[ivoras]

This actually makes me sad :(

Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse.

It was SUPPOSED to enable me, myself, hosting my videos, on my computer(s) and making them available to whomever I want to, including everyone. This is how early protocols were designed. Everyone was supposed to be a SMTP (e-mail) host. Everyone was supposed to run FTP and HTTP. Everyone got an equally routable (the link quality depends, of course) address, not some 3rd level NAT retail monstrosity. If you needed aggregation, you make search sites like Google (and AltaVista and others before it) and RSS to pull data from multiple sources and CACHE IT LOCALLY.

Of course I welcome projects like PeerTube, but I'd much rather go back to the original idea. No ISPs or Clouds, only Peers.

With Internet like water grid - a utility.

[pimterry]

> It was SUPPOSED to enable me, myself, hosting my videos, on my computer(s) and making them available to whomever I want to, including everyone.

I think maybe you misunderstand PeerTube? It is exactly what you say the internet should be.

You can use it to host your videos yourself, on your own computer, and make them available to whomever you want to.

You can use a hosted version too, but it's not required. It's also completely possible to host in your own cupboard, or to use a cloud server you control. On whatever instance you use, you can still talk to your friends directly, through peer-to-peer connections to whichever instance they choose to use. It does even support RSS, and other PeerTube instances do indeed cache the video locally!

It has its own new set of problems of course, but it does seem like it's a strong step in exactly the direction you're interested in.

[mschuster91]

> Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse.

The main problem aren't privileged actors like ISPs (although shit like asymmetric DSL or CGNAT definitely prevents people from self-hosting)... it is abuse and the complete unwillingness of almost everybody from private actors over governments to international organizations to put a fucking stop on it.

You open up a server on the Internet? Not even sixty seconds and the first Shodan or whatever using script-kiddies will attempt to hack you. And god forbid you run some popular software that can be sniffed like Drupal or Wordpress - you end up in Shodan just as well and will be automatedly exploited as soon as the CVE gives enough hints to people to write an exploit. You wish to send your own emails? You find yourself greylisted by almost everyone in their futile attempts to keep their users from spam. You wish to communicate with someone? Better read up on crypto because governments and ISPs just love to mine data. Operate a service that allows user-generated content? Beware for a deluge of everything from warez groups to CSAM spreaders that can and will expose you to serious legal liability.

The old protocols were all designed with implicit trust in mind and the assumption that no actor on the internet would abuse their position. That worked reasonably well as long as it was only universities (but even then, first viruses appeared from enterprising prankster students)... but once the Internet got mainstream, all of that broke down, and it completely collapsed once people started realizing they might make money shilling grey-imported penile enlargement pills. And the more people were on the Internet, the harder the work of "abuse departments" got, which led to most organizations simply dismantling the department or redirecting complaints to /dev/null. The fact that some governments (particularly China and Russia) take a completely blind eye towards hacking originating from their countries as long as they themselves aren't targeted (just look how many malware samples have a dead-man switch when they encounter information that the target might be Russian) just makes the problem worse.

Unfortunately, by that time the old protocols and standards were so widespread in use there was no chance to replace them, and so layers upon layers upon layers of bullshit got placed over the old layers in the end.

[foobarbecue]

You're right that there are a lot of bad actors out there, but in my experience they are pretty easy to deal with if you set things up right. The biggest annoyance for me self-hosting has been ISP refusing to give static IP and decent upstream bandwidth.

I've hosted my own website and email server for decades. It does take a little work to keep up with things like DMARC, reverse DNS etc, but if you get a good score on https://internet.nl/test-mail/ and don't spam anybody, self-hosted email works fine. FYI you are misusing "greylist."

[mschuster91]

> You're right that there are a lot of bad actors out there, but in my experience they are pretty easy to deal with if you set things up right.

Sure, it's possible to defend against hackers to a degree, but even using a completely static website still leaves you open to attack surfaces in the webserver software or to remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in the Linux network stack.

> FYI you are misusing "greylist."

I assume we share the definition of "greylisting" to be the receiver MTA blocking the first delivery of an incoming email with "try again later", and the sender MTA then retrying after that time frame? If yes then this exactly describes my experience in administrating self-hosted mail servers with popular large mail providers.

[foobarbecue]

Ah, my apologies, I jumped to conclusions that you were misusing "greylisting". I've never actually checked if I'm getting greylisted sending to large providers, but I think initial greylisting of new addressses is pretty reasonable.

My mail server (MailInABox) has postgrey enabled by default, greylisting incoming email each time email is received from a new address. I thought that was a little overzealous so turned it off.

[mschuster91]

It might be reasonable, but highly annoying if you run a, say, sign-up double opt-in or an email-based second factor/OTP. Customers don't like waiting an hour or whatever greylisting period, and so as a SaaS operator you are all but forced to go to one of the big e-mail senders like AWS SES because you don't stand a chance otherwise.

[foobarbecue]

Ah, darn... I'm starting a web app with email verification now, using my own email server for sending and I didn't consider this. Thanks for the warning. Guess I'm about to find out how bad it is.

Pretty annoying to test for this reliably as well...

[sp332]

Hosting large files from your house is a good way to have a saturated upstream all the time. P2P protocols like gnutella and later bittorrent are a way to distribute files without putting all the load on one host. Not to mention all the liability for pirated content.

[gabereiser]

Only because the ISP's made it that way. Having 1Gbps down and 10Mbps up. You are forced into consumerism of bandwidth instead of a peer. ISP's don't want competition so you'll never be a peer.

[HenrikB]

The asymmetry stems from the days where we connected through the phone lines, which was not designed for data. There it was possible to have a higher bandwidth out from the phone switches than in. That is, dial-up modems and DSL modems could have a much higher download speed than upload.

I don't know about cable, but I suspect it's the same there.

OTH, fiber-based internet often has symmetric speeds. Don't know the stats, but I suspect most fiber ISPs gives you that.

[gabereiser]

The asymmetry stems from ISDN. Bonding pairs, twin lines, etc etc. that bled over into the dialup era and bled over still into the cable internet era and has even bled over into the satellite era.

[wolfprogramming]

Fiber internet often gives you 1Gbps up.

[gabereiser]

Fiber isn’t available in 95% of the US. They give you 1Gbps up because they don’t really have saturation.

[znpy]

> Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse.

No it wasn't. The internet was supposed to be a a global network of networks, and it is.

> It was SUPPOSED to enable me, myself, hosting my videos, on my computer(s) and making them available to whomever I want to, including everyone.

No it wasn't. ARPANet was supposed to be a network of computing facilities that could withstand a nuclear attack, and Internet was the effort of opening up such infrastructure to scientific and commercial entities (universities and companies). For quite a while the idea of the general public having internet at home wasn't even an idea.

> Everyone was supposed to be a SMTP (e-mail) host.

No they weren't. Pretty much nobody had their own dedicated computer, and they just had a shell account on a shared computer dedicated to a specific organization. And the administrator of such computer would set up mailing facilities on such host. Hence the local-delivery (/var/spool/mail and stuff).

[BlueTemplar]

Wait, what exactly makes you sad about PeerTube ?

Also, how would you connect to the Internet without an ISP ? (Well there are mesh networks I guess, but AFAIK they are much slower, both in throughput and latency ?)

[rakoo]

You can perfectly run peertube at home.

[goosesanta]

What you want is Urbit (though hn hates it for political reasons)

[cyanydeez]

The current state of cryptocurrency should be enough evidence that people want centralization as it affords the most social investment value.

[yummypaint]

I think it shows that what most people actually want are banks and brokers, and they don't know or care about how things work on the backend, or understand what banking regulations do for them when they use a real bank. The robinhood crowd and early NFT enthusiasts are in some ways two sides of the same coin.