Usenet doesn't scale. The Eternal September taught us that.
To being Usenet back into the mainstream would require a major protocol upgrade, to say nothing of the seismic social shift.
I don’t think it’s a fruitful or useful comment to say something is “like Usenet” as a dismissal. So what if it is? It was useful as hell when it wasn’t terrible.
The other issue is who's going to host it? I need a port somehow (CGNAT be damned!).
ps When is your SC podcast coming back?
but it came right at a time when the industry had kind of just stopped listening to that whole group, and it was built on multicast, which was a dying horse.
but if we had that facility as a widely implemented open standard, things would be much different and arguably much better today.
There's a fascinating research project Librecast [0], funded by the EU via NLnet, that may boost multicast right into modern tech stacks again.
I feel like the "one feed" approach of most social platform is not here to benefit users but to encourage doom-scrolling with FOMO. It would be a lot harder for them to get so much of users' time and tolerance for ads if it were actually organized. But it seems to me that there might not be that much work needed to turn an RSS reader into a very productive social platform for sharing news and articles.
2. Proof of work time IDs as timestamps: This doesn't work. It's trivial to backdate posts just by picking an earlier ID. (I don't care about this topic personally but people are concerned about backdating not forward-dating.)
N. Decentralized instances should be able to host partial data: This is where I got lost. If everybody is hosting their own data, why is anything else needed?
And one can host many signing keys at a single domain.
I believe I have the timeline right that this study happened not too long before StackOverflow got the idea that getting upvoted gives you ten points and downvoting someone costs you two. As long as you’re saying something useful occasionally instead of disagreeing with everyone else, your karma continues to rise.
Regarding hosting partial data: there should be an option to host just recent data for the past month or other time frames and not full DB of URLs. This would make decentralization better as each instance could have less storage requirements, but total information would be present on the network.
https://theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-c...
- You don't need domain names for identity. Signatures are enough. An optional extension could contain emails and social handles in the payload if desired.
- You don't need terabytes of storage. All content can be ephemeral. Nodes can have different retention policies, and third party archival services and client-side behavior can provide durable storage, bookmarking/favoriting, etc.
- The protocols should be P2P-first rather than federated. This prevents centralization and rule by federated cabal. Users can choose their own filtering, clustering, and prioritization.
Yeah, this won't work. Like at all. This idea has been tried over and over on various decentralized apps and the problem is as nodes go offline and online links quickly break...
No offense but this is a very half-assed post to gloss over what has been one of the basic problems in the space. It's a problem that inspired research in DHTs, various attempts at decentralized storage systems, and most recently -- we're getting some interesting hybrid approaches that seem like they will actually work.
>Domain names should be decentralized IDs (DIDs)
This is a hard problem by itself. All the decentralized name systems I've seen suck. People currently try use DHTs. I'm not sure that a DHT can provide reliability though and since the name is the root of the entire system it needs to be 100% reliable. In my own peer-to-peer work I side-step this problem entirely by having a fixed list of root servers. You don't have to try "decentralize" everything.
>Proof of work time IDs can be used as timestamps
Horribly inefficient for a social feed and orphans are going to screw you even more.
I think you've not thought about this very hard.
Not author, but that is what the global domain system is. There are a handful of root name servers that are baked into DNS resolvers.
It took me 20 years to decide maybe they were right. A bunch if Reddits more tightly associated with a set of websites and users than with a centralized ad platform would be fairly good - if you had browser support for handling the syndicated comments. You could have one for your friends or colleagues, one for watchdog groups to discuss their fact checking or responses to a new campaign by a troublesome company.
One area that is overlooked is commercialization. I believe, that the decentralized protocol needs to support some kind of paid subscription and/or micropayments.
WebMonetization ( https://webmonetization.org/docs/ ) is a good start, but they're not tackling the actual payment infrastructure setup.
In other words what is missing is rules, regulations and incentives that are adapted to the way people use the digital domain and enforce the decentralized exchange of digital information to stay within a consensus "desired" envelope.
Providing capabilities in code and network design is ofcourse a great enabler, but drifting into technosolutionism of the bitcoin type is a dead end. Society is not a static user of technical protocols. If left without matching social protocols any technical protocol will be exploited and fail.
The example of abusive hyperscale social media should be a warning: they emerged as a behavior, they were not specified anywhere in the underlying web design. Facebook is just one website after all. Tim Berners-Lee probably did not anticipate that one endpoint would succesfully fake being the entire universe.
The deeper question is, do we want the shape of digital networks to reflect the observed concentration or real current social and economic networks or do we want to use the leverage of this new techology to shape things in a different (hopefully better) direction?
The mess we are in today is not so much failure of technology as it is digital illiteracy, from the casual user all the way to the most influential legal and political roles.
They have hundreds of servers running today by volunteers, there is little cost of entry since even cellphones can be used as servers (nodes) to keep you private notes or keep the notes from people you follow.
There is now a file sharing service called "Blossom" which is decentralized in the same simple manner. I don't think I've seen there a way to specify custom domains, people can only use the public key for the moment to host simple web pages without a server behind.
Many of the topics in your page are matching with has been implemented there, it might be a good match for you to improve it further.