Here’s an AWS employee basically saying nobody can host a social media service without AWS or the like, and if you look for alternatives you have wrongspeak on your platform and shouldn’t find a host. Thoughts? https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/parlers-new-serverless-architecture/
He also uses "platform for nazis" and "need to scale to millions of users" in reference to the same hypothetical service looking for a home. Seems like a pessimistic view of the world.
@alan8325 The internet is very dependent on what are essentially edge caches these days, and while those are physically distributed around the world, they're administratively/economically highly centralized companies. That's not quite the point he's making. But it's the biggest issue.
It's certainly doable to host yourself. But it won't be as cheap/efficient as using a big cloud provider unless you're operating at a huge scale. Note how Twitter is switching to AWS...
@alan8325 The best model would probably be for there to exist a standardized encrypted blob protocol, that ISPs could run caches for at the edge. There's some privacy concerns vs self-hosting, as they could learn what content their users are requesting. But that's still better than the status quo of centralized CDNs learning everything. And VPN services could easily offer that caching too.
The internet used to work this way in some places actually, pre-https.
@alan8325 The sad thing is fixing this problem isn't that hard: come up with a secure caching protocol that all ISPs can run, on an equal opportunity basis. It doesn't even need to be some fancy decentralized thing. Encrypted blobs would be enough.
But there's zero incentive for Google to implement support for that in Chrome, so...
@bitcoineagle @alan8325 Exactly!
This tech is out there. The challenge is getting adoption in mainstream browsers. Quite possibly an insurmountable challenge, as Google has negative incentives to do it... Maybe Apple would be willing to in Safari.
@pete @bitcoineagle Maybe it's surmountable if people use other browsers.
@alan8325 @bitcoineagle Problem is it's a chicken-and-egg thing: without a major browser implementing it, hard to get enough ISPs to run edge cache servers.
On a tech level, you could anycast the edge caches. But where is the money going to come from to pay the bills to run them while you wait for ISP adoption?
concrete proposal: web CDN over IPFS
insert a JS IPFS client on your page, make it download resources from IPFS
@ArturoGoosnargh @alan8325 @bitcoineagle IPFS isn't magic: ISPs need to run IPFS caches if you want latency and downloads speeds to be competitive with existing CDNs.
if the objective is the latency as CloudFlare then yes.
if the objective is scaling bandwidth, resisting DDoS and having acceptable latency then maybe not necessary.
@ArturoGoosnargh @alan8325 @bitcoineagle Well what I was talking about up-thread was finding ways to get past the monopoly position of CDNs for people trying to compete with services like Twitter and YouTube. Sure, even Bittorrent can help w/ file distribution. But we need something that's actually competitive for mainstream websites.
@pete @alan8325 I suppose Google shall lose its position. Microsoft has lost as well. We need to have the technology ready, have another browser and wait for opportunity when the censorship becomes unbearable and people switch to the new browser because of some important event. I suppose Brave is unobtrusive alternative now, it has the alternative DNS, IPFS, chrome plug-ins and add blocking might be the selling feature for normies, still centralized though.
@pete Yeah, I was mentioning some ideas for decentralizing CDNs yesterday. i.e. if you have a small datacenter maybe you can be incentivized to use it as a local mini CDN. https://bitcoinhackers.org/@alan8325/105550349476271971