Towards layered re-decentralized web

http://mitar.tnode.com/post/146227562556/towards-layered-re-decentralized-web

If we are serious about decentralized technologies, we should be building them as independent layers where we all reuse them and have common users. This improves how innovative we can be and how robust our technologies can be. The only missing piece is a decentralized computations layer for general computations

every device was publically addressable <-- can this be done in a decentralizing way?

yes:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Source_Routing
• https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

i don't think having publically addressable devices is enough to decentralize the web, but it is certainly helpful

the real problem is a bit more detailed than that. Even if you could easily address any device, that doesn't mean you could host a website on your phone. well, you could, sure, but that would just mean you have to keep your phone constantly on and connected.

The more important thing about applications like ssb and ipfs etc, is that they may operate "offline" you connect address and connect to the data, not the device.

The device is temporary and the data is not. That is completely the other way around from traditional systems. It helps here to remember just how modern crypto is. Modern Cryptography (hashes + signatures) is less than half as old as computer science. MC was only invented in the late 70's, but computer science was invented in the 30s (turing machines, etc)

The internet existed before crypto, and so did unix.
We are only just figuring out how to build things with crypto...
Addressability is the easy part. we want to be able to publish from your phone, but we don't actually want everyone in the world to be connecting to it, that would just DDOS your phone. With the web, your post goes viral, that is a DDoS, but with a correctly designed P2P network, when your post goes viral it just works better.

@johnny I agree it's a building block, but I disagree it's the most essential block. There is already things that "solve" it, tor, cjdns, i2p... and yet these have not been enough to bring forth a flowering of p2p applications.

@tiago that is quite possible. actually we can whether that is the case by looking at the structure of the branch links