@xj9 I'm not under any impression that they're obliged to be nice.

I agree the web is a dumpster fire. Does that mean misinformation from massive conglomerates should go unchallenged? Or that speaking up about their backhanded tactics is futile?

@seasharp

if you think that's a battle you can win.

web is firmly controlled by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Mozilla has some, but waning influence and are pretty much dependent on Google/Microsoft for funding. w3c likes to pretend they're relevant, but WHAT-WG really runs the web standards game.

Mozilla made a huge rally against Microsoft back in the day, but that was against a stagnant browser from one not very engaged opponent, not a syndicate of cooperating browser vendors with extremely deep pockets.

seems to me that the smart move is to cede to the giants on this front and focus on cultivating a free ecosystem of native applications with strong UX.

war is expensive, and FOSSistan isn't exactly rich/

@xj9

I think perhaps cedeing the giants on this front and confronting their FUDtastic bullshit are not mutually exclusive, and in fact might illustrate why our attentions should be elsewhere as you've said.

I don't purport to know that the majority of internet users even understand that there's an option beyond Chrome, FF, and Edge, so criticism of Edge speaks to a majority I believe.

To put it another way: Pointing out MS's bad behaviour is not an explicit endorsement of the current web.

@xj9 @seasharp Half the planet is yet to get online, and they're the poorer half. When they do get online they're going to be using low power hardware comparable to an ARM7 board.

That's supposedly what the Simon & Speck fight was about.

So the growth area in the next decade is going to be in low performance and low energy systems. At this point Moore's Law is history, so we have what we have in terms of transistor density.

Many of today's browsers and sites are hopelessly bloated. I think there's going to be "disruption" in the web development and browser space as companies/organizations/projects focus on where the new growth is happening.

@bob @xj9 Thus I think we will no doubt see these tactics make their way to the platforms you discuss.

@seasharp @bob

certainly, but if we are trying to win that market we have to be able to compete with expensive FUD campaigns

@xj9 @bob Yeah I can see why investing in winning the browser market is likely to waste cycles better used to embolden the FOSS strategy on the next frontier (Bob's talk of ARMv7 systems).

Is there a way we can criticise and expose these tactics in the current arena with a focus on easily identifying them as they make their way to the new platforms?

@seasharp @bob

one moat i can think of is pushing/building decentralized networks that are difficult for large players to leverage. fedi is a good start, but not exactly a good fit for mobile, partially connected networks (possibly with limited cell data caps).

Google et al have to deploy satellites, hot air balloons, or lay actual fiber over thousands of hectares in the developing world. NDN and roaming mesh networks are an essential part of competing with the internet giants. self-organizing infrastructure powered by low-powered smartphones is much, much cheaper than building out traditional internet infrastructure.

there are research problems there, but if we can solve them we might have a shot at beating the big 4 to the punch by getting people connected while they are spending billions of dollars trying to reach them with their centralized architectures.

@xj9 @seasharp So a possible near future development is someone developing a new type of browser and web framework which is dramatically simplified compared to what we see today, ditching a lot of what today we think of as vital and probably ignoring W3C entirely. Things are going to need to be designed for "offline first" and accommodate large latencies via satellites or multiple hops through mesh nodes.

@bob @xj9 @seasharp I heard this 'Gopher' thing was designed for that use and like always Pleroma is at the cutting edge by supporting it

@Thndr @bob @seasharp

unfortunately, pleroma is in the category of "legacy TCP applications"

fedi is good, but Anonymous Named Data Networking is the future

@Thndr @xj9 @seasharp Gopher was designed for a different era, but something like a modernized version of Gopher might be something which becomes a trend.

A simplified web framework could contain things like commands which implement generic screen layouts, reducing the amount of code and allowing for possible hardware optimization.

@bob @xj9 @seasharp sounds a bit like Scuttlebutt to me

@kawaiipunk @seasharp @xj9 Yes scuttlebutt is a good start, although its main client, Patchwork, could do with some slimming down.

@bob @seasharp @xj9 Admitably it's not designed for privacy if you're connecting to a bunch of random pubs but it does have the right vibe.

It would work super well in a mesh network.

@kawaiipunk @xj9 @seasharp

#freedombone mesh already uses it. https://freedombone.net/mesh.html

@kawaiipunk @seasharp @bob

scuttlebutt is bae tbh

@GqsSW1pLJq5qUbJuDAtm7MwwOhpf+Ur6BfDH0kZKCJc=.ed25519

@xj9 @seasharp Well. We've built i2p. And for all intends and purposes, it's good. It's pure FOSS, it's so secure literally nobody will find you unless you explicitly tell them where to. Basically, hacker's paradise.
And it's not that it's vary hard to use either (except for may be DNS issue, but I'm sure we can make something more clever than registrars with different address books)

Still, I see no one going crazy about using it. Why is that?

We're stuck with Web, for better or for worse. It's where our friends and family are. Ever tried to make your closest ones to use a super-cool FOSS messaging app you use? Now extrapolate this problem to the whole Internet, and you'll see what you're getting yourself into.

Because network, as a communication tool, means exactly nothing without its users.

We gotta fight for the Web, and take it back or else everything is probably fucked.

@drequivalent @seasharp

i2p is still point-to-point networking and doesn't solve any fundamental networking problems. its a good tech, but not next-gen tech.

@xj9 @seasharp And what-to-what networking would you prefer?
Won't reinventing the wheel introduce more problems than it solves?

@drequivalent @seasharp

https://named-data.net/project/

@xj9 @seasharp Nice idea, may be. May be not. Though it's still not clear to me how exactly is it going to be implemented.
Don't see that catching on like a wildfire anyway.

@drequivalent @seasharp

bit torrent is effectively NDN, which is, by itself, bigger than tor and i2p

@xj9 @seasharp Yet, you still find links to the torrent files or magnet links on the Web mainly.

@drequivalent @seasharp

obvio 🙄 its not like there's a client you can use to browse DHT directly

@xj9 @seasharp So, yeah, BitTorrent is an awesome content delivery network (and for example PeerTube uses it for what it is). Probably not as great as a replacement for other things Web consists of.

@drequivalent @seasharp

give concrete examples of things that you could not implement on top of a DHT

@xj9 @seasharp Live streaming services and other dynamic content are kinda hard, I guess.

Anyway, it's not the question of implementation. It's the question of "who's gonna, beside you, use the stuff you've implemented". A network nobody uses is useless. Making your own internet with blackjack and hookers won't solve anything, unless everyone hops over. Which is hardly gonna happen.

@drequivalent @seasharp

see webtorrent and popcorn time for streaming applications

i'll give you live, not sure how you would do bit torrent video chat.

dynamic content is pretty doable via DHT feeds

it doesn't have to be "the next internet" immediately upon complete for me to build it in the first place. advancing the state of the art is sufficient motivation for me.

@xj9 @seasharp No, I meant livestreaming. The kind where you, say sit in a room and play a game and a lot of people's watching it in real-time.

There is some research into this, which, if successful, very hopefully will get into Peertube's codebase, that would be awesome.

I know webtorrent, and I mentioned it.

@drequivalent @seasharp @xj9 the biggest problem with all these newfangled networking toys is that they are domain specific and aren't generic so you have to rewrite EVERYTHING just to get something to work.

@jeff @drequivalent @seasharp

i'm ok with rewriting everything. linux desktop is shit anyway.

@xj9 @jeff @seasharp Is anything at all good by your standards?

@drequivalent @seasharp @jeff

🤔 seL4 is ok, but it will be good when they figure out SMP!

@xj9 @seasharp @jeff Well, it's good in academic sense, I guess. In practice it's nowhere near as useful for an average consumer as any given Linux desktop.
Are you bad enough to turn seL4 into a usable consumer-grade OS (which would mean not only porting the apps, but also device drivers - of which there's a ton) along with rewriting the Internet into your fancy Named Data thing?
I mean, isn't it kinda a lot to ask for? We don't live in a perfect world, and really, we don't have to. There's a "rule of good enough". Linux desktop meets the requirements while being reasonably unbloated. What's inside - nobody cares a whole lot, as long as it performs well enough and breaks rarely enough. Sad but true.

@drequivalent @jeff @seasharp

that's exactly what I intend to do actually! using genode os framework with sel4 at the core :)

it is a lot to ask, but progress isn't made by having reasonable expectations 😉

@xj9 @drequivalent @seasharp afiak BitTorrent still connects via ip, and what you're describing sounds a lot like IPFS. Although IPFS is intended to be protocol agnostic rather than a replacement of a networking protocol

@Thndr @drequivalent @seasharp

that's true. you also still can only control your computer using asm, but the abstraction of language and other symbolic abstractions gives you the ability to think on a higher level and create more interesting applications of the same basic technology.

the abstraction also gives you the option to swap out the transport mechanism. conceptually, the data is what the application is built around so you really shouldn't need to bother with the details of which address it lives at. just like you typically don't manipulate registers directly in high level programs.

@ohthehugemanatee @seasharp

The fact that only developers are seeing this currently negates the fact that this is FUD from a company that says they verbatim "<3 Open Source" ?