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by allemagne 3944 days ago
I think all three of these principles are important but miss an obvious one that should come first. A decentralized web should have decentralization as its central principle.

If we're talking about our ideal pie-in-the-sky protocol (where people have total control over their data) then let's dream big. Web hosting should be completely decentralized. DDOS attacks should become infeasible because there are no dedicated servers to target and web services should already scale directly in proportion to usage. Entities should receive incentives for participating in the protocol, but have no feasible way of negatively affecting others no matter how much relative computing power they control in the network.

2 comments

It's very interesting what you said.

I only discussed what matters to the user (control, interoperability and portability) - extending the list with technical perspective will then come soon.

This. Decentralization needs to be the foremost feature of a decentralized system. No single points of failure. Scaling up and down with demand. Resilience and choice for everybody.

Money has been decentralized.

Social networking hasn't, yet.

Security hasn't, not really. Have you installed the latest SquirrelMail patches yet? You probably use GMail so you don't have to worry about it.

You should look into diaspora, an open-source decentralized social network. IMO diaspora has formidable foundation and interesting content. Highly recommend. However, as Eben Moglin said, the next facebook should never happen.
The next facebook should be a decentralized, open source platform. Like Wordpress was the "next LiveJournal".