired of seeing comments that
assume it's false, without having the guts to state it clearly. Really, do you
actually think the web was _intended_ to be roughly a limited number of high
traffic web site? Side question: do you think that's better than a more evenly
distributed model? Or even good? Personally, I think it's unintended, worse,
and bad. You know some of my arguments. I have another one: raw efficiency. A
centralized web creates choke points in the network, and hurts peerage
agreements. That is costly to ISPs, which then are tempted to relinquish
Internet Neutrality to recover the loss. Carry out that trend to its ultimate
conclusion, and the Internet as we know it will be replaced by an AOL-like
network. Such a thing will still be called "internet", and it will still be IP
based. But it would have lost it's most interesting property: letting the
people write freely.

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mayank
Nice rant.

------
there
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2021908>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2063616>

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j_baker
You know, I'm not one to complain about duplication, but I think it's a bit
excessive to have the same thing submitted three times in less than a month.

