alt Hacker NewsWe 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...
Replies
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?
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.
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)
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.