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186 points nafnlj | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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echelon ◴[] No.46241293[source]
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...

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0xbadcafebee ◴[] No.46241355[source]
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)

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1. vladms ◴[] No.46242037[source]
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.