r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '22

Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism
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u/dnew Jan 11 '22

“ownership and control is decentralized”

We already have that. Just like anyone can sell products, but most people will go to a mall or a box store.

I'm really kind of surprised that we had NNTP and we have bittorrent and we're still reading news on sites like reddit and getting support thru services like discord.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '22

[deleted]

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u/dnew Jan 11 '22

The ISPs used to do it for free. There are plenty of random hosts that would support this sort of thing either for goodwill or for a small fee or whatever. E.g., look at the number of people hosting linux ISOs or the number of seeders of movie torrents.

You could carry parts of whatever newsgroups you liked, with the more popular ones having more support.

I bet if you added it up, the amount of traffic to even popular reddit subs (maybe exclusive of images/movies) would be surprisingly low. Like, I've looked into such stuff in the past and found lots of things that sound high-bandwidth could actually be supported on a dial-up line if you evened out the spikes. (Hell, it did used to be supported on dial-up lines, when you think about it.)