Theoretically you can run a web server at home but you'll have a problem if you start to get a lot of traffic or you have trouble with your internet connection. Your website will be trivially easy to DDoS.
Services you create on Freenet will scale automatically and are immune to DDoS.
it doesn't really scale in the traditional sense, it just pushes the 'damage' out to the entire net.
freenet overall is one of the most bandwidth and storage intensive platforms out there. I understand why -- but I say this as a means to say that it doesn't really deserve direct comparison to the open web. it's not the same thing, even if the work overlaps -- it's a lot more work.
"Damage" is misleading. A DDoS only harms when concentrated on a few peers. Freenet distributes load across the network, autoscaling in response to demand and preventing overload.
As for bandwidth and storage, I think you’re referring to the old Freenet (now Hyphanet). The new Freenet is optimized for lighter services like group chat and isn’t designed for heavy data sharing like BitTorrent. It should be much less of a bandwidth hog.
However to host something yourself you need a lot of things, for example FTTH to host it at your home, or a hosting provider; then a domain name and other things. These can be taken away from you.
Pretty sure that freenet also requires some sort of ISP to provide a ethernet connection to your machines, which can still be taken away from you. This doesn't change the fact that the www is decentralized already
Eventually Freenet will work over mesh networks like Lora and 802.11ah - meaning it will be entirely decentralized including the communication infrastructure.
On Freenet you own things cryptographically, typically by possessing a private key.
This is similar to a Bitcoin wallet although Freenet isn't a cryptocurrency, it's a general-purpose platform for building and distributing scalable decentralized services.
When many people have the ability to publish independently without relying on a central service, then it’s decentralized. The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.
In practice, however, this didn’t quite work out. Most people publish through centralized services like Instagram, to name just one.
There are two main obstacles to achieving decentralization. The first is technical difficulty: not everyone wants to learn how to run a web server. The second is reliance on foundational services like domain names and hosting, which can be revoked. For example, if the authorities think you did something illegal, boom, your domain name got confiscated.
So, no, in practice, the World Wide Web isn’t truly decentralized. But at least there remains some possibility for it.
Thanks. I think we've always had the ability to publish content on the internet without relying on external services, and we still have. It's just not something that most people are willing to do, because it takes expertise and resources, and corporations can do it better by specializing in providing these kind of services. This is why people use them. For the same reason people don't usually make their own clothes, furniture, etc., either. Specialization and division of labour allows us to be much more productive and as a result enjoy a higher standard of living than we would if every individual had to produce everything they consume themself.
Eh, besides Cloudflare, you're pouring money down the drain if you're using any of those. Remember that recent thread where some open source project was spending $100/month on a Vercel database handling 3 requests per minute that could have been a $4 VPS?
Non-hyperscaler server hosting is a pretty competitive business that doesn't need further decentralization at this time, though it's not a bad thing either.
> The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.
Yeah not really. If the Web was designed to be decentralized it would have used URNs as content identifiers instead of URLs. A URL is specific to a scheme (means of access) and authority (where to access).
A decentralized system would use URNs and any host that could service a request could return the resource. Once a resource was in "the Web" it would be accessible to future requests even if the original source went offline.
This sort of mirroring can be built on top of the Web (CDNs, traditional mirrors, etc) but it is not a foundational component. The authority providing a resource needs to online for that resource to be available.
ARIN and ICANN are centralized. WWW can run over alternative number and naming spaces but in practice doesn't do this except for Tor and to a much lesser extent i2p.
"www is already decentralized", okay but not in reality, not even a little bit.
you can spin up as many nodes on the internet to have as many platforms as you want, nothing is stopping you. getting booted from some company's platform for violating some company's tos does not mean the world wide web is not decentralized
PKI and DNS are centralized and any of the _three_ major browsers rely on them and actively deny features if they are not present.
I mean, sure, packet routing is decentralized, and if you're a military operator, this might matter to you, if you're someone who wants a public voice it's not significant.
