This attitude is IMO exactly why the decentralized web movement outside of the blockchain/crypto space has not come further than it has in the last two decades. I run my own website out of a VPS and even that is nontrivial: occasional outages due to SSL certificates expiring, the VPS getting shut down because my credit card expires so the auto-payments stop working, troubles with the server software itself, etc etc. Meanwhile, if you just dump stuff onto one of these decentralized layers or even just a blockchain, you publish once, it's easy and it's there forever.

I truly believe that for "fully decentralized" to be viable, it must mean "serverless" (as in no servers, meaning no single computers whose IP addresses or DNS names or equivalents are explicitly referenced in a line of client-side code, not meaning that AWS lambda stuff). That does mean you're making significant efficiency tradeoffs for the foreseeable future; for some types of applications it's worth it and for others it's not.

self-host. Don't have someone else "self"-host for you.

I personally self-host because it's neat and interesting to me, but not because it's simple and cheap - if you want to actually get a website or some other service running on the WWW going, VPSs are a god-send. Also, consider the fact that unless I do actually use a Raspberry Pi, which is very flexible but underpowered, I'm going to be paying for potentially quite expensive new hardware and electricity if I self-host, as well as bandwidth. These are all non-issues with a VPS.

Also, SSL certs are necessarily centralised, because they operate on a web of trust in a world where we don't know who to trust or not. If you have a website using a certificate which is self-signed, I'm not going to trust it unless I know you personally, because if I don't know you personally I have no way of determining that you are who you say you are - only a trusted CA is going to do that. That's why a green-padlock in your browser means 'One of a limited number of root CAs trusted by the distributors of this browser says this site is owned by who it says its owned by', not just 'this site is owned by who it says its owned by'.

This is probably for the good though, as most software don't take security seriously, example listening on a public port by default, with the default password.

Actually, my experience has been the exact opposite on both points with every ISP I've ever had (in the United States). I've never had a problem setting up a dynamic DNS server to access my home network from outside. Likewise, I've never had an ISP that will give you a static IPv4 address. Maybe it's just luck on my part, but I was under the impression mine was the most common experience these days (for this country).

If your DNS provider has an API, it's probably the first example in the API documentation. If not, there's DuckDNS and similar.

I don't think it's that "easy" regardless of whether you're talking about cable-modem/router port-forwarding, or new IPv6 addresses, or even turnkey web host appliances.

In any case, I'll copy&paste one of my previous comments on NAT or ease-of-use not being the real barrier people think it is:

>Even if this thread's article's vision of IPv6 improving direct connectivity were to happen, I still claim the overwhelming majority of programmers would continue to choose something like Github rather than host their repositories on personal home servers. Personally, I wouldn't want my repo to be traced back to my home's ip address. I don't want China DDOS'ing my home ISP connection if they don't like my iPhone app that monitors Hong Kong. If I was a female, I wouldn't want my home git repo to give away my ip address and invite digital stalkers. I'd use Github just for the ability to shield my home's IPv6 address for privacy and safety.

>If the programmers -- which we can think of as technical thought leaders -- aren't leading by example (with git) for decentralization, why would we realistically expect other mainstream consumers to adopt decentralized setups? Yes, there will always be decentralized communities but it will always remain niche.

In 20+ years of home self-hosting I've never been DoS'd except on my tor hidden service (also served from home) and because it was tor all I had to do was change 1 number in my config file to limit it. Super easy.

If I want to publish a web page with some anonymity and I'd prefer that readers not know whether it's in Kansas vs New York, then my home ip address is one less piece of information readers don't need to know about. It's totally reasonable for my particular preferences. Of course, the ip privacy is not absolute but relative -- and that can be good enough. Github/Youtube/HN will know my home ip address but everybody else interacting with those sites don't need to.

I'm not going to give up some privacy of my ip address just to fulfill your ideals of "decentralization". That's not a good enough reason. And looking at your webpsite, your self-report of 20-years of no DDOS attacks is irrelevant to what I might want to publish. Maybe I want to write essays on more controversial topics than what you chose to write about.

I find it interesting that you posted a previous comment about not wanting "trackers":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22835625 : >I have never carried a cell phone (smart of otherwise) in my life. I leave my dumb phone at home or take the battery out. I hope that these tracking bracelets which others voluntarily carry will not be forced and required in the future.

Cell phones with base station multilateration track the cell phone's location 24/7/365 and in the USA that data is accumulated for 2-5 years. Over that time they get to know you and your averaged patterns of movement (<100m) very, very well.

Your IP is how you interact with the internet. Trying to 'hide' it or whatever because you worry about someone knowing your ISP's general location is shooting yourself in the leg. And after you'll start relying on third party services to do what you can't do anymore because of gimping and give away even more private information.

That said, I'm not against using anonymity networks. I host many tor onion services from the very desktop home computer I'm typing to you on. I also support i2p with bandwidth and bitcoin as a full node.

Only if by 'everyone' you mean 'not everyone.' Broadband is far from universal.

> The decentralized web is everyone hosting their own webserver from home.

Only of by 'decentralized' you mean 'centralized.' The point of decentralization is that there isn't one and only one place (a 'center') at which you can find a given resource.

And no, the point point of decentralization is literally that. Decentralization. What you're talking about is business crap leaking into areas it shouldn't. Uptime, availability, CDNs. All completely unneeded. Might as well be making straw airplanes to go full cargo cult.

Some can barely afford a cheap prepaid phone to make occasional calls, let alone a landline to tie up 24/7. Even then, running a web server is not trivial for most of the general public, a dial-up or DSL line is unlikely to come with a static IP address, and if folks don't know how to run a webserver, they certainly don't know how to set up a hostname with dynamic DNS.

> What you're talking about is business crap leaking into areas it shouldn't. Uptime, availability, CDNs. All completely unneeded.

No. You're talking about that. My point was much more basic.

As for "My point was much more basic", it doesn't count if you edit your post. That's a real jerk move to do after someone has already responded.

Last time I checked, I might violate the terms of my ISP, but that's by very strict definition. Remote access and "server hosting" could be one and the same depending on how you look at it.

The point of decentralised stuff is there is no centralised server, but rather the content is decentralised and thus available when things inevitably go offline. So if your home server goes offline for whatever reason then no biggie - some other node on the network serves your stuff instead.

I'd say we should keep the decentralised and replicated-for-reliability concepts slightly separate. They are interesting together, but they're orthogonal.

I thought that Opera Unite was magical, and bewilderingly, it was pretty simple. It is my hope that Vivaldi attempts to bring it back.

It feels like this is simply the cycle most new browsers go through now. They start out minimal and fast, then slowly fall for the issue of having to validate time spent developing, so they sell out.

(Or alternatively, we stop putting oversized JS frameworks/libs and ridiculous tracking systems inside our pages)

Content-addressing is FAR easier to understand than location addressing. In fact, it's the way most people think of a url. I'm sharing "this picture." When you post to Facebook, you're "writing to your friends and family," not "uploading my stuff to a faceless corporation for them to monetize in whatever way they see fit." I mean, folks have a better understanding that that's what they're doing NOW, but a honestly IPFS seems closer to the way people intuitively use and think about the web.

Otherwise, how are you paying for the hosting?