@nyx Well at least IPFS got some adoption, meanwhile essentially nobody adopted dat:// and the other bunch of "let's get http but torrent-like or blockchain-like"
@nyx@lanodan at the same bookstore i found the Texe Marrs 666 Beast Machine book there was a IBM book from the late 90s on peer to peer computing and almost no reliable technology has changed much since other than weird crypto layers
@ink@lanodan not surprising honestly, it's really fucking pathetic what people tried to do with P2P stuff in the 2010s because all of them ended up being basically useless but still required massive amounts of funding and labor to produce useless tech demo releases
@lanodan to me part of why they're such huge failures is precisely because they got adoption and yet even in spite of that are bordering on useless and have the most embarrassingly shitty implementations imaginable that are also the *only* implementations that have any real-world usefulness. but that's what happens when instead of having actual serious researchers writing these protocols, you have a bunch of Dunning-Krugerite techbro assholes who think they're gonna just YOLO their way to a re-decentralized internet
@nyx Plus for me one of the reason BitTorrent largely won over eDonkey is it being way more trustworthy. Which is also why I think the muh-anti-censorship P2P things where you just host random data won't see much adoption compared to the ones where you host the data you'd keep anyway.
@ink@lanodan I've felt for a long time like the only way that these "re-decentralization" projects could ever have any hope of producing anything useful is if they began at Layer 1. anything higher up is just trying to slap a bunch of complicated protocols on top of a network that is fundamentally not designed to work that way, which effectively creates a lot of additional problems to solve that shouldn't exist in the first place, and that's on top of P2P already being a really difficult problem to solve.
but obviously the problem with this is that you can't just start setting up networking infrastructure in the field that will be reliable without getting funding and government contracts and shit, otherwise you're just relying on a bunch of volunteers who will lose interest in these projects when there is inevitably nothing happening on the networks other than circlejerking over the technology itself.
now yuo see this is why the entire premise is flawed in the first place. there are no technological fixes for the problems the internet has with centralized power because these are ultimately political problems.
@nyx@lanodan the lainchanners and some 4channers worked on meshnets at some point but those have no capital to sustain a lifecycle beyond the devs losing interest or time to maintain it
@lispi314@nyx True, there's a ton of independent BitTorrent clients, by that measure it's probably the most resilient protocol. Like you could thanos half of the implementations/implementers and it'll still be fine, which is very rare.
@lanodan@nyxdat:// had some interesting ideas, particularly with tunnel encryption between individual peers to mitigate observability, but then they went and wasted their time with unnecessary blockhain/coin bullshit.
@nyx@lanodan The serious reseachers aren't exactly publishing much at the moment, other than meshnets with little retrocompatibility (which kills mass adoption).
Sure I'd like if people just went and used the meshnets anyway but they don't.
GNUnet's implementation has a bunch of problems and a lot of it is waiting on research to complete (no ETA) so progress can continue (I'm probably going to be long dead by the time it completes).
What alternatives do we have? I2P? Sure it works, but it *also* has a bunch of issues.
@nyx@ink@lanodan The only "re-decentralization" project that would work would be making a time machine and nuking apple HQ before iPhone is released. That way, Google takes the lead in smartphone technologies, all mobile phones are Android, and mobile computing becomes forever associated with giving women "the ick", ensuring being online never becomes popular among normies and centralized social networks never reaching the critical mass of users they need to become viable.
@ink@lanodan@meltedbrain_y2k he was really only like a few years behind the first tech industry bubble. I think if he's waited a bit longer before sending bombs he would have realized that the academics aren't the problem
@nyx@ink@lanodan A lot of your first paragraph is mirrored in GNUnet documentation & whitepapers.
The solution to the hardware problem is to also enable emulating/tunneling it atop other legacy hardware.
To the third one, there's a reason they go "let's make a GNU internet" (puns, yes), sure tunneling isn't an ideal solution but it still is an option and it bypasses purposely uncooperative political fuckwads.
@ink@lanodan@lispi314 lmao I would be entirely unsurprised if most of these cryptocurrency projects were essentially money laundering scams for cartel and/or CIA drug money
@lispi314@lanodan@ink thread broke I guess but to expand on the other thing I posted: I will say that from what I've read before about GNUnet, the fact that it has a naming system built in (that has an RFC standard no less) is one thing about it that I think indicates they have a better idea of the sorts of problems a decentralized network needs to solve in order for anyone to actually use it. however, I still think the last paragraph is the most relevant one to the issue: GNUnet has been in development for 20+ years and will probably never be used by anyone other than free software nerds because it all exists within the usual free software mentality of thinking that social problems can be fixed with technical solutions. we're never going to get a better internet as long as the infrastructure is owned by essentially an oligopoly of US corporations who have unlimited resources to lobby to ensure that things never get better.
@nyx@lanodan@lispi314 think its funny that some markets in the middle east they had an improvised cell phone call based trade system where they would just utter some coded orders in whatever local dialect of arabic and via a trust system shipments would get made
@meltedbrain_y2k@nyx@ink@lanodan normal people used the internet in the 90s/2000s they just werent on forums. centralized big websites were always going to be a thing given enough time. they arent necessarily the problem either.
not to mention android phones would get sleeker and more functional with time (though they would obviously take a different stylistic direction, they also would still be smartphones.). i think most consumer electronics werent made in a vaccum and were largely either inspired or derived by preexisting tech.
the reason the old internet (hell even when i was first learning to use a computer i was witnessing that transition in real time to the late 2000s style of web design) was better wasnt necessarily due to the decentralization, but id say it was due to less corporatization (due to it being smaller). i prefer fedi over twitter because it feels "real", or atleast realer than most social media sites. most people on here act like actual people (albeit weirdos but that comes with the terrirory, ntm i like it that way).
@Mondobizarrro@ink@lanodan@nyx I was just shitposting, obviously of iPhones didn't exist Android or whatever Google or Blackberry or Nokia would have come up with would not be seen as the poor man's/nerd's choice and smartphones would have evolved very similarly anyway. I just find the idea of women being repelled by Android like vampires by a cross funny.