I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it
As much as I&#x27;d love to help projects like IPFS (for example), truth is that most people simply don&#x27;t care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives. Sitting with random people on a table, they giggle and smirk saying &quot;I&#x27;ve got nothing to hide, you&#x27;re too paranoid, bro, cheer up!&quot; and I quickly give up. They have zero idea about how much info is collected about them. If tomorrow somebody pulled out that info in a fabricated trial against them, they&#x27;ll sing another tune but it will be way too late. Nobody ever listens until it impacts them directly. Sad reality about Homo Sapiens. Another one is the echo chamber effect -- people absolutely <i>LOVE</i> their social echo chambers and they can legitimately punch in you the face if you point them at a source that disagrees with them.<p>As a second and last point to the above, I can&#x27;t afford donating all my free time to help progress the decentralized internet anymore. I am 37 and I have a very happy personal life but need to work on my health a lot, I am very tired and burned out and I am finding myself unable (even if I want) to work for free without any reward in sight (not even talking about money; I am sure I wouldn&#x27;t even be thanked). I imagine many others are in a similar position -- in terms of finances, in the health department, or in their general mental stance.<p>I very much like the idea of creating a &quot;home internet box&quot; which is a self-contained fanless machine connected to an UPS -- and it contains router, firewall, own website, own mailserver, own private Dropbox, a universal P2P node (BitTorrent &#x2F; IPFS) etc., but as others have pointed out, our current stack of network technologies is way too bloated and full of incomplete standards -- which in turn are likely full of exploits and dark corners -- that right now the only seemingly appropriate course of action is to get rid of it all -- except the physical layer protocols -- and start over.<p>Try making an API app that works with anything else than HTTP and HTML&#x2F;JSON. Tell me how that went for you. Try using ASN.1 as a data format, or a compressed secured IP layer protocol. Yes it&#x27;s possible but it&#x27;s much slower than it should be. Seems us humans always want to have one &quot;universal truth&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s extremely sad and I am afraid we&#x27;ll live to see very oppresive times pretty soon.