
Redecentralize: Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net again - Tsiolkovsky
http://redecentralize.org/
======
frabcus
I'm one of the founders of Redecentralize.org.

My own main motivation wasn't just privacy, but also resilience (against, say,
hurricanes) and fun (the web doesn't have the same joy it once did).

So my favourite interview so far is the mobile mesh network one
[http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-
serv...](http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-serval.html)

I also think it is important that new algorithms like DHT (Kademlia), BitCoin
and GFShare get known and used to their full extent.

Please get in touch if you've a project that would like interviewing!

~~~
lancewiggs
Please see and respond to the comments above about the ineffectiveness of
using only videos to communicate your messages. Whatever they are.

~~~
antocv
Yeah, its very annoying, I want to get into this and see what its all about,
but Im not gonna turn on a video just for that.

~~~
mistermumble
tldr;

[https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-
internet](https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet)

------
wyck
For those of us (probably most of us) that would rather read quickly. Links
from talks,

[http://www.servalproject.org/](http://www.servalproject.org/)

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

[http://mediagoblin.org/](http://mediagoblin.org/)

[http://cryptosphere.org/](http://cryptosphere.org/)

[https://www.zerotier.com/](https://www.zerotier.com/)

[http://drogul.us/](http://drogul.us/)

------
nwp90
While this is a subject I would be interested in, I took one look at the front
page, saw that it appeared to be video-only, and gave up.

This is precisely the reaction that news sites get from me when I click on a
link to a story and find video-only content.

Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of
the interviews?

~~~
csense
> video-only

Videos are a lower-bandwidth medium than text for explaining things. I can
read a lot faster than I can listen to a person talk.

Seriously, _this_ website doesn't realize that?

~~~
anxrn
#1. A commenter is not a website.

#2. There are a lot of considerations apart from bandwidth when it comes to
disseminating information. For eg., having to use speakers or even reach for a
set of headphones is reason enough for me to skip to the text.

~~~
Blahah
I think csense meant bandwidth in the sense of rate at which the audience
takes in the information, not network bandwidth. You're in agreement with one
another.

~~~
csense
Yes, by "lower-bandwidth" I meant "video usually [1] takes more of my time to
transfer ideas from the author's mind into mine than equivalent text." I
wasn't referring to bytes-on-the-wire [2].

[1] Sometimes video is more efficient than text. E.g. with respect to video
games, gameplay videos can convey a lot of information in a short time.
Basically if you want to teach someone about some system that changes over
time, showing how it changes in video is often a lot clearer and faster than
trying to describe it with words or static diagrams.

But a video that just involves listening to a person talk -- or, worse yet,
read slides from a projector -- usually just ends up wasting my time compared
to equivalent information presented as text.

[2] It's obvious that video consumes way more bytes-on-the-wire than text.

~~~
anxrn
I see. Yes, I misread your comment. Apologies. We are, as another commenter
eloquently put it, 'in violent agreement'.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is the way forward.

If most all internet services can be implemented with open source, and
processing and data storage is all virtual, then the logical place we're
headed is either 1) big, centralized services that treat the details of our
lives as fodder to sell products, or 2) renting cycles and storage out and
decentralizing everything.

For anybody concerned with privacy and not looking forward to becoming part of
some hivemind, option 2 seems most logical. I don't think cost would be
prohibitive, and looks like this site is interviewing guys working in the
problem area on new product development, which means that there is a future
there. Anybody's bet if it actually happens, though.

------
shevski8
The idea behind the site is to make decentralised, privacy preserving,
resilient (and fun!) tech more accessible to people who don't already know
about this stuff. Hence videos and user focused questions. We want to expand
the appeal and plan to do podcasts and meetups too.

We hope to engage digitally literate people and show them that there are
concrete existing software and app options they can use now that aren't
selling your data, are interesting, easy to use and open.

However, we also need to be pragmatic - aiming to use decentralized open
software ourselves when it works for our use case, but not if it stops us
doing this quickly.

Please do sign up to the mail list or email us because we have ambitious plans
that could use help and would love feedback (esp on stuff like if videos are
really much less useful to people etc) :)

Cheers, Ira

------
csense
It's quite ironic that a website about decentralization is using Github [1].

Gitlab [2] would is an alternative with similar functionality that's more
consistent with the ideology they're trying to promote.

[1] [https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-
website](https://github.com/frabcus/redecentralize-website)

[2] [http://gitlab.org/](http://gitlab.org/)

~~~
frossie
Is it that ironic? Git is inherently decentralised, github is just a
publication method. Everybody's repo is still good if github gets nuked and
can be used as the new public. It's nothing like, say, Facebook where They
Have All The Data And You Don't. Self-hosting with Gitlab is no different,
except to have the public repo sit on a different server.

~~~
phaer
Its not just a publication method. If you loose your github repo for some
reason you loose

    
    
      * the issues
      * the wiki
      * the community because your local repo is fine, 
        but nobody knows any other remote than github.

~~~
amirmc
Good points. However:

Issues - I'm sure these can get recreated, even the discussions. In many
cases, people will have those threads in their email.

Wiki - In Github's case, this is also a git repo.

Community - GitHub is rarely the _only_ mechanism used to manage a community.
There's likely a domain name and mailing list of some form.

Losing all of the above is certainly painful but I'm trying to point out that
it's not _irrecoverable_. A better question might be _how painful_ would it be
to lose that (and the likelihood of losing it) as compared to other options.

~~~
foobarian
You know, sourceforge was once the place to be for hosting your SVN projects,
forums, etc., and nobody batted an eye when they ceased to be the community
centroid. Similarly with github, if it shut down or something new and shinier
came along the projects would move there before you could say "merge
conflict."

~~~
warfangle
And now I dread seeing a sourceforge link on a project site. Absolutely,
chest-clenchingly dread.

------
zobzu
decentralizing is the only way to scale everything - from privacy to security,
from resilience to performance.

concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a
connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists.

I think the way forward is actually to create standardized, easy ways to
decentralize. The idea is shared by many and there's several attempts,
although none seems to have matured enough yet.

Basically, those boxes and all allow you to store your data on your end. The
part that's missing is that you need the devices you use _today_ to be
compatible. That means ios, android, etc.. have to be able to sync your
pictures, movies, contacts, emails, what not there. That's the hard part.

~~~
bbq
> concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a
> connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists.

To this end, I'm optimistic about lightweight containers, especially a la
docker.io[1]. Releasing an application as a container can help solve
dependency hell. Nesting containers for a complex application (i.e. with
multiple disjoint services) looks promising to me, as well.

[1] Not that LXC and/or docker are ready out-of-the-box for non-specialists
(yet) - but that seems achievable. A friendly wrapper around vagrant might do
the job.

~~~
grogenaut
It solves simple dependency problems. It does nothing for your interdependent
"decentralized" services which are talking to each other. That's where the
real hard work is.

~~~
bbq
You're right. There is hard work in managing a system of services where any
service endpoint can change at any time. It appears to me protocols for
negotiating upgrades between services are important and there's no widely
deployed solution for that yet.

------
Su-Shee
Quietly, some geeks never stopped having their own services and didn't even
get centralized in the first place... ;)

That's not really "the way forward", that's actually quite back to the roots.
:)

------
VeejayRampay
Celluloid, Cryptosphere, it seems like Tony Arcieri has found a way to bypass
the 24-hour/day limit. Awesome.

------
BUGHUNTER
What are the best channels to follow discussions on decentralized social
networks? I see too many alternatives coming up and it is getting too time-
consuming to follow all of them. Friendica (BTW this one is missing on the
list in wiki), Buddycloud, Diaspora, to name just a few - where do they
coordinate their efforts and how can an interested developer follow
discussions of these projects?

Also it would be interesting to exchange experiences made with these new apps,
so that not every developer has to check every network, what is not possible
in one life - the already existing listings of alternatives are of great
value, but a more systematic approach in collective knowledge gathering and
exchange would be even better.

Hey, that´s what the internet was built for, wasn´t it? Still does no software
for this exist? :)

~~~
danielsiders
Honestly there isn't a lot of coordination, but many of the people most
interested in decentralization participate in one or more of these networks.
As one of the architects of Tent ([https://tent.io](https://tent.io)) I spend
a lot of time talking with others on Tent about similar projects.

~~~
BUGHUNTER
I can not see what I am looking for there, sorry. The Tent protocol certainly
is interesting, but I was asking for an open place where it is possible to
share / exchange / collect and extract knowledge and experiences about
decentralized social network software.

I was hoping for an open, easily available information source that can be
followed.

~~~
w0rd-driven
I would hope this project could be that hub. Propose an interop data exchange
format where information can be freely shared among all "exchanges". I'm
definitely not seeing this as an easy problem to solve but it would make all
of this more accessible to the grandmas of the world.

The major problem I see is geeks always think their idea is perfect and have a
hard time justifying the technical cost of implementation when it doesn't
directly affect them ("You mean I have to make feature x to help my competitor
that's actually doing way better than I am at this? Psh!") Openness shouldn't
only be about the ability to export and keep that information but to also
interop and play nice with others.

I think it sucks that Disapora didn't have the traction it should have and I
would hope that a data exchange format among all social networks would be
beneficial to all. Unite _against_ the Facebooks of the world. I believe
united we can do this much better but its clear we haven't found the perfect
disruption yet. I'm glad we haven't stopped trying because it's out there.
Somewhere.

------
BUGHUNTER
"That's why we don't think the network will be taken over by child porn. You
have to have someone accept what's on your node in order for them to pass your
traffic around," he says. [1]

So instead of a guaranteed right to access information freely we make every
mesh node a potential censor.

I do not want to depend on the likes or dislikes of mesh participants to be
able to access or distribute information.

Here seems something fundamentally broken by design. I hope, I am
misunderstanding the concept.

[1]
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-a...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-
activists-rebuilding-the-internet-from-scratch.html)

------
oridecon
I think this idea would be even better if instead of recommending services
(since people will be divided anyway), they would recommend
protocols/standards, for each case. OFC cases like bitcoin, that is really
stablished, should just be named as the only suggestion.

"Oh you're on Diaspora? Too bad, I'm on Kune and they don't talk with each
other." You get the idea.

------
Nux
One of the first things we need is p2p/webrtc/blah video conferencing so all
those cool geeks can get off Google Video and Skype.

~~~
PhearTheCeal
From the list given, looks like that would be Tox. It's got IPv6 and
everything.

[https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-
Core](https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core)

~~~
rossj
Unfortunately [http://tox.im](http://tox.im) says "Tox isn't ready yet,
downloads will be available soon!"

------
CookieMon
Great interview (the one I listened to). This stuff interests me, but how to
choose a project to get behind? For example Diaspora and Gnu Social might be
two scattered groups both trying to build the same thing separately, or there
might be important design/philosophy differences that neither of them felt the
need to explicitly state. FreedomBox sounds perfect for me but the last
news/release was more than a year ago - have most of the developers moved on?
What other projects are similar to it?

A redecentralizing hub is a great idea, can the list be more cross-
referencable like a wiki - allowing project descriptions to be linked to
similar projects, with information about what makes the "similar project"
different. Appraisals of how projects are going etc.

Judging from the existing list, cross-referencing would have to be introduced
by the redecentalize guys before we could start adding the info.

* gnusocial is another project that can be added to the list.

------
jamesblonde
Wireless community networks are where there is much research going on for
fully decentralized systems. Check out Guifi.net, the world's largest wireless
community network with over 20,000 nodes. All the protocols are decentralized,
from DNS to routing to HTTP Proxies for internet access.

------
adamnemecek
Does anyone else dislike the sentence 'Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing
the net again'?

~~~
vertis
Also, it's a third party site interviewing geeks about what they're doing, so
'Quietly' might not be the correct word.

That aside, the site is a good idea and covering projects of this nature is
important.

~~~
frabcus
Yep - the idea was that it isn't generally known about. There's lots of
interesting stuff going on that we wanted to highlight - hence the site!

------
PLejeck
We still have huge user experience issues with decentralized systems which
make it more awkward for the average person. It's sad, because I (like most
programmers) want a distributed system, but it's rather hard to get it right.

~~~
jewel
BitTorrent Sync seems to have done a really good job of making a decentralized
system easy to use. Their pre-shared-key method of connecting computers is
really simple for people to understand, and supports a wide variety of
potential use cases.

Incidentally, I'm working on an open-source competitor to btsync called
clearskies
([https://github.com/jewel/clearskies](https://github.com/jewel/clearskies)).

------
foobarqux
In the Cryptosphere talk the author says that you can use a cryptosphere
address to reference the latest version of a git repository but I thought
cryptosphere was content addressable. How does this work?

------
EGreg
I wrote this about 2.5 years ago:

[http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21](http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21)

~~~
zobzu
keep writing, this stuff its picking up a lot better these days

------
gima
Couldn't find writups about the mesh networking in Serval. How scalable is
this? Last time I did some digging around mesh networks, they didn't scale too
much. Every message has to be broadcasted to every node (and every client had
to maintain a list of all nodes and their routes), or something along those
lines.

------
frank_boyd
If you're looking for a decentralized & encrypted communication platform
(messaging, chat, file tranfer, etc.) to get behind, head over to
[http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/) and
consider developing plugins for any missing features.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Retroshare is missing, it's actually quite good project and it's usable, it's
not just talk.
[http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
rossj
It's on the list - [https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-
internet#retroshare](https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-
internet#retroshare)

------
cromwellian
Obligatory self promotion link:
[http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-
web.htm...](http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html)

------
minikites
There's also Steven Frank's
[http://decentralizer.com/](http://decentralizer.com/)

------
oridecon
so to decentralize we would need to host everything ourselves? PC turned on 24
hours and awful gaming latency since you'll be using lots of upload traffic.
please tell me I'm wrong, this would never work for lots of reasons.

~~~
deathanatos
Do you need to distribute things when you're gaming? For most interactions, I
imagine that when the user says "save", replication of the user's data can
start at that point, and for most things, ought to finish within a minute or
two, freeing up the network/CPU, at least if you're doing it across a private
cloud. I imagine that for most of my data, 3 copies in disparate locations
would more than suffice. How long does that take?

Having a machine on 24/7 is perhaps a bit wasteful, but what is the electrical
use of a mostly idling machine? If you really cared, you could perhaps get
something with less power, like a raspberry pi.

~~~
oridecon
Oh I got the wrong idea, I wasn't able to check the video and the "about" is
really bad. But now that I'm home I opened the Github page. So it's just not
giving control over the data for a central corporation, but we're still using
datacenters.

I thought it was the same folks that wanted us to self-host diaspora (as in
OUR home pc/network). If this works, the *aaS market will explode even more.

------
BUGHUNTER
There seem to be a lot of discussions going on inside each of these projects.
There should be some central hub for research and exchange ;)

Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing
solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of
scattered communities.

Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides
- creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the
knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain
to connect all available information.

Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the
centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly
will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways
of thinking about everything could be the results.

The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency)
to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be
seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data
collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected
exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and
oppression.

But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It
will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the
internet exists and it will not want to go back.

This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I
said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need
some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect.

It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is
the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these
possibilities to connect to the global information pool.

The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by
insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead
to social changes - it does already.

Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the
real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or
at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already
concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you
consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are
following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people
misusing the system just for their own profits. Most probably "profit" will be
an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted
with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves.

Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation.

