Decentralizing the web

Tim, you made the web fundamentally client-server. Servers have urls, can be indexed, have centralising power. Clients do all the work: run the code, render the page, be subservient. Clients do not have urls, cannot be indexed and cannot communicate among each other (gRPC excepted). Don’t you agree this design has massive centralisation as a side-effect, and how can we fix the design?

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He’s actually been working on solving that exact problem: https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-l…

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Facebooks was a terrible idea. Why Centralize?

decasteve 3 days ago [-]

The concept of Facebook was always terrible. Why do we need a single platform for people to congregate socially? We have a distributed platform built with common protocols and services that we can all use.

Let the web be distributed physically, organizationally, and socially. Let people congregate for purpose and not for the sake of congregation itself.

We are here on Hacker News because of a common interest. I belong to a number of sites fulfilling a way of connecting to people who share the same niche interests. I don’t want everything under one roof or in a single walled garden. AOL failed and the Internet succeeded—stop trying to bring it back because it’s more profitable for those that run it.

.. Facebook’s downfall as a service won’t be another social service that has the same features but is distributed/blockchain/FOSS/quantum/whatever. Facebook has an enormous amount of resources and talent that will allow them to keep their moat in the social networking space.
No, its downfall will come from a paradigm shift in technology that renders the feed-style social network obsolete. This is how most behemoth companies fall, they don’t get outcompeted at their own game, the game just changes around them. Maybe it’ll be VR, maybe it’ll be a virtual social assistant that has no browsable UI but helps you keep in real-time contact with the people you care about, maybe it’ll be a new kind of device or screen or wearable that completely changes the game. But it won’t be another social networking service.