I’m tip-toeing into the world of the distributed web.
I set up a mastodoninstance to play around with it, and have started meeting nice people.
I am seeding my personal homepage (dat://hecanjog.com) with the dat protocol, and have had some fun trying out the beaker browser.
The beaker browser and dat especially are inspiring, and feel like possible future paths for real self-hosting beyond the current centralized platform world that’s normal now.
Reminds me of the playground-like situation of the early web.
Hosting a static HTML site with audio files on dat really feels exciting. I hope to at least mirror my netlabel on dat soon.
For what it’s worth there is some related discussion around distributed web-esque technologies in an older thread: Building the world you want to live in.
I continue to see investment in things like Secure Scuttlebutt and ipfs. I ran a publicly accessible scuttlebutt node for a few months while I was exploring the system but in the end I found navigating the “gossip” content too confusing for my wee brain.
I’ve long wondered about the possibilities for decentralized collaboration platforms focused on creative endeavors and how flexible devices like norns could participate in that space.
IndieWeb is also a very interesting concept. One of the main idea is to own your content. For example, I have set a POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) publishing model.
I post my content on my website and then it’s automatically published on other platforms (Mastodon, Twitter, etc.). It means that if in the future, Twitter shut down for X reason, I do not lose all my contents/tweets.
I didn’t know about all of this, being a web developer myself I’m VERY EXCITED about this stuff! I’m checking it all out now, new worlds opening, thanks! Any links to interesting music projects on there that are up and running already?
Nice, thanks! IPFS felt really promising too but it felt like it could have really benefited from a beaker browser type project. (I guess beaker did support IPFS at first but they have since removed it for some reason.) The combination of beaker being an editor & host platform so you can make a new dat site right from the browser, and dat supporting stable URLs that can be mapped to normal DNS TXT records for human-readable URLs is pretty great too.
Scuttlebutt sounds interesting!
I haven’t come across a lot but p2p distribution seems like a great platform for netlabels.
I’m really curious about funkwhale which seems like a self-hosted spotify-type platform?
I’ve been following and using Ethereum and IPFS for a good while, now. The most interesting project I’ve come across using both is a social blogging platform called Akasha, and I was pretty active on there for a time. I’ve also put some music up on Ujo and messed around a bit with ENS as well as resolving DNS to IPFS-hosted content.
This stuff is incredibly exciting, but it seems I’m forever waiting for the ecosystems to mature.
It certainly looks great, but I have quickly been pulled in a maelstrom of technical difficulties and my funkwhale server hasn’t been set up yet. It’s a bit different development environment I’m used to so I haven’t even been able to test it locally, but I’m still on it! I need to set up my router to accept outside connections and so forth. Really looking forward to it, especially because I think many of us here would probably been keen to populate a platform like this.
So I don’t fully know what to make of it, yet, but this is fairly new:
I imagine it will make more sense with the next version of Akasha, which I eagerly await. In any case, I for one have long considered Ethereum and IPFS’s most promising use-cases to be as better means of publishing in any context, along with more meaningful interaction around published content (to include better and more transparent aggregation on all levels).
It is indeed a pity that so much knowlege i getting lost, on the other hand I do welcome a certain degree of ephemerality with discussion groups. Most knowledge that is or was present there is not easily searchable, there’s a lot of noise mixed in with the signal and often the information can be incomplete, if you don’t take the time to dive into the context. Also, I don’t know if I like things staying online forever. Many things on the internet should have an expiration date.
So what would be needed – more than things being kept online as they are – is a constant and active archival work, where information is selected, compacted, organized and integrated and combined and put in a place where it is easily searchable and usable.
But that’s a lot of work.
It already seems to be more developed than Ujo ever became, but with a different angle of approach, which is basically like SoundCloud meets Spotify. Being already decentralized, opensource, allowing sign-ups without an Ethereum wallet, and enabling lossless audio upload are a few ways it’s already ahead of Ujo, and, by virtue of the former two, it should prove more or less a permanent platform (which Ujo never achieved, hence how it is now considered to be shuttered).
Now, I was actually quite enthusiastic about Ujo, and Audius should eventually offer sales, digital collectibles, and so on, which is something Ujo did manage to achieve and in interesting ways; as such, I am hoping Audius will adopt some aspects of its predecessor, like setting automatic division if sales revenue between collaborators through smart contracts.
One thing both platforms lack is a full-fledged social layer (comments mainly, though there are at least some basic forms of aggregation), which is not a trivial matter in this manner and level of decentralization. I suspect one possible route of implementation could be through Ethereum World.
Anyway, this is one thing I’ve been really keen to see in the distributed/decentralized space, and though I joined up a little while ago, it recently took me by surprise in just how much ground has already been covered. I still have to give the white paper a good look, but so far it seems fairly solid here at the ground floor.
whoa ! thanks for pointing me to this - I didn’t realize they were an open platform. I hate their web interface already and now I’m curious if an alternate client will pop up or I can build my own to stream my music from my website. woo !
