They've been constantly trying to set up P2P solutions. Torrents, DWEB, IPFS, Filecoin, WebTorrent, YJS, whole bunch of tech acronyms. I'm not sure much of it has really caught on?

https://blog.archive.org/tag/decentralized-web/

https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-transports

Third-party attempt:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Turns out it's hard! Or maybe just too niche. But you can also help them today, by seeding some of collections that are available as torrents.

I don’t think the problem lends itself well to decentralization. People have tried to use IPFS et al for this. There were even IA attempts https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-gateway

No one has cracked this one yet.

It has been cracked.

The internet itself is the thing we want.

We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.

The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.

It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.

I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.

The easiest way to see the dots is to:

1. Stop trying to make money

2. Tally the things that cost money

3. Amortize the upkeep over time

E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.

Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.

That's not what is meant by "decentralization".

None of those things help with the problem of centralization. Centralization isn't limited to moneymaking enterprises, or the modern internet. A centralized server operated by donations for free can just as easily go down, be seized by law enforcement, have its domain or internet service taken offline by government action, and so on.

The internet is not the thing we want (or not sufficient alone), because the internet's resources, and the communication systems between them, are largely centralized.

Yeah, I hear you.

Yeah, them as a single instance is centralized, but if you actually go (show up at 300 Funston on a Friday at 1pm) you can hear about the research into how to replicate and become the resiliency in the network to make it decentralized.

A lot of it is ancient Unix philosophy like “this massive text file is a seekable index” and “rsync does basically most of the heavy lifting” and you’ll quickly realize decentralization is a social problem and not a technical one.

They’re shifting more and better data than the centralized services we’re complaining about— we need better education, not innovation at this current juncture.

The technology exists, the will of the people is lacking in spirit.

Also tacking on that ssh is a social network.

That’s the crucial social layer that powers all of the everything else on the decentralized internet.

Take git as a social platform.

SSH is the social protocol.

GitHub centralized most of the git+ssh net, but that was a choice and we use all these other git+ssh services to not give them a monopoly.