People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers.
I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's laptop, desktop, or cellphone. Something with a distributed/peer-to-peer file system for ubiquitous content, and peer-to-peer RSS.
The harder question is (complex) querying. How do we avoid the centralization of Google, while still retaining the functionality? I don't see how such a new service could survive if there's a regression in search.
I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group shared content online, and the encryption key for cloud backup. Dont ask the user what encryption they want, just set up wpa2.
Physical panel is always admin. Let the panel admin create users and admins with their own credentials for all the usual cloud services - docs, email (at their subdomain), some kind of social networking/IM node, with easy-to-download apps for various other services like minecraft or music streaming or whatever, etc.
Complete 1-stop wifi and cloud server.
Ask yourself one question: What problem am I solving with this?
Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device, however simple, just to connect to others in a decentralized way? Would your mum use it? That's your target audience.
I firmly believe the future must have a better way of doing things but we need to look at the pain points, the current problems that the current tools are attempting to solve and then coming up with something better and easier (let's keep network effects out of the equation for now).
I don't know what that is but it must be as simple as clicking something that says "Log in to <Product Name>"... not another device, however cool or simple it is.
Perhaps a router that gives you a simple question during setup, e.g. Would you like to enable SocialCloud? A major problem I could see with something like that is that I imagine most people get their routers from their ISP and I have no idea how big the router market is... I got mine from Sky and have no intention of replacing it.
Consider what would happen if you asked the same question about technologies that are popular today before they were popular... What problem does WhatsApp solve? What problem does Instagram solve? What problem does YouTube solve? Instant messaging apps, photo sharing websites and video sharing websites all existed before WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube, yet they all took off in a big way. Home servers can take off despite the competition so long as there are enough early adopters willing to take a punt. Network effects can kick in after there's a small, dedicated group getting use out of the technology.
> "Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device"
They don't have to buy anything. You can run a home server on computing devices you probably already own.
Nonetheless, things like it and Time Machine illustrate just how much use one can get out of certain features if the UX is bulletproof or nearly so. Routers might be done as easily depending on the circumstances. I'm almost certain ISP's could pull that off. Give them username and password to use on a HTTPS site that downloads the right configuration into an OpenWRT router they supply with any configuration software built-in. It then prints locally-generated password and other configuration data on form for customer to safely store. Any recoveries can be done with it or through ISP.
What you think?
Already done with the Almond+ and others. The problem is that at best, the firmware behind the pretty screen is terrible. At worst? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/13/home_router_botnet/
IE, you can simply drop an html page into your own IPFS directory, and other users of IPFS can browse to it (assuming you put global read permissions on it). It is no more complicated than a daemon and a virtual file system.
There have between a bunch of proposals (eg, grokster) out there which have started off as radically decentralized, but eventually took on a layer or three of super peers to manage that metadata transfer, after the fully decentralized model failed under real traffic.
(Good datasets also seem to be a problem here. The available ones are pretty small or have a lot of caveats, which makes it tough to really see how a solution will play out is the real world.)
Also, if the idea takes off, I'd expect to see the functionality being built-in to home routers. However, that's not necessary for the popularity of home servers to grow.
If it's simple enough to be mobile, it's also simple enough to be static and self-hosted. And there are advantages to that.
Replication, redundancy, and consistent presence, for starters.
Identity is solved by real-world trust. Facebook has proven most of us are separated by less than 5 degrees.
Also, I have only about 15 apps, 300 pictures, and 10 sorry videos and I'm constantly running out of space even with half the stearate being on an SD card. I can't imagine puerile having enough storage to run something like this on their phone.
Most knowledge as we use it now is ephemeral and can be somewhat centralized safely. The permanent knowledge or at least the trusted hashes of that knowledge can travel with us.
- Data plans. Everyone connecting to your blog through your phone would use up a hell of a lot of data.
- iPhones are notoriously hostile to P2P apps, so that rules out about half of all smartphone users.
There are other issues but those are the most significant imo.
Maybe this can be solved with good caching.
But what you don't want is your site / post going viral which will bring down your internet connection.
This means that reverse scaling effect kicks in. The more popular the file is the less people access it from original source.
Without the serialisation of actions that centralisation gives, it's much harder and hence more expensive to create things.
If we're talking about the ideal world that may be true, but the real world is far from perfect. If you ask 100 people do you want to live a meaningful life, probably 99 of them will say yes. But do they? Probably 1 out of those 100 will live a meaningful life. If you ask people do you want to be told what to do, or do you want to do what you want, most of them will say they want to do what they want. But in reality most people just want to be told what to do because making decisions and being responsible for it is not an easy thing.
Coming back to Facebook feed, there's a reason why people keep using Facebook even though many people hate it. Sure it's not ideal but there will never be an ideal world. I think the reason why most "decentralization" advocates never succeed is exactly because they're being too ideal (read naive) about this.
That said I think the pendulum will swing back someday in the future surely, it just won't be by these guys. It will be from some random technology which didn't even aspire to "disrupt" the web.
As I said before, content could be curated by apps. You could choose the apps that present the information in the way you like. The difference is, if a better app comes along you can switch to it without losing your past data because all the data would be application-agnostic, there's a greater degree of separation between the raw data and the presentation of that data.
Although network effects work the other way as well, when people start leaving social networks they collapse exponentially just like they grew exponentially.
I like the concepts of Namecoin & Keybase, IPFS and Tahoe-LAFS, etc, Tor and I2P, CJDNS, PHB's Mathematical Mesh, and so on...
Having your own server or cluster that your own devices connect to for anonymization, identity, syncing, federation, etc, would simplify so much.
To me the answer is obvious.
Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your user experience does not always reflect what's best for you. To give a simple example, the news feed on Facebook is curated based on algorithms you do not have full control over.
From a technology perspective, there are two key parts to what could replace this arrangement to provide a tangible benefit... home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure. Decentralised identity would then be used to connect to the home servers.
One way to think about it would be... instead of typing in a website address, you choose from a contact list. Whatever people share is held on their personal server. You could use apps that run on your own server to aggregate media from your contacts.
The tangible benefit is found in connecting to others without relying on middle men. Contact is direct whilst still retaining convenience.