
Distributed Everything - gwenbell
https://medium.com/surveillance-state/19a5db211e47
======
RyanZAG
_" IRC. Everyone who wants to make sure their messages land use IRC as a
backchannel now."_

No, damnit. IRC is logged, double logged, and then has all of the logs shipped
offsite to be engraved in bedrock. IRC servers, because of their history in
pirated content, are very heavily controlled by law enforcement. A huge number
of raids have been carried out around the world based off what people have
said on IRC.

IRC is very much not the solution to the widespread monitoring of facebook.

~~~
jaryd
A lot of my friends who use IRC as a primary communication channel will stick
to invite-only self-hosted SILC IRC networks. These are essentially 1 step
above darknet (eg: local IRCd), and are a far cry from the efnets of the IRC-
verse.

~~~
RyanZAG
All it takes is a warrant and a plea bargain, and your private 'darknet'
(haha) irc server is now a honeypot collecting all the traffic you thought was
private. The more popular an easily controlled solution like private IRC
servers become, the greater the advantage for law enforcement and others to
control them.

End-to-end encryption is a requirement for secure communication. Anything less
is the same as scribbling on paper and tossing it to the recipient, and hoping
nobody catches it on the way.

~~~
pyre
As long as we can all agree not to get complacent, it's a step in the right
direction. Arguing that people need to go form 0 to 60 in under a second isn't
going to get us anywhere.

For example, if you want to convince someone to become a vegan, which path is
more likely to succeed:

    
    
      Omnivore => Vegan
    

or:

    
    
      Omnivore => Vegetarian => Vegan
    

or even:

    
    
      Omnivore => No red meat => Only fish => Vegetarian => Vegan

~~~
PavlovsCat
On the other hand.. what's easier, convincing someone to change a habit once,
or convincing them four times?

~~~
iandundas
Some diet habits are harder to persuade, and many won't stick with them. So
anything is something.

~~~
PavlovsCat
_anything is something_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum)

------
chipsy
Recently I've been fascinated by the concept of individuals having a "private
cloud" service - a server that they own or rent, which has all the data that
an individual could hope to have centralized, contains APIs and UI for remote
access from client devices, and acts as the middleman for most transactions
with the outside world.

The beauty of this is that if it were developed as a unified system, minimal
tinkering would be necessary for a layman user. A preinstalled, auto-updating
OS would do the heavy lifting - we're aiming for a situation where a bare
minimum of configuration becomes necessary. Once configuration is done, all
the user needs to know to reach _all_ of their data is a URL and a password.
The server itself can (ultimately) become the identity service for all remote
accounts.

It has a straightforward progression of development and adoption, too. Create
a web app that kludges together some messaging, identity, and storage
solutions - the stuff needed to do this at an 80% level already exists, for
the most part. Package it into an image installable on a VPS. Subsequently,
make native apps for the client devices, or adapt existing ones, to match the
experience of Dropbox/GTalk/etc. Last, build a hosting service or sell
hardware tailored around simplifying the configuration process, providing
backups, etc. As you get further into the adoption process, more and more
possibilities to reclaim data open up, since you'll hit the critical masses
necessary to push new protocols into the system.

~~~
amirmc
Yup, this is the kind of thing I'm working on at the moment and I'm finding
that other folks are thinking along similar lines (but taking different
approaches). The first application we want to build on top of the underlying
'private cloud' is email.

My viewpoint is that to do this properly, we need to think through things from
the ground up with privacy and security built in, otherwise I don't see it as
that much better than current systems (you'd just be getting the _illusion_ of
security/ownership/etc). It's really not the kind of system that lends itself
to the mantra of 'move fast and break things'. Such software would also have
to be open-source (to a large extent) so that others can verify security or
people can deploy it to their own machines (I'd personally prefer a hosted
version, knowing that I can migrate off if I want to).

The question is what kinds of business model can one build around such a
product. Would you be willing to pay for such a service? If so, how much and
what features would you expect from an early version? Would an app-store model
make sense to you?

In any case, if you or anyone else is interested in finding out more about the
work (esp alpha releases), feel free to drop me an email (in my profile).

~~~
metabren

      > from the ground up with privacy and security built in
    

Couldn't agree more!

    
    
      > I'm finding that other folks are thinking along similar lines 
      > (but taking different approaches)
    

Not sure if this is the right place for it but does anyone have a list of all
these similar projects? I know of:

* ArkOS [[https://arkos.io](https://arkos.io)]

* FreedomBox [[https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/](https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/)]

Seems to me that something like this can be built faster if resources were
combined in some way. I guess the tough thing here is that people seem to have
different visions as to what the end product would look like. Perhaps effort
would be best expended by collaborating on a solid, secure "base" image which
could then be forked as needed.

\---

My ideal system would:

* Be open source.

* Be built with a security mindset from the ground up.

* Have some sort of full system/drive encryption.

* Run on something like a Raspberry Pi with local storage attached.

* Have one identity per-person for social use (public/private blog, private chat, private audio/video calling, private email, private sharing of photos, videos, private VRM [1])

* Have the ability to spawn off anonymous identities that would not be traceable back to your IP/device for anonymous publishing/chat/email where required.

* Be easy enough that I can give one to my parents, create accounts for them, show them once how to use it and then forget about it.

* Have all of this backed up through some distributed, encrypted system like SpaceMonkey [2].

* A possible late addition for mass adoption - the software could "trick" users into doing things they shouldn't (in a controlled way) and then after they've done this, tell them that what _could_ have happened would have been quite serious (such as giving some . This would lead to more careful behaviour in general by all that use the software, which could only be a good thing.

Anyone know of such a system in the works? I'd love to contribute.

[1] VRM - Vendor Relationship Management. Keeps track of who you've shared
your personal details with, generates a unique email for each "connection"
(where connections can be you telling someone to flick you an email or you
signing up to a site) in order to cut off communication at your convenience,
not theirs. Sharing of personal details (such as name, birthday etc.) for
sites that require it would initially be done directly, eventually moving to a
system where this software IS the proxy by which third parties communicate
with you (physical mail, messages, phone calls etc.). No more spam!

[2] [http://www.spacemonkey.com/](http://www.spacemonkey.com/)

~~~
huntaub
Looking over your list of things in your "ideal system", I know that we are
attempting to build something like that at Airdispatch
([http://airdispat.ch](http://airdispat.ch)) - feel free to give it a look,
and let me know what you think (my email is in my profile).

------
shortformblog
I think while there's a valid point in here, it strikes me as kind of harsh
towards the larger public, which has never heard of IRC … for a reason. It's a
great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. Which is why it's
essentially stayed around as more of a backchannel than anything else.

Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed
and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially
calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems
counterproductive to your ultimate goals.

Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech
skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is
made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll
let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this.

If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he
doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance
he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime
soon.

You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up
solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the
button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is
counterproductive and will get you nowhere.

~~~
williamcotton
> It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical.

IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently
the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with
the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services
like Twitter and Facebook. :)

~~~
shortformblog
The teen chatters of the world—the ones who set the cultural trends—got a
handle on it, but did their parents? :)

~~~
nine_k
The parents often don't catch on Twitter either.

I think it's mostly due to a different communication culture, not technical
ineptitude.

~~~
ams6110
Parents who are grownups are too busy to fool with nonsense like Facebook and
Twitter.

------
donaldguy
He is missing an important point here that is well illustrated by his coffee
metaphor: I don't go to Starbucks, but I don't make my espresso drinks at home
either -- I go to smaller coffee shops for two things: convenience, which he
acknowledges, and what he ignores -- specialized expertise.

I could spend time learning how to make a good latte or mocha at home, but
right now I don't want to; I have better things to do. And in the short term,
what I could manage by myself probably won't be as good what I get poured at
the small shop down the street.

Similarly, everyone who wants to write online could learn all the web tech,
but using Medium is, yes, easier, but also probably results in a higher
quality product (in both presentation and especially distribution) than what
they will manage on their own in the short term. There is expertise that's
gone into Medium that many writers don't have or want to acquire (yet).

Sure censorship can be an issue, but I don't believe that these skills are
becoming impossible to pick up when they become needed, as he seems to imply.
Use Medium or Svbtle or whatever while they work and move off when they
actually become a problem, or simple when your time and interests change
enough that you actually want to pick up web development (or espresso brewing)
expertise.

~~~
ISL
A small coffee shop would align with the author's intent. The post favors
distribution over centralization; federation, so long as it's into small-
enough chunks, tends to do the same thing.

~~~
donaldguy
But at the moment, Medium is a small(er) platform. If my local coffee shop
does a hugely successful business and is pushed by the market or management
decisions to resemble the Starbucks he describes, I will probably find a new
one.

I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just
cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams)
started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what
Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at
least. But maybe that makes me foolish.

------
Detrus
The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same
problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How
to be go to places.

Poogle Glus, F __*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is
paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address /contact
book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old
websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it.

It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks
when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry
porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems
of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse.

A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all
the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble.
Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare
bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish.

Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental
design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.

~~~
nine_k
Who exactly needs attention, and from whom?

* Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them.

* "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people.

* Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them.

* People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives.

Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux
had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an
open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is
good (lower prices, more openness).

But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of
non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of
censorship) may be one of such things.

~~~
Detrus
Businesses don't get the attention they want and have little idea if the
attention they get from spamvertising are curious page views, capable buyers
or people that think their business is crazy.

Quite a common theme on HN.

Also having to know the name of a business to search for them biases
everything towards big players. Good luck remembering these
[http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.pn...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.png)
when you need them.

Impossible to remember app/startup names are one of the failures of the web's
design. And the design of computers in general. When I need contacts or video
chat I shouldn't have to memorize brands like Facetwitter or Skype, only
contacts and video chat. New players that improve on those services can live
under those tags.

Top bloggers and news services are adopting content farm tactics because
that's the model that fits the web. So journalism/news that the web was
supposed to liberate from censorship and centralization are declining in
quality and usefulness because of the current web's design pays them through
ad impressions.

Commercial advantage of a new model for the web has to be significant and
decentralization could be a feature but I don't think THE feature. For Linux
customization, price reduction and feature parity were THE feature. In the
early days it didn't have feature parity. A new model getting feature parity
with the current web seems like a harder task.

------
xtc
Shameless self-promotion while also using the same service you denounce. Why
did you post your criticism of Medium on Medium? You wanted a larger audience
to hear your opinion. That's what the majority of writers on services like
Medium are aiming for. Plenty of people currently joining Medium in troves are
probably just as capable of creating their own blog, and I wouldn't be
surprised if a majority of them use both. Syndicated sites are where people
come to have their voice heard. Just like how this was posted on Hacker News,
a central site where like-minded individuals enjoy viewing pertinent
information and have a larger discussion about these matters. Isn't that one
of the primary functions of the internet?

Plus, using names like 'Shitter' and 'F __*book ' made me discredit your
argument rather quick, personally. What's next, is 'Micro$oft' also keeping
you down? Or would you rather everyone create their own OS?

On another note, IRC is a safe-haven? That's fascinating news.

------
waffle_ss
The founding fathers set up America as a distributed system. It's no accident
that as the federal government has taken more power from the states that it
has gone to shit.

~~~
mtgx
I think there needs to be a strong balance. For example, I think the
"centralization" of EU has been great for unifying citizens across the
continent, unifying trade, making it easy to travel and work in other
countries, and perhaps the most important aspect - stopping European wars.

So far it seems like a pretty democratic system, and the laws tend to be much
better, and with a lot more _common sense_ than the ones being passed in US
right now. But I'd be really wary about making it anymore centralized than it
is.

~~~
nine_k
_Removing barriers_ is a good thing. So removal of trade tariffs and border
checks and visas within EC is a good thing.

Centralized rule is usually less beneficial, to say the least. Besides adding
another layer of bureaucrats that need to be fed, it _removes diversity_. If,
for instance, you think that legalization of marijuana in Netherlands is a
good thing, imagine a EC directive that overrlues this decision.

The most historically successful of surviving democracies, Switzerland (850
years of largely uninterrupted democracy) is hugely decentralized, with most
decisions made by voting or referenda on municipal or cantonal level. Not
coincidentally, it sports huge differences in local laws: e.g. such a basic
thing as women suffrage took 25 years to be gradually accepted in all cantons.

If you want a strongly centralized, standardized government, take a look at
USSR (late) or China (quite alive).

------
DanielBMarkham
I liked it. Couple of notes.

The internet was more distributed and _protocols were way more flexible_.
Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just
TCP/IP.

The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as
"locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return
html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location.

An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed
up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game
played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is
just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of
every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers.

Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize
all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take
advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks
and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different
spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on
Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is
desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off
making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left
us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's
words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse.

But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their
marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the
problem. It is not the problem.

------
n0on3
you know the kind of solution you come up with when you just realized you made
some terrible mistake and adrenaline keeps flowing no matter how much you try
to stay calm? this is exactly how this post looks like to me. Don't get me
wrong, you are damned right. But unfortunately it's nothing new, we saw
similar trends in the past with other media and you know what.. people will
read your piece, say you are brilliant, then forget about it and keep doing
what feel more comfortable to them, which in the end it's just the way they
learned to live. Nodejs, HTML5 and CSS3.. seriously? Well done catching the
problem in its n-th instance, but encouraging people to develop tech skills to
avoid something they don't fully understand is not really going to help.
unfortunately.

------
zorbo
I find it funny that the author chose to publish this on medium. Had he not,
would I have ended up reading it? Which is better, reaching a large audience
with mild incitement which is tolerated by the censors, or being able to be as
provocative as you wish, but remaining unread?

~~~
muuck
Non issue, I and most people here I think read the article because we found
the link here on the front page. Not because the author used Medium.

------
luke-stanley
Deleting everything on Facebook is NOT likely a good way to increase
engagement on a separate platform. More likely, people will just forget about
you! The problem is, with the Dunbar limit, these tools serve part of peoples
memory. There almost certainly MUST BE A TRANSITION to the new peer based
tools.

Why doesn't Ven Portman / Ev Bogue mention PGP? I don't see his public key
anywhere, why talk about emailing people what you are working on openly if you
want to "evolve beyond reach"? Hard to take seriously.

------
nine_k
Let me mention [https://nightweb.net](https://nightweb.net)

 _Nightweb connects your Android device or PC to an anonymous, peer-to-peer
social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will
retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is
still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable,
untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices and PCs._

Also, posting this on Independence Day just feels right.

------
johnchristopher
> A year ago (late 2011/2012) I got very interested in this
> centralized/distributed problem. I’d been traveling around the world. First
> I went down to Mexico, and saw how free it is down there. I went back up to
> San Francisco, and I sold my iPhone in the Mission.

I don't understand the logical link between those sentences. What does he mean
when he writes "[I] saw how free it is down there." and why did it lead him to
sell his iPhone ?

------
seiji
Brilliant article. There's a great list of current-gen distributed things
towards the end, but we still need people who make things to keep making non-
centralized _usable_ platforms. Get us out of gmail-istan and fadbook-istan
and hn-monsterator-istans. Give us our nerdependence back.

~~~
mtgx
Google has been relatively "good" to us, the users, so far, and they've even
been our allies in some cases(SOPA, ITU).

But make no mistake, when the Internet will start a trend towards fully
decentralized/more anonymous services, they will become our _enemy_ , because
that will endanger their very way of making a revenue.

If I were a Google boss I'd try to start making money from other business
models besides ads as soon as possible, possibly from hardware, like Apple. I
think they're already planning this to some extent with Motorola, Google
Glass, and even Google Fiber. But they need to hurry up. That trend might
arrive sooner than they expect (within 5 years).

Facebook is already dead. They just don't know it yet (it takes a while for
the market inertia to stop).

~~~
gizmo686
I agree with your point, but think your wording sidesteps the issue. Google
has been our allies because the same things that we were against (IE a closed
internet) directly endanger their revenue. They won't change their attitude
when they see a huge threat to their revenue, although we may notice that
their motives have always been revenue, and that does not necessarily align
with ours.

Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a
bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site
like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway
to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide
targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value
of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for
shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed
advertising through other means goes down.

Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger
you are the better you can take advantage of it.

~~~
nine_k
BTW why a rise of anonymous private communication would mean an end to the
existing web, as indexed by Google? A lot of things are still perfectly OK to
do in public. Consider open information sites as Wikipedia, most business
information sites, and even most online commerce.

------
cjbarber
Why is Mailchimp filtering 'bitcoin'? That was one of the most shocking parts
of the article for me. (Which is a sad point in itself, that I almost expect
many of the other things mentioned. But that innocent Chimp filtering out a
word that the valley loves right now? Strange.)

~~~
ErsatzVerkehr
Yes, that stood out to me, too, because it is surprising and should be easily
verifiable. Any Mailchimp users or employees care to comment?

------
wooster
Amusingly, as I'm typing this, the author's site is down:
[http://evbogue.com/](http://evbogue.com/)

------
pyre
While I do agree to some extent with this post, it is naive in a lot of
places. Forgive me if this comes across as picking at the post, but I feel
that some of these things need to be said.

    
    
      > You know the sources. You’re all on them. [...] Shitter.
    

While Twitter is grouped with all of these others, I don't find Twitter to be
on the same level as Facebook or Google Plus. Maybe it's just me, but I view
it as a very large, public forum/chat. (I guess I'm in minority here?)
Chatting on Freenode in a public channel isn't necessarily any more private
than Twitter.

    
    
      > When you use these services, you’re not even a button
      > pushing Starbucks at Barista. You’re just ordering a
      > free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the
      > future. You’re not even pushing the button.You’re just a
      > user.
    

This is misleading. People contributing to Medium are _creating content_. They
are not passively consuming content via YouTube, or only posting ephemeral
content via Twitter. Just look at the post that you created. Sure it's
published via a 'central' service, but you are not a 'drone' just
regurgitating content or providing little to no value to your readers. The
real danger in centralized services is when they eclipse everything else. The
inflection point where they become a blackhole, sucking everything else in
(e.g. long-form blog posts aren't read by a large audience if they aren't on
Medium) is the real danger.

    
    
      > So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails,
      > I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails.
    

The MailChimp/Tiny Letter issue is an issue of centralization _caused_ by the
downsides of decentralization. It becomes increasingly hard to deal with email
as the 'small guy' because:

1\. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making sure your emails
are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g. Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail).

2\. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that email admins must
play with spammers. If email was a centralized service, spammers would
probably be easier to block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword.

This leads to less competition in the email market because it's a hassle that
few people want to deal with when deciding to start a new business.

    
    
      > So as more and more people started using these services,
      > I noticed the level of the conversations around me
      > dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have
      > in kindergarten.
    

Unfortunately this is what happens when you draw in more and more of the
general public. You can't solve this issue with decentralization, unless your
decentralized solution sets the bar high enough that these people just choose
not to participate.

    
    
      > You don’t accidentally end up inside someone’s public
      > furry porn collection
    

Most people don't view accidentally stumbling into someone else's furry porn
collection as an upside. You're never going to get many people to 'sign up'(1)
for something like this.

(1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized service. Just 'signing
up' as in joining in.

    
    
      > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no
      > idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no
      > idea how to create a link to another website.
    

If you ever think that the general public is going to want to write HTML or
deploy Node.js applications, then you have another thing coming. This is like
suggesting that everyone should learn how to repair their car to avoid getting
screwed by shady mechanics. It doesn't hold up in the real world. It might be
nice, but it's a pipe dream.

    
    
      > Don’t just log out. Delete your accounts. This will
      > force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way.
    

I appreciate the sentiment, but how many people has, "Go start coding in Vim
and disable the arrow keys to learn," convinced? And this is among the 'tech
elite.' I don't understand how you think that this is convincing argument for
the general public.

    
    
      > Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital
      > Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server.
    

First, the 'distributed vs. centralized' debate needs to have terms defined.
Sure, Facebook is definitely centralized, and P2P is definitely decentralized,
but what about hosting your own server? It's more decentralized to host your
own server than something like Facebook, but the government can still just ask
your hosting provider for access to your server without a warrant. So how has
this really helped us?

It's made it _harder_ for the government to get access to your data because
data is now in lots of little silos rather than a handful of huge ones, but
it's still not the panacea that it's presented as here.

To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like Facebook, centralized.
The stovetop expresso maker is more like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting
your own server? That's more like renting an expresso maker at a community-
center. Technically you don't own the expresso maker, even though you are
renting/leasing it. At any time, the expresso maker could be used be someone
else if that's what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements that
are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with law enforcement).

    
    
      > Deploy using Node.js using Bitters.
    

I'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this
somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?'

    
    
      > Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your
      > filter bubble, and respects your privacy.
    

Unfortunately there are a few issues here:

1\. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data. Sure, they aren't
sending usage statistics back to Yahoo! (so far as I know), but how free are
we really from the giant data silos when we are still connected to them for
things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to the point that it
would be severely cutting into Google or Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the
program would probably be terminated.

2\. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of functionality as the big
players. Many people have attempted to switch to DDG over the recent NSA
revelations, only to switch back to Google.

3\. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to have everyone switch
from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA
targets them instead. What have we really won, then?

The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition in the web search
market, but if we are to attempt to hold the web search engine market to the
distributed ideal we are discussing, then what we really need is something
else.

~~~
jrs99
_I 'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this
somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?'_

Maybe it has to do with selling his "Deploy Node" product for $37.

~~~
alex_doom
Don't forget to sign up for Digital Ocean with his referral link.

~~~
jlgaddis
And send him money via Gittip.

------
6d0debc071
Have you considered that, perhaps, the reason facebook is full of people with
nothing to say is because most people have nothing to say?

I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason,
there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google
or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential
meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the
way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually
pleasing interface before.

The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is
still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep.

And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally
screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable
shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh.

Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a
serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the
likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage
discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues
that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their
own websites.

~~~
Heliosmaster
There is this great quote attributed to Mark Twain:

"If you have nothing to say, say nothing."

The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all
encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this,
but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to
"dumb shit".

~~~
6d0debc071
I do wonder how much of that we're responsible for sometimes. I was quite
little when the internet started to become popular, to the extent that I
barely remember it, but I do remember that it used to seem to make people...
well, I don't want to say smarter but definitely more rounded.

Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend
to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and
orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments,
the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think,
how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better
conversations to find them and be nurtured by them.

Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with
search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a
desired quality then ... oh dear. :/

You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that
there's nothing _on_ the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily
true - but equally actually _finding_ something like Gwern's site or Hacker
News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain
circles already....

The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really
horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive
structures to me.

------
sergeykish
You want people to give away so much and propose what?!

> start by learning some Internet basics. HTML5 and CSS3

Isn't this a bright future? People all around saving the world by typing HTML
tags and CSS rules. Let me clarify something: HTML is a DOM serialization.
It's editing by hands is as stupid as typing UTF-8 byte by byte.

Our tools are weak. Consuming and publishing are disconnected. To publish
information one has to convert it and push on server. Now it's copy, not
original document. Modern web tries to solve this problem by making web the
only place. Sure it requires resources and for sure it's centralized.

I'd like to have all hypertext goodness on local computer. Make interconnected
notes, publish them by clicking button and don't worry about synchronization
or file name. Interconnect with web, know that every page I'm interested in is
cached locally, edit these pages in place.

It would be nice to use 320MHz 16MB RAM wireless router as always present
server.

> You have no idea how to type HTML anymore Can you write HTML WYSIWYG editor?
> Can you write tooling to query interconnected data?

Maybe at least some users would not need to store data outside

------
damian2000
I agree with the message behind this post, but it comes across as hyperbole.
The thing that irks me on his website is that the sole payment method for his
eBook (Deploy Node) is PayPal. Nothing wrong with this of course, but in the
context of this post, well it seems a bit off.

------
jongraehl
This blog post is a threat to medium.com and maybe they'll delete his account?
Please.

That said, cjdns and pump.io were interesting to read about. I don't see any
practical benefit to using them now, but they look like fun hobby projects.

------
mwcampbell
Unfortunately, even if you run a VPS on DigitalOcean or Linode or the like,
you are still using a very centralized service. These services concentrate
many servers in a few data centers. The US data centers are mostly on the
coasts, though Linode has one in Dallas. Sure, this is efficient, but
efficiency has its downsides.

I think we need at least one competent web hosting provider operating in every
state of the US, and more for the large states.

------
coldcode
If you are pushing packets anywhere on the public internet you aren't really
all that disconnected. Much of what the author talks about assumes all of your
contacts are highly intelligent and paranoid programmers. That leaves out 99%
of my family and friends. Any highly technically advanced decentralized secure
non-NSA-readable communication technology is likely indistinguishable from
magic to the general public.

------
thomasf1
This analogy just seems a bit confusing to me and threw me off the main
point...

End users, readers = coffee consumers

Bloggers = baristas, either working in their own store or a Starbucks.

Mixing the two up doesn't make sense. Well, there are a couple of bloggers
that are their only readers - hopefully less guys than the ones that brew
their own coffee though ;).

~~~
thomasf1
Is's hard to find a analogy that really fits well...

Bloggers typically benefit from their activity, wether they blog on a platform
or have their own blog. In both cases, they have an audience.

As your main point is about fully controlling the tools you'd use for their
work, maybe something like racing drivers building their own cars would work
better...

------
mwcampbell
The author suggested Bitters for publishing a good web site. That may be a
good option for us hackers. For our non-hacker family and friends, it seems to
me that the best option is currently self-hosted WordPress. But WP is quite
infamous for insecurity. Is there anything better?

~~~
noja
[http://www.movabletype.org/](http://www.movabletype.org/) ?

------
bryanchen
Okay, this is kind of off-topic to the main gist of the article, but I'm a
Singaporean living in Singapore, and I believe that the article is rather
mischievous (or the author genuinely does not know/bother to know the facts).

First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence.
I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging
licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an
article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license".
This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying
to mislead people.

Next, I'm tired of people saying that free speech is limited in Singapore. It
is not. There are rules in place to prevent over-zealous extremists (of any
kind or nature). I urge anyone who feels otherwise to take a look at
Singapore's short national history - about mass inter-racial riots that caused
massive turmoil in the country. This is why the laws have been enacted. These
laws simply say that we aren't allowed to publicly denounce another religion,
or another race. And before you start jumping up and down saying "that's
limiting my freedom to speak!", let me clarify. It's not what you think. It's
not that I can't complain or even speak badly about someone else's race or
religion in public. I can. But the moment I start shouting these insults,
that's when the authorities would take action against me. It's only civilised,
and the government has formalised this civility. On one hand, people ignorant
to historical events in Singapore can simply surmise that they are tools by
the government to inhibit freedom of speech. On the other hand, however, and
this is what I personally feel, these laws exist to keep the peace. Think
about it. Singapore is a small island filled with people of different races
and religions. Yet we don't have religious wars and we certainly don't have
racial riots.

And finally, the claim of, "I suspect at some point the Singapore intelligence
agency may have hacked into my email while I was there (another IP was
registering on my Gmail account). Also I believe I was interviewed by a
Singaporean spy." I seriously doubt it. Do you really think that if a highly
trained spy wanted to covertly interview you, a technical writer and web
developer, that you would know? And if they did want you to know, you _would_
have known that you're being interviewed. I doubt (and here I'm assuming) that
spending hours reading conspiracy theories online would make one an expert in
counter-intelligence. Again, like what I said, this ill-constructed idea that
the author has is probably due to the lack of understanding of the so-called
"blogging license". And again, I repeat: one DOES NOT require a licence to
blog.

Over the last couple of years, I've seen an increase in the number of people
(mostly foreigners) writing articles about Singapore, saying that citizens'
liberties are curtailed and limited. Again, as a citizen, this isn't true.
Just like how Americans value their "freedoms", sometimes till the point of
absurdity (absurd at least to foreigners like myself, and with regards to "the
only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"), we
Singaporeans value the peace and harmony within our tiny island-state. We put
this, sometimes, even above our own personal liberty - like the freedom to
shout racist remarks in a coffeeshop. Is that wrong? Only someone who has seen
the bloody effects of racial and religious unrest would be qualified to answer
the question.

~~~
CaptainZapp

      First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people.
    

While the term "Blogging License" may be be slightly hyperbole I feel that you
just denying that such a thing exists is disingenuous, at best. Specifically
since you then gloss over a real onerous requirement that each "news" website
(whatever that is), which reaches more then 50k unique viewers per month over
a two month period indeed is required to be licensed.

So if you have a puny little blog with a couple dozen, or hundred readers
then, yeah, you don't need a license. But if you run an even semi successful
blog you damn well need to be licensed.

In my view it's really self evident that such a law is rife for abuse if a
site doesn't toe the governments line.

I quote Human Rights Watch on the issue :

 _On May 28, 2013, the Media Development Authority, which is controlled by the
Ministry of Communications and Information and is responsible for regulation
of Singapore’s media and publishing industry, announced that all “online news
sites” that reach 50,000 unique viewers per month over a two-month period must
secure a license to operate. The licensing regime took effect on June 1, and
the Media Development Authority released a list of 10 websites that will
initially be impacted, including AsiaOne.com, Business Times Singapore, and
Yahoo! News Singapore._

([http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/07/singapore-licensing-
regim...](http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/07/singapore-licensing-regime-
chills-news-climate))

~~~
bryanchen
My point was that a license was not required to simply blog - which was what
the article was insinuating. For the exact rules for licensing of news
websites, go to
[http://www.mda.gov.sg/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease/2013/Pages/...](http://www.mda.gov.sg/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease/2013/Pages/28052013.aspx)

I'm not saying I agree with it. But at the same time I think that as long as
it is not abused (to be addressed below), it is intended to prevent the new
class of "independent journalists" from writing baseless stories without
getting their facts right.

> In my view it's really self evident that such a law is rife for abuse if a
> site doesn't toe the governments line.

Exactly. Contrary to what many may think, if or when the government does begin
to abuse this right, I can assure you that we, the citizens, will be up in
arms and take them to task.

~~~
AlexandrB
> I'm not saying I agree with it. But at the same time I think that as long as
> it is not abused (to be addressed below), it is intended to prevent the new
> class of "independent journalists" from writing baseless stories without
> getting their facts right.

Who decides which facts are right and how does paying $50,000 prevent someone
from publishing false information?

> From the linked fact sheet: _The new Licence provides greater clarity on
> prevailing requirements within the Class Licence and Internet Code of
> Practice, and explains what MDA would consider “prohibited content” in the
> existing Internet Code of Practice, e.g. content that undermines racial or
> religious harmony._

Literally everything said by US civil rights leaders during the 20th century
could be construed as "undermining racial harmony" (in the US). Why is
preventing this kind of thing important?

------
nmc
You want a distributed F __*book? Try PSYC on
GNUnet![http://about.psyc.eu](http://about.psyc.eu)
[https://gnunet.org](https://gnunet.org)

------
llama42
> Little did I know that Singapore doesn’t have the same freedom of speech
> laws we take for granted in America.

> In other words, you can get in big trouble in Singapore just for saying or
> writing something.

whoa... sounds like my country.

------
revorad
Meanwhile -
[https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080](https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080)

------
_prometheus
> How about Visit my distributed website at
> [http://198.199.80.174/](http://198.199.80.174/)

FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.

~~~
spydum
DNS is HIGHLY distributed (more so than SMTP)

~~~
insom
The protocol is, while the domain system isn't. But then, you could say that
about IPv4 and IPv6 - you have to get your allocation from somewhere, and your
LIR gets it from its RIR and your RIR gets it from IANA. As long as you're
using publicaly addressable computers, the system is in _some_ way
centralised. (And that's probably okay).

------
alexvr
Anyone notice the parallels between this and the transcendentalist movement?

------
dot
> a suburb west of San Francisco

Hawaii? :)

------
dschiptsov
Why so many points? Does this considered a good writing nowadays?)

------
wilkie
Commenters: you need some terms defined with context. Let's do that. I'm a
founder and one of the current maintainers of the distributed/federated
microblogging platform rstat.us.

In this particular context, centralized vs distributed have to do with control
over both storage and propagation of your data more so than its architecture.
Or at least, the concerns over how to better control storage/propagation drive
decisions about architecture. Twitter, Facebook, etc are centralized in this
case. Your data goes to them, they propagate it, you have little to no
control. Their system is designed around that. Identi.ca, rstat.us, diaspora
are distributed. You control the software that holds the data and distributes
it to others. Many designs are possible, even that which you design yourself.

Do these distributed platforms still have centralized components? Yes. There
are lots of centralized pieces. Doesn't matter. Minimizing them is still the
goal. Less is progress. It's not perfect; it's better.

What's stopping distributed platforms from overtaking centralized ones? The
typical things: politics, lack of resources, high barrier of entry for non-
tech folks.

Can distributed platforms do X? Yes. For example, the very usual: "But they
can't handle spam!" Sure they can. Distributed platforms exist to share
information. They can share blacklists. Share training data for spam filters.
Ultimately, if they can distribute content, then they can distribute metadata.
The only thing a centralized platform can do that a distributed one cannot is
provide immediate global consistency... but considering most centralized
services grow to the scale where they are internally distributed anyway, they
can't even do that.

What do we need to do to succeed? We need software that is light, easily
understood, easily augmentable, modular. Something that can easily and freely
be deployed with minimal effort from a city's public library. Deployment on
hosted or publicly available servers... or packaged on cheap hardware to be
used in the home or taken with you. Hardware and deployment services that
don't really exist. But creating the software may be the motivation to create
them.

Who will build it? I've published research on distributed systems and
distributed databases. I founded rstat.us with some friends which has had over
60 diverse contributors from around the world. It got some good, albeit small
press, but OStatus (the protocol that rstat.us sits upon) is being superseded.
So I'm working on this:

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n)
\- Support for social sentence generation for many languages/cultures

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus) \- A
discovery layer and data structures for distributed social graphs. It
negotiates the protocol so many different distributed social systems can
interact (which is the point, ya think?). (models)

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-
mongodb) \- Small persistence layer. (models+db)

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus](https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus)
\- Rack extension for interacting with the social graph and content generation
as hypermedia over HTTP. (controllers)

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site)
\- Example site (hoping to pull much of the view/presentation logic into a
separate repo)

Modular. Easily modifiable. Released as closely to the public domain as is
possible (CC0.) With these combined, you can build any number or variety of
distributed social web systems (image sites, photo album sites, hosting of web
comics, flash games, blogging, etc etc etc.) Hopefully they will share a
common deployment strategy so if you build a new thing, however unique, it
will be just as easy to deploy from the point-of-view of somebody not very
well-versed in technology.

So... Me. I'll do it. With some help. If you care, here is my gittip (I only
need $250/wk to squeak by):
[https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/](https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/)

