Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

We need a P2P internet.

No more Google. No more websites. A distributed swarm of ephemeral signed posts. Shared, rebroadcasted.

When you find someone like James and you like them, you follow them. Your local algorithm then prioritizes finding new content from them. You bookmark their author signature.

Like RSS but better. Fully distributed.

Your own local interest graph, but also the power of your peers' interest graphs.

Content is ephemeral but can also live forever if any nodes keep rebroadcasting it. Every post has a unique ID, so you can search for it later in the swarm or some persistent index utility.

The Internet should have become fully p2p. That would have been magical. But platforms stole the limelight just as the majority of the rest of the world got online.

If we nerds had but a few more years...

That literally already exists and nobody uses it. Gnutella. Jabber. Tor. IPFS. Mastodon. The Entire Fucking IPv4/IPv6 Address Space And Every Layer Built On Top Of It. (if you don't think the internet is p2p, you don't understand how it works)

You know what else we need? We need food to be free. We need medicine to be free, especially medicines which end epidemics and transmissible disease. We need education to be free. We need to end homelessness. We need to end pollution. We need to end nationalism, racism, xenophobia, sexism. We need freedom of speech, religion, print, association. We need to end war.

There are a lot of things we as a society need. But we can't even make "p2p internet" work, and we already have it. (And please just forget the word 'distributed', because it's misleading you into thinking it's a transformative idea, when it's not)

There is a technological feudalism being built in an ongoing manner, and you and I cannot do anything with it.

On the other side of the same coin there are already governments that will make you legally responsible of what your page's visitors write in comments. This renders any p2p internet legally unbearable (i.e. someone goes to your page, posts some bad word and you get jailed). So far they say "it's only for big companies" but it's a lie, just boiling frogs.

No, you need to bust up Google as the monopolist it is.

YouTube should get split out and then broken up. Google Search should get split out and broken up. etc.

This is not a problem you solve with code. This is a problem you solve with law.

Centralization is simply more efficient. Redundancy is a cost and network effects make it even worse. You’d have to go the authoritarian route - effectively and/or outright ban Google and build alternatives, like Yandex or Baidu.

Websites are p2p by default actually. It's just discovery that goes through google.

Isn't what you're describing something like mastodon or usenet?

Yes. It's a political problem and a very old one. That's why we also already have solutions for it, antitrust laws and other regulations to ensure competition and fairness in the market, to keep it free. Governments just have to keep funding and enabling these institutions.

Depends what your times scale is for "being built". 50 years ago the centralization and government control were much stronger. 20 years ago probably less.

"cannot do anything" is relative. Google did something about it (at least for the first 10-15 years) but I am sure that was not their primary intention nor they were sure it will work. So "we have no clue what will work to reduce it" is more appropriate.

Now I think everybody has tools to build stuff easier (you could not make a television or a newspaper 50 years ago). That is just an observation of possibility, not a guarantee of success.

I do not think free is attainable for everything due to thermodynamics constraints. Imagine "free energy". Everybody uses as much as they want, Earth heats up, things go bad (not far from what is actually happening!).

I would settle for simpler, attainable things. Equal opportunity for next generation. Quality education for everybody. Focus on merit not other characteristics. Personal freedom if it does not infringe on the freedom of people around you (ex: there can't be such thing as a "freedom to pollute").

In my view Internet as p2p worked pretty well to improve the previous status quo in many areas (not all). But there will never be a "stable solution", life and humans are dynamic. We do have some good and free stuff on the Internet today because of the groundwork laid out 30 years ago by the open source movement. Any plan started today will have noticeable effect in many years. So "we can't even make" sounds more of an excuse to not start, rather than an honest take.

For a lot of things we don’t opt for the cheapest solutions that also lack redundancy for a lot of things. Why not for the “information highway”?

Most efficient = cheaper. A lot of times cheaper sacrifices quality, and sometimes safety.

I don't think we need for food to be free, we just need it to be accessible to everyone.

Every family should be provided with a UBI that covers food and rent (not in the city). That is a more attainable goal and would solve the same problems (better, in fact).

(Not saying that UBI is a panacea, but I've lived in countries that have experimented with such and it seems the best of the alternatives)

Why do you need Google at all?

From what you've described, you've just re-invented webrings.

It's not even that. It's that "centralization is more efficient" is a big fat lie. If you look at the "centralized systems" they're... not actually technologically centralized, they're really just a monopolist that internally implements a distributed system.

How do you think Google or Cloudflare actually work? One big server in San Francisco that runs the whole world, or lots of servers distributed all over?

I know exactly how they work, but they have a single entry point, as a customer you don't really care that the system is global, and they also have a single control plane, etc. Decisions are efficient if they need to be taken only once. The underlying architecture is irrelevant for the end user.

Why do you think they're a monopoly in the first place? Obviously because they were more efficient than the competition and network effects took care of the rest. Having to make choices is a cost for the consumer - IOW consumers are lazy - so winners have staying power, too. It's a perfect storm for a winner-takes-all centralization since a good centralized service is the most efficient utility-wise ('I know I'm getting what I need') and decision-cost-wise ('I don't need to search for alternatives') for consumers until it switches to rent seeking, which is where the anti-monopoly laws should kick in.

> This is not a problem you solve with code. This is a problem you solve with law.

When the DMCA was a bill, people were saying that the anti-circumvention provision was going to be used to monopolize playback devices. They were ignored, it was passed, and now it's being used to monopolize not just playback devices but also phones.

Here's the test for "can you rely on the government here": Have they repealed it yet? The answer is still no, so how can you expect them to do something about it when they're still actively making it worse?

Now try to imagine the world where the Free Software Foundation never existed, Berkeley never released the source code to BSD and Netscape was bought by Oracle instead of being forked into Firefox. As if the code doesn't matter.

There are very few things I'd consider a silver bullet for a lot of problems, but antitrust enforcement to break up near-monopolies is one of them.

> Decisions are efficient if they need to be taken only once.

In other words, open source decentralized systems are the most efficient because you don't have to reduplicate a competitor's effort when you can just use the same code.

> Obviously because they were more efficient than the competition and network effects took care of the rest.

In most cases it's just the network effect, and whether it was a proprietary or open system in any given case is no more than the historical accident of which one happened to gain traction first.

> Having to make choices is a cost for the consumer

If you want an email address you can choose between a few huge providers and a thousand smaller ones, but that doesn't seem to prevent anyone from using it.

> until it switches to rent seeking

If it wasn't an open system from the beginning then that was always the end state and there is no point in waiting for someone to lock the door before trying to remove yourself from the cage.

> just use the same code

This is the great lie. Approximately zero end consumers care about code, the product they consume is the service, and if the marginal cost of switching the service provider is zero, it's enough to be 1% better to take 99% of the market.