Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and this stuff... is not. Going forward it gets even worse, they're going to be opposed at every step by corporations with more money than most nations.
The internet was originally decentralized because the government wanted to make it that way, and I think the only way to get back there is going to require a gigantic, economically unattractive investment. There are at least a few governments that may have the capability but I can't name one that would have the motivation. Hopefully some billionaire's charity will decide saving the internet is a worthy legacy.
The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0]
An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.
E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage).
And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?
And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.
I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.
In my book, they're moderately worse. I entered the internet around the time of free web forums, where anyone could run one for any reason. I moderated a couple moderately sized ones, mostly oriented around computer games. Overall it wasn't too bad. Certainly nothing compared to what I've seen in larger communities. I suspect the larger the community, the worse the garbage.
But the main reason I say commercial players have made it worse is that they've also commercialized content moderation. Which is to say, they employ people to sit at a desk looking at the absolute worst humanity has to offer for 8 straight hours a day for barely better than minimum wage. That's like a job straight out of Black Mirror.
Forum moderation, by contrast, was/is a volunteer position. You were only in it for as long as you chose to be, and you could leave at any time without any effect on your livelihood.
So I'd argue the "community watch" model of amateur forum moderators was closer to the greater good than the commercial walled gardens.
Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”?
Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell.
I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.
If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.
The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects.
An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.
Perhaps it's a social one as well.
There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.
But that’s beyond the point that I originally wanted to make: spam and email have very similar parallels to security and the Internet. In another universe, it’s possible that the issue of spam and security could’ve been incorporated into the protocols themselves. But for some reason I’m sure is rational, those issues were moved outside, to the hosts — to be left to be solved with middleboxes as firewalls and Google’s spam filter.
I would argue that this was the smarter choice and that both of these involve the same problem: spam and security are ill-defined and constantly evolving.
I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit.
Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.
It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off.
Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.
I used Spamassassin back in the day and it was effective for a bit, and then pretty much all spammers figured out how to avoid it.
Also, I'm not talking about the obvious VIAGRA large caps spam, which I think is fairly easy to solve. But spam has become much more nuanced and Gmail is the best at it, and the false positive rate is still amazing.
Anybody who wants to advance the open web should focus his efforts on a P2P library with extremely good NAT traversal capabilities that is extremely reliable and simple to use and supports as many programming languages as possible - certainly not just C++ or C. It needs to be deployable under a permissive license on all major platforms macOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, iOS, Android, and browsers, and may not transport any data or chew away bandwidth without allowing total control over this by the programmer and end user. It needs to have a dead simple, almost idiot-proof API. The resulting network on top of IP needs to be searchable, not too high latency, and route to any endpoint on it.
That's still the biggest hurdle for the Open Web. Everything else is secondary.
The confusion in your comment is that one would need RDF to do Linked Data. I've written about that misconception here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linke...
Don't get me wrong, the Semantic Web community has made mistakes and has not been developer-friendly. But we're not still stuck in the 90s. For instance, XML hasn't been a part of any of this for many years.
AKA instead of "Eval is Evil" we might instead say "XML is Evil"
With open-science mandates coming from governments around the world researchers are looking for ways to share their data in meaningful ways. I can think of a significant amount of research that regularly consumes RDF, particularly in the fields of medical biology and genomics where it's used to annotate data. This is where I'd guess you'll see it take a foothold, for example medical diagnosis codes are notoriously disparate and there is a strong appreciation for what semantics could address. Unify, exchange, and consume medical diagnoses ... proffit.
Links etc. off the top of my head-
* GO - The gene ontology, used in hundreds of thousands of genomic anotations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944782/ * UBERON - https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-... * The second year of US2TS - http://us2ts.org/2019/posts/registration.html * OBO foundry - https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io
A related beef though, is that with any reasonable size dataset ontology-based inference is computationally very difficult, you have to cut all sorts of corners and know all sorts of tricks to actually infer across your data. In other words- if semantic data are going to truly become ubiquitous we need to infer in real time across them. Inference takes everything in your dataset into account, so adding a single axiom means if you want to be complete, you have to compute all over again -> slow.
Where is a good place to participate in those debates, especially data authenticity and local server pods?
FreedomBox didn't go anywhere. FreeNAS with ZFS is reliable but not designed to be exposed to the public internet. Many local services are using a centralized rendezvous server for NAT hole punching.
On the shiny commercial front, MyAmberLife has $13M in funding for a home server but it's mostly controlled by a central cloud service. Do Western Digital, Synology, QNAP, Drobo, etc care about decentralization?
Current solution for several issues related with electronic health records concluded to create the new standard, to use RDF and linked data, which solved most of the issues on the previous standard. See FHIR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Healthcare_Interoperabili...
In fact, current linked data discussions seem to me that become relevant again because it is more clear now that we have been misusing/overusing/ bad REST, microservices architectures and GraphQL for some already analyzed and solved problems.
But, of course, for a single application which doesn't require interoperability, not requiring standardized data exchange formats, not requiring support for flexible data representation, Linked Data and RDF will be clearly unnecessary. But on time, the future of data interconnection plays on the side of Linked Data IMHO.
Until now, current attempts to create some Linked Data + RDF alternate infraestructures are more likely to create ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of Linked Data and RDF.
And just to make sure we are on the same page here: it's not academics' job to build usable products. We will continue working on things that are novel from the academic standpoint; if people like you dismiss LD/SemWeb, those novel things will have "a terrible track record of solving real-world problems". I hope this does not come across as too personal.
And using semantic web for that is just as bad. A basic json API would be much more stable than parsing a document with navigation and similar just to get that data.
Highly unlikely someone will bother with this (in addition to all the other quirks) while making their website.
Instead, it's just 'what about old-fashioned websites, plus lots of xml schema and long spec documents'? It just tastes like a rehash of Berners-Lee's existing '5-star open data' schpiel ( https://5stardata.info/en/ ) but now with the billing that it'll fix the internet. 5-star open data has been around for years now, and, well, the linked data future isn't here. When's the last time you consumed RDF in an application?