[EGreg]

I think it's obvious that the current web is decentralized, but is heavily server-based. At the same time, there is something about propagating applications across these servers... Russia can ban Reddit but they can't ban Wordpress. For the moment, that is what we are working on at http://platform.qbix.com (and have been for the past 4 years). Making it easy to have a distributed social network the same way bitcoin makes money distributed.

Now, how would you take it further and make the web entirely peer to peer, so you wouldn't have to trust servers with your security and politics? You can have additional schemes like http and https, for various methods of delivery and storage.

I wrote this FIVE years ago but nothing seems to have been done about it since then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2023475

That would be an easy first step, that would do a lot. It's 2015 and we can't even have XAuth (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/18/spearheaded-by-meebo-xauth-...) in the browser! (We would need a space for storing preferences where websites from any domain could read what was written.)

[jeena]

> Russia can ban Reddit but they can't ban Wordpress.

That's why I'm part of the IndieWeb https://jeena.net/indieweb or http://indiewebcamp.com/

The nicest thing about that all is that I don't need to wait until someone else writes a whole new WWW, my own website already is a small part of the whole big thing, I just make my HTML more machine readable and implement something like pingback (but easier, it is called webmentions). With this small building blocks I am, together with others, building a social network which we don't even need to call that.

[EGreg]

IndieWeb looks great. I am going to try to get involved with it.

Could you please get in touch with me by email? You can find it at http://qbix.com/about -- just click on "contact". I would like to find out more about this movement ... I'm beginning to participate more in the Offline First, Distributed Web, Mesh Networking and other such movements. Our company's spent 4 years building a platform that would decentralize social networking, because we see it as the catalyst to giving users control of their own data. Most people in the world are just using centralized services these days, and it's directly related to how difficult it is to make a seamless social layer for the web. So I think that we're solving a solution parallel to what bitcoin did with money. A good solution unleashes new possibilities, like the Web itself did, like Email did.

Anyway, reach out if you can! - Greg