[dvt]

> How do you put this genie back in the bottle?

You don't. It's over and done with. It started with Microsoft shipping Windows with Internet Explorer. And it probably ended with Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp.

Long gone are silly, goofy, pointless GeoCities sites, webrings, and phpBB forums for just about every topic you can think of. I mean, just think about how ridiculous it is that WikiLeaks has a Facebook page or that Snowden has a Twitter account. The final nail in that coffin is that a significant portion of the web is accessed these days via phones: which, by Google or Apple mandate, are extremely locked down ecosystems. You've still got a couple of crazy idealists out there like Stallman, but they're far and few in between.

The open web is dead. Long live the open web.

[ALittleLight]

I make this comment whenever a lament about the old style of internet pages comes up, but I tried to use StumbleUpon a while back and noticed it was gone. Since it was gone I decided to recreate it, in hopes of capturing some of the weird independent websites I remember browsing years ago.

https://stumblingon.com

It's click a button and get a random website.

[EGreg]

Google and Apple have web browsers, and they can be used to build quite a bit. Presumably, Apple and Google browsers won't block a website. The Web is probably the most open and permission-less ecosystem there is, among the widely deployed ones. And it supports more and more features that let you replace native apps:

  Push Notifications (engagement)
  Web Payments (monetization)
  Contact Picker API (virality)
  WebRTC (peer to peer data, files and video)
  ServiceWorkers (caching and more)
  Crypto (peer to peer encryption, auth)
  PWAs (add to home screen)

Wordpress has been a smashing success for indie Web 1.0 (with tons of hosts and their one-click install). We also have Drupal, Joomla etc.

But what about Web 2.0? There has to be a sort of "operating system" of reusable components the same way that MacOS did buttons and menus and windows.

We have amazing hardware. But we rent our software from Zoom, Facebook, Telegram. Why? Because it's very hard to replicate everything we've come to expect from Facebook today, and not in 2004.

Well, there are projects out there on the front lines doing it. Like Inrupt (née SoLiD) from Tim Berners-Lee. I met most of these guys and teams over the years. We started before everybody, in 2011, so we have had a bit of a head start. Nearly 10 years and over $700K spent from our revenues. I'm not proud of how long it took. But it has been a long slog. But yes, we want our platform to be the next Wordpress and liberate the Web from Feudalism to a free market:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

(Here is the larger vision, not realized yet: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...)

[8jy89hui]

I've read most of the paper but I just wanted to clarify something: is the goal of this to invent modern cross-platform HTML/CSS or am I missing something?

Similarly, despite the fact that the user's data can be hosted on their own computer (ex: name service), I find it hard to believe that any major site hosted with Qbux would not still have sign-in pages and de-anonymize their users. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the on prem data / distributed approach?

[EGreg]

Yes and no. Qbix and QBUX are the next step in the evolution, but there are further steps.

1. Qbix is the operating system (available today)

2. QBUX is the token (monetizing open source and digital content)

3. https://intercoin.org is the next generation (launched in 2017, still in early stages)

Let's go through the roadmap. So basically, what Qbix does is gives you choice of landlord. It replaces the Feudalism on the Web with a free market (of hosting companies, plugins, etc.) There is no one middleman - not even Qbix Inc. - that prevents you from selling your software, digital content and services (hosting, translation, moderation) to communities, who in turn take their members' money and pay for the services.

Once all this is commoditized, there is competition rather than a monopoly or cartel of large corporations. I should say that, by and large, all the problems we see from corporations and governments have to do with a lack of a real open source alternative. At Qbix we wrote an article a year ago that was largely like the OP one, but used the events of its time. You could write an article like this any month of the year btw:

https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

Alright so now we have a choice of landlord, which is capitalism and competition. That's pretty good, but we can do better. We could replace that with an autonomous, self-healing, end-to-end encrypted framework that has no user accounts and every infrastructure node just accepts cryptocurrency and stores stuff. One such system is http://maidsafe.net/ They are probably the furthest ahead. They started before Qbix, in 2006, and they are still not done. They are far beyond IPFS in their vision.

We started a spinoff company called Intercoin (that one, I can actually say, is selling tokens in a regulated presale at https://intercoin.org). The goal is to build a distributed platform and protocol that is cryptographically secure AND scalable, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum which are only secure but not scalable. It would be used for many applications, including payments, micropayments, UBI, fundraising, but also things like anonymous and secure voting, elections and governance. Here is my article in CoinDesk from last month about the details of that:

https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting

So in the end game, "communities" are simply superconnector users, and any user can grow and become one. They are no longer privileged by virtue of operating or paying for the hardware servers. Indeed, every Inter.Activity is end-to-end encrypted and stored on K nodes that run a consensus about its state. The Inter.Activity can be a chat, or it can be a coin, or whatever that evolves over time, and every Inter.Action is M-of-N signed by the current owners of the Inter.Activity . Some of our early thoughts in 2018 can be seen here:

https://qbix.com/blog/2018/04/03/onward-to-qbix-platform-2-0...

By now you can see a lot more of the "finalized" architecture here: https://community.intercoin.org/c/technology

A lot of what I build is "graduating" from the level of technical programming and more to do with societal programming... i.e. like the US constitution, it basically has to be architected to shape the growth of communities in a positive direction. That is a lot of responsibility. I have been thinking about these issues for at least since 2012: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114

This is why we've recently taken on advisors from many different schools of economics, sociology, etc. to understand how our architectural decisions. Our company's mission is to Empower People and Unite Communities.

PS: If you're an advanced JS + Web developer and you'd like to potentially get involved, email me at greg @ either one of the domains qbix.com or intercoin.org ... we could use all the help we can get.

[kart23]

I honestly think the biggest problem is finding those places.

Some of them still certainly exist, but are dying because the people who started them are growing old, and the next generation would never find small, interesting websites on google or similar. We need a place that's dedicated to finding and connecting people, not companies and advertising. What that looks like is up for debate. An IRC server, federated social media, or even an entirely new, separate internet, I'm not sure.

The problem is that most of these just don't provide enough to people now. With any service, people have to feel like they are getting some value out of using it, and that benchmark has increased with the amount of media, information, and knowledge anyone can consume these days.

[holler]

A sad irony is that between all of the smart people viewing HN, we could build practically anything we want... So, why not build instead of complain? People forget that these gigantic corps also have weaknesses.

[searchableguy]

Why would they build a competitor to their own employer ;)

[holler]

It's really the only thing to do once you reach a certain TC :o

And because let's face it, the American Dream.

[sjroot]

> The final nail in that coffin is that a significant portion of the web is accessed these days via phones: which, by Google or Apple mandate, are extremely locked down ecosystems.

How is that the final nail in the coffin?

[hombre_fatal]

If anything, it should be a reminder that the web is really the only open system that we have and it's mostly just a quirk of history and luck that we have it at all. And it's too ingrained in our society to, say, release a phone that simply refuses to have a web browser. And I don't think we truly appreciate it enough.

[enos_feedler]

Totally agree. Appreciate what we have and ensure it continues to be healthy for what it already does. I love that we have an open HTML document rendering engine where anyone can make things available at a URL and people can experience those documents. Amazing!

[filleduchaos]

Tumblr, for all that people mock it, is one of the few remaining semi-holdouts.