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Alternative Internet

Jun 30, 2024, 7 min read

tags : peer-to-peer, Archival, NAT, Internet, File Sharing, Human Computer Interaction ( HCI )

Structure

  • Calling a network “decentralized” only defines it by what it is not
    • It is not dependent on a single set of servers run by one company.
    • What it actually is can look like many different things.
  • Centralized and Distributed are easy to understand, Decentralized is a mess but here’s what I feel about it. I won’t even mention blockchain. The lines are very blurry and things keep changing.
    • Federated ⊂ Decentralized
    • P2P ⊂ Decentralized
      • Stuff using NAT Traversal ⊂ P2P
      • Stuff using local discovery ⊂ P2P
      • Stuff using overlay network to discover peers ⊂ P2P
      • Other stuff that is P2P but i can’t think of ⊂ P2P
    • { Federated, P2P } ⊂ Decentralized
  • In the wild software use mix of centralized, distributed and decentralized so it’s hard to truly fit an application into these structure.
  • The applications that can be made out of these structure is simply your imagination, filesharing, social networks, chat systems, hosting, identity systems and everything else.

Decentralized

P2P

  • No distinction between clients and servers.
  • Every user’s device can act as both, making them functionally equivalent as peers.
  • Some nodes may have special roles, like public bootstrap nodes that help new users get connected to the network etc.
  • See peer-to-peer

Federated

  • Users are still interacting with a server
  • But anyone can run a server that interoperates with others servers in the network, giving users more providers to choose from.
  • This gives users more choices for applications, policies, and community cultures.
  • See Federated systems

Hybrid

  • Like I said line is heckin blurry.

  • This is what nostr(a growing decentralized social network), mentions in its readme. It’s funny.

  • Nostr is not federated(A relay doesn’t talk to another relay, only directly to users), doesn’t work on p2p principles, still decentralized.

    It doesn’t rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient; it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, and therefore it works.

Things on the internet that make the internet

Bridges and Gateways

Even when things are not federated, by the nature what these things are we can always creates certain gridges and gateways to things.

Fidverse

  • Where is all of the fediverse? | Lobsters
  • Fediverse is about software implementations and services being able to talk to each other.
  • This is not a replacement of the idea of indieweb, these can compliment each other.
  • At the moment, anything that supports activitypub is in the fidverse. If you have a mastodon account you’re in fidverse.
  • But the specs for indieweb and activitypub come from the same group of ppl.

Linkback

  • A linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents.
  • Different from backlink
    • Backlink: What gets created when a person refers to a page
    • Linkback: What the publisher of the page being referred to receives.

Refback

  • Usage of the HTTP referrer header to discover incoming links.

Webmentions

Others

Tracebacks and Pingbacks are relics of the past at this point but mentioning for completeness.

Indieweb

  • Webmentions: better pingbacks (see above)
  • ActivityPub: (See Federated systems), this sort of came out of the same community
  • Micropub: While ActivityPub is protocol describing a decentralized social network, Micropub is a way for “you” to post content to “your” own website from 3rd party platforms or your own systems that you built.

RSS

Learn more

Tools

Usenet

HTTP alternatives

Gemini

Gopher

More weird things

Webfinger

Offline & Low-tech web

Darkweb

  • I mean anything that’s not public is dark web. My private twitter account is dark web, my ex-es finsta is dark web.
  • But check Anonymity and TOR and VPN if interested

Billion other things

Graph View

Backlinks