Freenet Creator Ian Clarke Shares Progress on Its New Decentralized Network
- Reference: 0184931504
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/08/11/2030205/freenet-creator-ian-clarke-shares-progress-on-its-new-decentralized-network
- Source link:
> Earlier this year, Slashdot [4]covered the launch of the completely redesigned [5]Freenet . I recently [6]gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include [7]decentralized group chat , publishing, search, and [8]fully decentralized Git hosting . The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~Sanity
[2] https://freenet.org/
[3] https://freenet.org/about/news/services-without-servers-video-talk/
[4] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/03/15/0512246/new-freenet-network-launches-along-with-river-group-chat
[5] https://freenet.org/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RBNboYUlVI
[7] https://freenet.org/river/
[8] https://github.com/freenet/freenet-git
Just a heads up, decentralized platforms... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just a heads up, decentralized platforms don't solve the problems that users have. Social media platforms without moderation are hellscapes of spam, fraud and hatespeech. Every single one of them. There has never been a large, productive, legal and profitable platform that's been unmoderated and that's what this guy is creating.
He's actually got the entire problem completely wrong., We don't need social media to be more "free" we need to it to be less free. We need it to be paid. The users have to be communally paying for moderation and server space. Otherwise, whoever is providing those resources will eventually seek a return on their investments. If it's centralized it means ads, if it's decentralized then it just means every community turning into a monetized fiefdoms or hate-filled echo chambers.
Platforms need management and management needs to be transparent and knowable. Decentralization is a scam designed to reduce liability and obscure platform management but it absolutely still has to happen for any platform to exist. This guy is avoiding any effort to solve that problem with his product that no one needs.
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily. If they're designed to achieve maximum penetration, then you're probably correct, but if they're designed as networks of friends, and you can't invite whole networks, then it's a lot more manageable. Say that no group can have more than, O, 254 members, and you don't have the problem you posit. Of course, everyone would have trouble finding the groups they wanted to be a member of that also had room for them, but there are problems with every approach.
Re: Just a heads up, decentralized platforms... (Score:3)
They already have solutions for spam removal and moderation. You could learn more about their project before criticizing something you don't understand.
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And those solutions don't work.
You can do all the DNS snooping with your MTA agent, and spam removal doesn't work.
You can search for plentiful buzzwords and twit-filter trends, and you'll still miss a huge swath of goo.
This "they" you speak of thrives on user rage disguised as "engagement". They monetize it, and instead of actually spending money on things like abuse@ account monitoring, or IP filtering, they let it all slide, leading to the cesspool we have today, uniformly.
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Putting it bluntly, every new technology that allows communties to communicate has inevitably been used for sending dick pics. That dates back to graffiti on famous Roman construction projects. What prevents this decentralized network from delivering unsolicited dick pics to me? I'm not saying it's impossible to do this correctly, but it's very difficult, and they will have to learn from their mistakes.
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The Internet was built on gamers, pR0n, and dubious fun.
In its foundling days, these were university colleagues and DARPA. Social media were weird things, now long gone through Darwinian evolution. It's become highly monetized, and not really within the control of end-users.
Worse the dearth of public policy makes it the Wild Wild West on a scale out that only Wall Street might've imagined (and monetized).
So what if there are dick pics? Others might get useful work done and not be dependent on the micro-cost
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That's part of what was good about ye olde Twitter. It was really hard to make an offensive dick pic in 140 characters.
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Damn... slashdot filters ascii art! 8===O - - - --- -
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> Just a heads up, decentralized platforms don't solve the problems that users have.
It would certainly solve the problem of users being subject to the whims of massive, multi-billion dollar corporations that are essentially accountable to no-one, which is a huge problem (the main problem, in fact) for this particular user.
> Social media platforms without moderation are hellscapes of spam, fraud and hatespeech.
Social media platforms with moderation are hellscapes of spam. A significant portion of it is called "advertisements."
Fraud is everywhere, and also illegal. "Moderating" away crime seems neither practical nor desirable, it should be handled by law enforcement.
As for "hate
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You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.
Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.
The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.
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Actually, without a need to pay for servers (virtual or other), it offers freedom from sponsors that want the conversation kept profitable and ad friendly.
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So basically a paid version of Reddit where those pesky dictator moderators can still boot you from a subreddit when they don't agree with your opinion?
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> we need to it to be less free. We need it to be paid
amazing yuxtaposition. btw speak for yourself and enjoy your (paid) echo chamber. other people don't have a problem with everyone having their equal say, whatever it is. e.g. i don't have a problem with you posting this nonsense on slashdot. i don't even have a problem with anyone reading and moderating your idea of a dystopian information space insightful. i can live with that. i do have a problem with anyone, paid or not, deciding what can and what cannot be said. it's called "freedom of expression". spea
Only desktop clients for now? (Score:1)
This looks interesting enough for me to later read more about Freenet, but did I get it right from a glimpse on that web-page that currently only desktop clients exist? Not that I would not like such, but AFAIK many people use nothing but phones for all their communication stuff, aren't there any clients for such?
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Phones are pretty much locked in by now, done deal, gone freedoms despite opensource most parts. If I remember right, this or next month Google starts locking in developers allowed to have apps launched on Android. So to say - if you do something we don't like, we revoke your cert and no recent Android would even start your app.
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Most people probably don't want their cellular data bandwidth being used up by other people. Desktop clients are generally on all-you-can-eat networks.
So i can just post 30TB and get it later? (Score:2)
Decentralized network have a natural scalability issue. You still need to host the data somewhere. And so, someone has to pay for the storage.
And most likely you get liable for the shit that the service you are hosting does.
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So torrents have to pay someone for storage? No, because it is literally distributed amoung all the users accessing that file. It only breaks down when nobody is seeding the torrent.
Re: So i can just post 30TB and get it later? (Score:2)
Yes they do. Every user pay for their own storage and electricity. They are ok paying for it because they get something out of them.
And in many jurisdiction, they are responsible for the content stored on it.
When you scale thag to the way we think of apps, this is a fairly different proposition. Now there are cases where it will work.
But you do not get the benefit of decentralization and not having a central server unless you have enough users replicating the data enough that it remains available at high ba
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No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.
Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.
On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally pub
Sure, but... (Score:1)
What is the business model paying for all this bandwidth and hardware? In other words, how does one monetize it? Of course, I could ask the same about torrent, for which the bandwidth and hardware is provided by the same people that benefit from it as a side effect of getting what they want.
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i see you answered your own question, cheers.
Silicone Valley (Score:2)
Isn't this what they were trying to create on that TV show?
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Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.
Great! Why do we need P2P back end you ask? (Score:2, Interesting)
The answer is today if you want to write an app that anyone can use, you essentially have to run a business. The reason is no modern app can truly function without running on mobile, and without having a cloud back end. If you don't run the app as a business, you can't pay for the back end, and the mobile vendors force you to obey a bunch of red tape which basically means you have to have a single entity be in charge of the entire app, e.g., to hold signing certificates, sign app store contracts, etc... You