It's hard to imagine how things could be different, but for many services you don't need a middleman. For a long time, banking was thought to be a necessary middleman because you "have to" trust at least some actor to verify the transactions. Turns out you don't need to, with distributed ledgers (Bitcoin, etc).

When it comes to search engines, two things shake the centralized assumption: (1) you can crawl DHTs like https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico does for BitTorrent, and this can be done self-hosted, (2) too often we assume that searches must be global, but in many cases you are implicitly constraining your search space to regional boundaries or interest boundaries. E.g. as a westerner you are probably not interested in content from Vietnam or Pakistan. Also, when searching the Web, rarely do people browse through multiple Google search result pages. As a consequence, things like `awesome-*` lists ( https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness ) are a good starting point for a decentralized curated catalogue that could cover that use case. So you could imagine a curated catalogue of programming websites compiled as a few hundred megabyte file, it could pretty much cover your interest boundaries, and as a file this can be shared over Dat today very easily. Want to search another 'interest boundary'? Run the same search software but on a different catalogue file. These things are possible.

In other words, centralization is overestimated. Maybe there are a couple of genuine centralized-middleman use cases but most of use cases can be very well covered by decentralization.

> Turns out you don't need to, with distributed ledgers (Bitcoin, etc).

The distributed network is the middleman in fact. The entire thing doesn't function without that middleman. To get to the end result, you have to go through that network. It fits perfectly as a middleman concept.

The notion that crypto-currencies can exist without middlemen, couldn't be further from the truth. They're entirely built on and dependent upon middlemen. The distributed ledger is one of the greatest middleman technologies ever devised.

I think there will always be a value in middle men for something, but to me the argument is about how many. As time moves forward there are fewer and fewer domains we go to for things. Facebook Google Amazon. Sure there will be competitors and that's what makes this still fair. But over time, the largest entity of each domain captures an ever larger percentage of traffic, revenue, etc..

The current method of aggregation is to empower fewer and fewer companies to control the rules, what you see, how to sell, what percentage they will allow a sale to generator for the seller, how products are shippped, and how returns work.

This works great for buyers, it always works great for buyers, but behind the scenes what is this doing to our economy and distribution of wealth. It also tends to have a major effect on the country of origin of products - everything is globabalized, so when we purchase something from Amazon we are purchasing something made also increasingly from a single country. Yes other countries will need to address that (as a separate issue too) but still the effect of letting fewer and fewer companies control the market, its no longer a free market.

Is there a way to regain independence? Can Cryptocurrency help? What other peer to peer technologies need to work in concert for us to break our dependency on Amazon, Google, Facebook?

Another way to ask the question: How do we make the online like the offline used to be (we drive down the street and go into a shop - except without the Walmart) but still make this fast-trustable and simple for the buyers.

I was struck with the same thing.

There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently.

These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change.

I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.

Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that!

This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.

There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman.

Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.

No right or wrong? Why not?

Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right."

Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.

> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives

Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book. As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now.

This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later.

I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.

What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't?

What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?

> What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?

Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook.

How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.

Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about.

Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages.

It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

> It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.

If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com.

Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like this:

"Are you on AIM?"

"No, are you on ICQ?"

"Nah, but I'm on MSM!"

"Sorry I'm not on MSM, but I'm on Linkedin!"

"No good for me I don't like Linkedin!"

"Guess I'm gonna make an MSM account -_-"

For that very same reason I ended up creating my first Facebook account on Facebook.de, which was a scam site back then. But decades of compartmentalization of users into "regions" convinced me that if I want to get any use out of Facebook I better sign up with their German version of the site, as most of my friends/family are German, that's how alien this whole "aggregate all your social contacts in one place" idea was back then.

> > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

> That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.

Talking about Scuttlebutt here, it's actually the other way round. It's one protocol and any two people on it could connect, but in practice you won't see everyone, because you only have a social connection to certain people.

>Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

No, the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. Why would my 60-odd year old mother who uses Facebook to talk to her COPD support group even care about Diaspora? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.

> the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about.

That's exactly my point! A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.

> I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.

Scuttlebutt is neither anonymous nor censorship-resistant. It's free of adverts and sponsored content experiences. It's a friendly, co-operative culture (hence the software is open source, but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software).

> A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.

Here's the problem though - it's not really nicer to use than Facebook for someone who is already familiar with Facebook and who doesn't mind using it. The UX of these platforms tends to be rough in ways that would annoy many non-technical users, which is understandable given their newness, and the fact that technical users are early adopters, but still makes mainstream adoption difficult.

The Scuttlebutt client I downloaded has a search form at the top that will not behave as mainstream users will expect - they will wonder where their "newsfeed" is, try to search for a topic of interest and it will fail out of the box. Making an intellectual or emotional argument for why an alternative to existing social media clients is preferable won't work as long as the physical experience of using the alternatives is more complicated.

>but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software.

But those are the details that dominate the frontpages of these platforms. She either has to care or else care enough to wade through it to find what she needs. That's a real problem.

Yes, I agree with you on all of this.

The user experience of using the app, and of discovering the app (i.e. its web presence), needs to be friendly and relevant to the user.

I don't think we want to imitate Facebook too directly, because we don't want it to be Facebook, but it needs to make sense as you use it :)

(By the way, I'm a mere end-user here, and this is just my opinion!)

I've been trying to explain this for years here. People don't care that much about privacy because they can't see it and it's hard for them to conceptualize the scope of what they're giving up. It's a selling point, but not that great of a selling point - certainly not good enough to overcome the network effect.

I forget who pointed it out, but I like the point that to disrupt a big incumbent you need to be not just 10% better, you need to be 50% better. You can get started by doing something that nobody else does which is useful. What FB did better than anyone else was provide a clean interface to social network curation that made it far more useful to the initial population than the alternatives that existed at the time.

> Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

Sure, but why should we rely on a single middleman who at some point could abuse his power? Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

> Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judgement.

How does a distributed search work? What does my query look like? Where do I send it? How can I gauge how much I trust the response?

Here is a purely fictional example. I frankly don't know how feasible something like this would be:

The search index could be build using blockchain technolgy. Each transaction is an entry of the search index. For efficiency, such an index could then be mirrored by many different institutions. For example, universities. Each snapshot of the search index could have something like a sha256 sum. If the server you use per default returns a hash that differs from other institutions you rate trustworthy then you should be skeptical.

As for search queries, since the index should be standardized in some way there could be many open source apps that require their own syntax for queries so that they suit different purposes and preferences.

BitTorrent presents a plausible (but not complete) replacement. Most torrents nowadays are disseminated through the DHT. User clients can query the DHT to search for specific content, which is then downloaded via its content hash through trackers. Many websites are also available which provide indexes and other features (comments, virus scans, ratings, etc.) on top of this DHT database.

It would be a technical stretch to expand this to replace Google, but if you did you'd have many competing "search engines" built upon an open decentralized database.

I don't think I've expressed this idea well, but you should get the gist.

but then I'd want somebody to aggregate those competing engine results and sort them for me by relevance and applicability.