[Natales]

Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything.

I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora, Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies).

In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up.

Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement. Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious, production-quality systems based on dweb techs.

When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why". What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them.

As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

[Nextgrid]

> the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them.

The problems are clear but the solutions need to be clear too. So far many of the alternatives tend to focus more on the tech (decentralized protocols, this or that programming language, etc) than solving the problem. Even worse, sometimes the nature of the tech makes solving the problem more difficult or impossible (decentralized protocols brings a lot of challenges by themselves for example).

I made a comment back in the day about my thoughts on Mastodon and similar alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513

[nine_k]

Back in the day @moxie wrote a good text explaining why UX of a centralized solution will always be as good or better than UX of a decentralized solution. Most users crave pleasant UX, and easily discard applications and services that have annoying UX, as long as there is a sleeker alternative.

I'd add that a centralized solution can be run by a big corporation extracting significant profits, and thus investing significant resources into it. Investing into a decentralized solution gives a much vaguer idea of ROI. Look at email, the long-standing champion of federated protocols. Most investment went into Gmail and Outlook, proprietary solutions that happen to interoperate with the rest of email universe, but which use proprietary ways to communicate to centralized infrastructure as their strong suit. They are wildly popular.

I posit that for normal users a decentralized solution only makes sense when a centralized solution is impossible and / or illegal. See p2p music-sharing networks of 2000s, or modern bittorent. For bittorent though, centralized catalogs like TPB or rutracker are the norm, unlike the p2p search in Gnutella or DC++ of old. Even though incentives of those running TPB are better aligned with the interests of its users than e.g. in the cases of FB or Reddit, TPB is not a non-profit, AFIACT.

So, for decentralized web of 1995 to return, a lot of people must have it very bad using the centralized web. Even though ad networks actively work in the direction of making the experience of web browsing insufferable, it appears that relatively simple tools like uBlock Origin, or paying a small subscription fee, make the experience okay again.

So, YouTube + $5/mo, or even YouTube played via NewPipe, again trump the experience of using PeerTube, etc.

BTW even if the internet becomes a mesh network on transport / connectivity level, it won't change much in these dynamics. Instant gratification + not needing to pay money are winning, and will win, the majority of the audience, by default.

[jb_s]

>As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

Then it's not solving any immediate problems for them. Anyway - people get obsessed with getting the entire planet on to distributed networks. IMO that's not realistic - the mass population is always going to choose simple, corporate shit unless there's a direct need for something disruptive enough that they'll spend literally days working out how to do it - eg learning how to find and download torrents.

>Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything.

It won't change everything but I think it will become important. General purpose computing will continue it's dying path and in 10-15 years, normies will be solely on their smartphone walled gardens and programmers, scientists, muckrakers, enthusiasts etc will populate some kind of very niche darknet (<5% population) - or an array of totally disparate darknets aligned to various niches - whether theyr'e running over the Internet proper or some kind of alt network.

[0dayz]

>It won't change everything but I think it will become important. General purpose computing will continue it's dying path and in 10-15 years

I swear these kind of statements makes me feel old.

People in tech has been saying this for a very long time, and it's never been true, the PC market will only die if innovation and usability is dead.

What has happened is that we've spaced out our usage of tech with specialized tech, a good recent example is how say for instance smart watches have replaced the heart beat sensor and as a notifier /clock tool which the smartphone used to be.

[TroisM]

> the mass population is always going to choose simple

until the consequences of using the current cloud hurts them enough

[satchlj]

will they ever see it when we get to "enough" though? I am not sure...

[TroisM]

We'll probably find out, because that's where we are heading. It already went too far for me in many different ways.

[freediver]

As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

In order for people to care, give them something to care about.

It is hard to expect that an average person would 'care' about IPFS or Mastodon which are unpolished, hard to use technologies. But people care about their iPhones and Instagram accounts, even if they come at a great price. It is our job as technologists to give people something to care about. The perceived rate of 'caring' measures our own abilities (as creators of technologies and products), not the lack of theirs.

[edoceo]

To nitpick: it measures our ability to *communicate* the issues.

[subless]

> In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared.

From my experience just being an observer and not too much of a techie I’d say it’s one of the cons of open source products.

For example, if there’s an open source product you like to use but the maintainers are not very active, you may get aggravated and fork it and start another similar product thinking you can do it better justice. Problem is, for every new “fork” of a product you end up dividing the user base as well.

When users have too many options to choose from they usually do not compare differences when there’s too many to compare and just pick one.

Also, most of these similar products are not always backwards compatible which is one of many reasons people may not try to compare similar products.

Another way of thinking about it is the less effort someone has to input to copy something, the more “copies” you’ll have to pick from. From a users perspective it is very confusing and frustrating not knowing what to pick to use.

[burnt_toast]

> the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

I've started to wonder if the web will split for this reason.

Main stream stays on the normal web and techies move to their own. Almost like an end to the Eternal September but really it just feels like everything old is new again.

[black_puppydog]

The author just recently got contacted (again) by Cuban activists. In the face of internet shutdowns they, like Iranian activists before them, Indian and Colombian activists, are looking for networks that work off the grid. SSB isn't there yet. It leaks too much data at the moment. But the need is there. And if these people find it useful... we'd never know. That's the nature of these networks.

just my two cents...

[amelius]

I think the approach may be too radical for most users. Perhaps an approach like "embrace, extend, extinguish" might work better.

[EGreg]

DWeb is hard. We spent 10 years building this, and to offer the same things people are used to with Facebook or Telegram:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

[meiraleal]

Web 3.0 and blockchain technology[1] is doing a great job getting people into dweb. If we remove the "get rich fast" part of it, dApps are doing a great work bringing users to distributed platforms.

1. https://ipfs.io/

[AgentME]

IPFS is great, but just a nitpick, there's nothing blockchain about IPFS. Blockchain usually implies decentralized but decentralized doesn't imply blockchain. Cryptocurrency blockchains only really make sense when you're managing something scarce and you need to prevent double-spends (like for currency or domain names).