
Can we decentralize the web? - MilnerRoute
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/08/04/164215/can-we-decentralize-the-web
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pfraze
The linked writeup is a little light on content, but the dweb summit went
well. There's interest growing in the space.

Broadly speaking, the projects are solving either monetization, privacy, or
publishing. So, when someone says, "can we decentralize?" they usually have
one of those 3 things in mind, and are looking for a way to remove a fixed
intermediary. There are subgroups within that - for instance, people who focus
on decentralized naming (namecoin) tend to be pretty into censorship
resistance within publishing, but decentralized publishing can also mean just
reducing barriers to creating websites.

From the slashdot comments -

> 3\. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their
> grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn
> those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to
> get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big
> dragons (Google, Facebook etc).

The dream of the 90s web is alive and, yes, in portland. (I can think of 6
people working on it there.) It's an impactful thing to solve; the more that
people can publish independently, the less of a problem silos become. You
still have to index/aggregate/discover and can come up with protocols to do
so, but even with servers to do the indexing, independent publishing moves the
ball down the field since it keeps data and software in the user's control,
and free to move between applications.

