←back to thread

The New Internet

(tailscale.com)
517 points ingve | 2 comments | 26 Jul 24 18:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.415s | source
Show context
imiric ◴[26 Jul 24 23:04 UTC] No.41083107[source]▶
I like Tailscale, but this reads as too self-aggrandizing.

You have a mesh VPN product with some value-added services on top of it. That's great, but this idea isn't novel or unique. Why should your solution be the "new internet" instead of any of the alternatives?

I wouldn't want to rely on a single company for all my internet infrastructure, anyway. So I'll stick with the traditional internet with all its complexity. Its major problems aren't technical but social, and no new technology will solve those.

replies(2): >>41083866 #>>41084176 #
eddythompson80 ◴[27 Jul 24 01:34 UTC] No.41083866[source]▶
> Its major problems aren't technical but social, and no new technology will solve those.

Really? Isn't the major problem of the current internet is inherent centralization of services because the initial promise of 100% decentralized network is simply too complex to realistically manage? I view that problem as deeply technical. Unless if by "social" you simply mean everyone should become an experienced sysadmin. (or the slight variation of, everyone should know an experienced sysadmin who's willing to run their application for them for free)

Take something as mainstream as social media. Imagine a world where Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/YouTube/Reddit/HN/etc worked (seamlessly) like bittorrent. An application on your machine when you run it, it joins a "Facebook" network where your friends see you online through their instance of the application. Your feed/wall/etc is served to them directly from your machine. All your communication with them is handled directly between the 2 (or 1000 or millions) of you. No centralized server needed. You can easily extend and apply this majority of centralized application today. The only ones I can think of where this wouldn't work would be inherently centralized services like banking for example.

There are already plenty of p2p networks that show that this is a viable solution. Bittorrent, soulseek, bitcoin, etc.

All the problems you will run into however to make this as seamless as just connecting to facebook.com are purely technical. The initial big hurdle is seamless p2p connectivity. That is without port forwarding, dynamic dns, and requiring advanced networking, security, and other sysadmin knowledge from every user. Next would be problems like what happens when the node is offline? What happens to latency and load if you need to connect to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of machines just to pull a "feed"? How is caching handled? How are updates/notifications pushed? How do nodes communicate when they are wildly out of date? Where is your data stored? How do you handle discoverability, security, etc.

All deeply technical problems. Most are solvable, but you're gonna have to invest a significant amount of effort to solve them one by one to reach the same brain-dead simple experience as a centralized service. The fediverse has been trying to solve just a small subset of these problems for over a decade now, and the solutions still require a highly capable sysadmin to give users a similar (or only slightly worse) experience than twitter.com.

replies(2): >>41084578 #>>41087882 #
1. imiric ◴[27 Jul 24 05:11 UTC] No.41084578[source]▶
> Isn't the major problem of the current internet is inherent centralization of services because the initial promise of 100% decentralized network is simply too complex to realistically manage?

Not quite. The internet _is_ decentralized. What made the web so centralized from the start could partially be the result of lacking tools that made publishing as easy as consuming content. I.e. had we had a publishing equivalent to the web browser, perhaps the web landscape would've been different today. You can see that this was planned as phase 2 of the original WWW proposal[2] ("universal authorship"), but it never came to pass AFAIK.

So you could say that the problem is partly technical. But it's uncertain how much this would've changed how people use the web, and if companies would've still stepped in to fill the authorship void, as many did and still do today. Once the web started gaining global traction in the early 90s, that ship had sailed. People learned that they had to use GeoCities to publish content, and later MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. These services gained popularity because they were popular.

There have been many attempts over the years to decentralize the web, but now the problem is largely social. As you say, we've had the fediverse for over a decade now. How is that going? Are technical issues still a hurdle to achieve mass adoption, or are people not joining because of other reasons? I'd say it's the latter.

Most people simply don't care about decentralization. They don't care about privacy, or that some corporation is getting rich off their data. They do care about using a service with interesting content where most of their contacts are. So it's a social and traction issue, much more than a technical one. The only people who use decentralized services today are those who care more about the technology than following the herd. Until you can either get the average web user interested in the technology, or achieve sufficient traction so that people don't care about the technology, decentralized services will remain a niche.

There is another technical aspect to this, though. Even if we could get everyone to use decentralized services today, the internet infrastructure is not ready for it. Most ISPs still offer asymmetrical connections, and residential networks simply aren't built for serving data. Many things will need to change on the operational side before your decentralized dream can become reality. I think this landscape would've also been different had the web started with decentralized principles, but alas, here we are.

[1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html

replies(1): >>41085777 #
2. pdimitar ◴[27 Jul 24 11:11 UTC] No.41085777[source]▶
> As you say, we've had the fediverse for over a decade now. How is that going?

Convenience trumps everything. All the parts of the iPhone existed for a few years before it -- especially PDAs with touch pens -- but what made the iPhone succeed was putting everything into convenient and easier package.

The amount of time worked on thing X has almost zero correlation with its adoption, as I think all of us the techies know.

> Even if we could get everyone to use decentralized services today, the internet infrastructure is not ready for it. Most ISPs still offer asymmetrical connections, and residential networks simply aren't built for serving data.

While that is true, let's not forget half-solutions like TeamViewer's relay servers, Tailscale / ZeroTier coordinators, and many others. They are not a 100% solution but then again nothing is nowadays; we have to start somewhere. I agree that many ISPs would be very unhappy with a truly decentralized architecture but the market will make them fall in line. I have no sympathy for some local businessmen who figured they will run with tens of millions with $50K investment. Nope, they'll have to invest more or be left out.

So there would be a market reshuffling and I'm very OK with it.

---

But how do we start off the entire process? I'd beet on automated negotiation between nodes + making sure those nodes are installed on much more machines. I envision a Linux kernel module that transparently keeps connections to a small but important subset of this future decentralized network and the rest becomes just API calls that would be almost as simple as the current ones (barring some more retry logic because f.ex. "we couldn't find the peer in one full minute"). I believe many devs would be able to handle it.