Distribute The Web
Federating the web is not my idea, but it resonated with me after Twitter and Facebook were blocked after the unrest in Xinjiang. The idea resurfaced among western technology commentators after a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack against a Georgian blogger crippled Twitter and Livejournal.
The idea from tech heads such as Dave Winer, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Gina Tripani, Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte to name but a few is to move away from web services as centrally hosted platforms to a distributed model that pushes updates to friends whenever you post something. Rather than logging into Facebook.com, you add content to a local server which then syncs updates to all your contacts.
DDOS attacks work by employing millions of infected Windows machines to flood a website with traffic that cause them to fall down. Distributed social networks would make services more robust as they would no longer have a single point of failure. If hackers attacked one node on the network the service would be able to route around the damage to keep going.
Let's take this idea one step further. It's very easy for the Chinese Government to block access to Twitter, Facebook and Youtube given that data to and from these platforms need to pass through the Great Firewall.
If web services became distributed among all its users then it would be far more difficult for the Firewall to stop them from working. We already have good examples of this in practice. Hollywood and recording companies would love to stop piracy, but they can't because the files are being shared over distributed P2P networks. Self hosted blogs are portable. They can be shared through RSS feeds and they are portable. Blocked blogs can easily be rebuilt on another server.
I have had a taste of the distributed future by installing Opera Unite on my MacBook turning it into a webserver for sharing files, media and becoming a messaging node. I am also excited about Google Wave, which is a real time messaging and communication platform that can be installed on local servers.
Federating the web would not stop censorship and there would still be challenges such as maintaining individual privacy and security. How would casual users benefit from the distributed web?
I'm sure there will be continued unabated demand for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but they need to find imaginative ways to make their services robust to attack from hackers and paranoid governments. Otherwise innocent Internet users will continue to be punished for belonging to the same platform as Georgian bloggers and Xinjiang tweeters even though they have nothing else in common.
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