Bad Hosts, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Overlay Network
Metadata
Highlights
- But, as cool and promising as the overlay networks are, I am not willing to sacrifice “public” entirely, because what is the internet, if not an open invitation? And a suggestion, recurring, that you might not already know all the people you want to know. (If you’ve found your way to this newsletter, this web page, then you understand what I mean.)
Again, I feel the resonance of the word “host”, and again, I think about etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction. (View Highlight)
- What I’m really interested in — what I dream about — is the opportunity to play with new protocols without taking on, perforce, the burden of infrastructure. If we cast our gaze back to the early days of the World Wide Web, we find all these people coming up with cool new ideas for HTTP and HTML, writing new server software and new browsers with new features … and very conspicuously not “operating the web”. They didn’t have that power or that burden. The web was … out there. (View Highlight)
title: “Bad hosts, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the overlay network”
author: “Robin Sloan”
url: ”https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/bad-hosts/”
date: 2023-07-07
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Bad hosts, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the overlay network
Metadata
Highlights
- As home internet users, we can only speak and request, not listen and serve.
Computers with the ability to listen on the internet are called “hosts”, and there’s an interesting etymological implication there. Today, as home internet users, we are not hosts; and perhaps we are missing out, therefore, on a degree of etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction. (View Highlight)
New highlights added July 29, 2023 at 9:38 PM
- But, as cool and promising as the overlay networks are, I am not willing to sacrifice “public” entirely, because what is the internet, if not an open invitation? And a suggestion, recurring, that you might not already know all the people you want to know. (If you’ve found your way to this newsletter, this web page, then you understand what I mean.)
Again, I feel the resonance of the word “host”, and again, I think about etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction. (View Highlight)
- What I’m really interested in — what I dream about — is the opportunity to play with new protocols without taking on, perforce, the burden of infrastructure. If we cast our gaze back to the early days of the World Wide Web, we find all these people coming up with cool new ideas for HTTP and HTML, writing new server software and new browsers with new features … and very conspicuously not “operating the web”. They didn’t have that power or that burden. The web was … out there. (View Highlight)
title: “Bad Hosts, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Overlay Network”
author: “Robin Sloan”
url: ”https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/bad-hosts/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Bad Hosts, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Overlay Network
Metadata
Highlights
- But, as cool and promising as the overlay networks are, I am not willing to sacrifice “public” entirely, because what is the internet, if not an open invitation? And a suggestion, recurring, that you might not already know all the people you want to know. (If you’ve found your way to this newsletter, this web page, then you understand what I mean.)
Again, I feel the resonance of the word “host”, and again, I think about etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction. (View Highlight)
- What I’m really interested in — what I dream about — is the opportunity to play with new protocols without taking on, perforce, the burden of infrastructure. If we cast our gaze back to the early days of the World Wide Web, we find all these people coming up with cool new ideas for HTTP and HTML, writing new server software and new browsers with new features … and very conspicuously not “operating the web”. They didn’t have that power or that burden. The web was … out there. (View Highlight)