[adekok]

> A real barrier to a decentralised web is the difficulty of installing software on a server.

Also, economies of scale.

If people used a decentralized service called "UnFaceBook", the total cost of servers, administration, etc. would dwarf the cost of Facebook running their data centres. From a business perspective, it's just not feasible.

Hmm... perhaps everyone running their own systems is, in fact, doable. Most people have smart phones which are much more powerful than servers from 6 years ago. Why not just use that?

Have the content at the edge, and controlled at the edge. Scalability can come from lots of caching at the core.

Not a startup I'd want to do, but it's technically feasible.

[verbify]

> Most people have smart phones which are much more powerful than servers from 6 years ago.

This isn't even remotely true.

The most powerful servers from 6 years ago is a xeon x7560, which has a 40% higher passmark score than even the best enthusiast consumer-level cpu on the market today (an i7 6700k), never mind even the most expensive smartphone on the market.

https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X7560+%40+2....

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6700K...

[erikpukinskis]

I think that qualifies as "remotely true" actually. They didn't say "more powerful than the most powerful servers" they said "more powerful than servers".

People on the internet have an odd tendency to interpret statements in the broadest possible way.

[verbify]

I did misread that. I think the point still stands. The cheapest server cpus from 2010 are 60% as good as the best 2016 cpus. It might be close to the iPhone 7's latest chip or Google's Pixel. But most people don't have the latest and greatest. A normal phone won't be close to the latest and greatest i7. And I don't think it will be close to a 2010 era server.

[tajen]

Economics and scale can be a strange beast. The sum of Amazon EC2 + Google Cloud + Digital Ocean + Rackspace +... is about 10,000,000 servers, which makes... 1 server per 7,000 inhabitants on Earth. Have you ever looked at it this way?

And that's only for public cloud, not including Facebook, Google's internal servers, Apple's infrastructure, ISPs, and servers hosted by all companies. So to provide all IT services to citizen of modern economies, we're certainly close to 1 server for 100 inhabitants. Sometimes I wonder what we're doing with so many servers on Earth: I don't spend 24hrs a day sending requests to public servers, and even if I did, the server I'd be pinging could handle a few thousand users at the same time. So where does all this processing power go?

And there's even more computing available if you include everyone's home and work PC, phone and router, but those are not always-on.

> Hmmm... perhaps everyone running their own system is, in fact, doable.

Crunching the numbers, we're already above one system per person ;) So we might as well go full-decentralized, if we could conceive a theoretical model around it.

[FooBarWidget]

> So where does all this processing power go?

Security, redundancy and isolation. Often times you have an extra server not because you need the processing power, but to separate things for security reasons, to provide failover and to avoid noisy neighbors.

[nine_k]

Certain things, like filtering out spam, or handling video, require rather long computation per user per day. Same probably applies to just transferring data quickly enough, with a lot if spare capacity to handle spikes.

[TaylorAlexander]

I like the idea of smartphones as servers feeding content to a CDN... Combined with IPFS [1] that should work well.

I was going to make a different comment though. You suggest that, because it would have higher infrastructure costs, a decentralized network is "not feasible" from a business perspective.

I'm wondering a) whether infrastructure costs are currently a limiting factor in the growth of social networks, and b) if a decentralized social network needs to be a business at all.

But more to point a, what if it cost 10x more, but the current costs were $0.10 per user per year. Do you think a service with a cost of $1 per user per year would be too expensive to operate?

[1] https://ipfs.io/

[nojvek]

I was exactly just thinking about this. If phone is offline we need CDN's. But then again phone's have to watch out for their precious battery life.

With decentralized, you also have a huge issue of protocol. Facebook can upgrade millions of people instantly to new version. Decentralized could be a major pain.

[ComodoHacker]

>Most people have smart phones which are much more powerful than servers from 6 years ago. Why not just use that?

Not before we have breakthrough in power cells. Or some other breakthrough. Perhaps computer implanted in our body and powered by our food.