Solid – Re-decentralizing the web
I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-Berners Lee story.  In any case, I&#x27;ll state again that decentralization is really a <i>&quot;game-theory-economics&quot;</i> puzzle and not a &quot;protocol&quot; or &quot;node software stack&quot; problem.  Most software projects and essays on this subject keep analyzing the situation in terms of the software tech.<p>That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts. (E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.)  However, that framework won&#x27;t be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized social over something like Facebook.<p>In a previous comment I wrote:  Thinking in terms of technology &amp; software like the &quot;fathers of Internet&quot;[1] have done to try and &quot;solve&quot; the adoption of decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the &quot;software stack&quot;, think about the <i>economics</i>. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don&#x27;t seem to ever address the economics of why a billion people won&#x27;t choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc.<p>My theory on why those scientists don&#x27;t put economics at the forefront of their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was <i>sponsored by the government and universities</i>. So to them, it just seems like today&#x27;s problem can be solved with &quot;technology&quot;.<p>As another example of how &quot;protocols&quot; &amp; &quot;specifications&quot; don&#x27;t really solve decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982.  As you read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc.  <i>The technical stuff.</i>  But there is nothing about how people <i>pay</i> for pushing SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives.  To be fair, the &quot;economics&quot; are out of scope for a RFC.  But knowing what we know now, you can see that a computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and <i>not predict</i> that centralized email like Gmail&#x2F;Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior.  (E.g. the word &quot;spam&quot; is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential internet.)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;view-from-the-valley&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;internet&#x2F;the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;view-from-the-valley&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;intern...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc821" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc821</a>