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by ForHackernews 2783 days ago
Maybe. But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time, and don't want to be hosting videos and photos off their mobile device.

So you're stuck with replicating that data out to all the peers, which means you've just lost control of "your" data again.
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some-username 2783 days ago
The content could live at peers that are online all the time. This could be either your own node or not. If it's not your own node the network has to be designed in a way that the online node does not learn a bit about what it is storing. An example of this would be lake: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8974-practical_mix_network_desig... It's also mentioned on those slides: https://grothoff.org/christian/snt2017.pdf
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IshKebab 2783 days ago
Sure but hosting content isn't free, so then you have the problem of paying for it. I could imagine a crypto-currency based solution but that is just sooo complicated.

Most of the reason for centralisation is simplification. Have you tried running your own email server lately?

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ForHackernews 2783 days ago
I think people wouldn't object to minimal costs of hosting their friends' stuff on the scale of a few hundred friends.

Shoehorning in cryptocurrency just seems absurd.

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some-username 2783 days ago
Yes, cryptocurrencies was one way. (I don't think that it's really complicated.)

But on the other hand I don't think that it's really expensive. As in have a RasPi lying around at home that's keeping track of everything when you're not online. That should totally suffice for your own needs. If you have bigger needs or want to support the network (maybe even for a small compensation in whatever form) that's easily scaleable. Or think of bittorrent: It's incentivised that you run contribute back what you received. That works totally without compensation in cryptocurrencies.

About the simplification I'm not sure either. Have you tried running Gmail lately? (Not as client but as service ^^ I think that it's not quite straight-forward.) Once you have a proper working p2p network/algorithm/protocol I can imagine that it's easier to run for all parties.

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Navarr 2782 days ago
Asking the average person to install a device in their home to properly utilize a social network might be a non-starter
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some-username 2782 days ago
Let it run on the router or NAS...
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kodablah 2782 days ago
> But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time

I think most people know someone who does and we can start there. The first step is to make it really easy to host on a desktop (including addressing and NAT busting, both of which Tor provide).

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