I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?
@kensanata
I was thinking along the lines of a second wave of BBSs, but I really know nothing about the technology needed.
@kensanata @eladhen maybe it's time to recreate Hotline?
https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.html
@polychrome @eladhen Hah, that’s even stranger than Gopher!
@kensanata @polychrome
I'm thinking of something that won't be dependent on domain name providers and such... P2P net.
I really know nothing, of course...
@eladhen @kensanata @polychrome namecoin tried, but mostly failed, to provide decentralized domains. Plenty of other attempts too. Interop kills them every time :/
@eladhen @kensanata @lupine to be fair I suspect the approach of using domain names for reaching online services is already a faulty concept and distributing it won't help to fix it.
@eladhen @kensanata @lupine I had an idea awhile back that is kind of half baked but was generally based on the idea that every reachable node would have a DHT hash as its ID (for cases where you had to go by node rather than content) and distribute those IDs as PNG files with the DHT ID in the metadata chunks and possibly a QR with a vanity picture in the image data.
This way you could treat these files as contact cards on their own right.
@kensanata @lupine @eladhen basically, in systems like Tox, IPFS, Retroshare & Tor you are identified using a "key" instead of a domain name. The key is a series of hex numbers and is not human friendly, but it is securely generated and verifyable.
To find the owner of the key you ask the decentralized network for the key owner.
My idea was to turn the keys into "business card"-like files by embedding the keys into the metadata field of PNG files, making sharing and collecting these keys more interesting.
@polychrome @kensanata @lupine
I won't pretend I understood that, but if the idea is to replace the domain system I'm all for it.