> And you're reading them. So is every half-witted government agency in the "civilized world".

Clever and timely, but...

> How hard can it be to create a decentralized, convenient & secure environment for those use cases?

It's not hard to "create" this ecosystem. It exists. There are countless open & distributed technologies you can use for these, and most of them are pretty good.

The challenge is getting people to adopt them. And the problem therein lies; when enough people adopt something commercial interests will seek to exploit it as efficiently as possible, and you get efficiency by consolidating and centralizing. I'm not saying it's wrong -- there are plenty of us on HN profiting from it. But the technologies get condemned to death by NSA by their own success.

Se we seem to be stuck in a sucky social equilibrium until people collectively get upset enough that they're willing to pay with real money and inconvenience for their rights. I don't see this happening anytime soon. But then again maybe Snowden started something.

Agreed, plenty of decentralized systems exist. None have the convenience of, say, an Instagram. If ever a decentralized system becomes widespread it will not be because of it's decentralized nature but because it makes it easier for people to do the things they care about. Distrust in Facebook et al. is growing. There's this "back-to-the-roots" meme going around. And there's the NSA clusterfuck. Maybe the time is right to build a convenient system that covers just the basic usecases for most people?

I would love to hear some fictions on what a turnkey user stack might look like, reworking current and emerging social site features and patterns with current and hypothetical open and federated social web protocols and encryption to provide the decentralized convenience of tomorrow.

This is a comment. Like most on the Internet, it doesn't really add anything to the discussion. It's simply here because bytes are cheap now. In the "olden days", every character would have taken eons to traverse my 300 baud modem, but now I can afford enough bytes to make you truly suffer.

So, let me get this straight....

The OP is using 2 common trending topics on HN (return to fundamentalist text values and whistleblowing/privacy issues), with zero added value, to plug his book?

I'll upvote this only so people can see my pretty rude and totally-unlike-me comment at this - fuck you, OP.

It's not zero added value - it's actually an insightful point that arises from considering the two trends together. The plugging the book thing seems to be more of a joke at the expense of the original "This is a web page" piece.

OP here. Blahah got it right. The book thing was intended as a bit of a joke. I do think the post is insightful so I'll go ahead & remove the pluggity-plug for the sake of the discussion.

It's not insightful and plug is only masquerading as joke.

As long as the Internet connection goes through ISPs it's not decentralized. Haven't we already established that it's through these centralized pipes that the NSA is gaining access to everything?

How would OP's solution solve the problem, or am I missing something?

> Bet you haven't seen one like this in a while.

In my case, "in a while" means "a couple of minutes," since that's when I last read my email.

Heck, we convert all email to plain text at work.

Text and now email?. We have had enough of these

I think "This is enough".

This is a slow news day