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Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web

Jan 10, 2024, 13 min read

Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web

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Highlights

  • Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed back-end database to the open Web as our data source.
  • Ultimately, decentralization is about choice: we will choose where we store our data, who we give access to which parts of that data, which services we want on top of it, and how we pay for those. Nowadays, we are instead forced to accept package deals we cannot customize
  • End users become data controllers. This is the most well-known decentralization aspect: we store our data in places of our choice, which improves privacy and control. Apps become views. As apps become decoupled from data, they start acting as interchangeable views rather than the single gateway to that data. Interfaces become queries. Data will be distributed across highly diverse interfaces, so sustainable apps need declarative contracts instead of custom data requests
  • This idea brings us back to the original vision for the Web, where anyone has their own website or blog and publishes their thoughts on there, rather than in a single stream controlled by one company
  • However, we want the convenience of the single stream without the central control that currently comes with that. We want to continue enjoying the same types of services that nowadays are only available on centralized platforms. So the important question is: can applications on top of decentralized data behave the same way as centralized apps?

## New highlights added January 5, 2022 at 9:38 AM

  • Other than with centralized platforms, trust is not derived from a single party. For instance, if I claim my post has 124 likes, then we believe this because Facebook says so (and frankly, we have no objective reason to doubt that). In a decentralized scenario, I could prove that by linking to the individual likes that are stored on other servers, which form a provenance trail. And if those links break for any reason (for instance, if people retract their like), I can still prove they once liked it, if my app made a copy of their digitally signed like on my post. This mechanism can replace networks that are largely based on authority
  • The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.
  • The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.

Highlights

  • In a fully decentralized social network, every single part of an interaction—which would now be stored in its entirety on Facebook—could reside in different data pods. Consider this social media post, where an author states his professional opinion on an online news article. Literally each single piece of data can be in another data pod:
  • In fact, these platforms have become inseparable from their data: we use “Facebook” to refer to both the application and the data that drives that application. The result is that nearly every Web app today tries to ask you for more and more data again and again, leading to dangling data on duplicate and inconsistent profiles we can no longer manage. And of course, this comes with significant privacy concerns.
  • decentralized Web applications decouple data and applications: you enter data only once—in your own data pod. Instead of maintaining credentials with each app, you log in through your data pod and give apps permission to read or write specific parts of your data. The Web’s ecosystem thereby evolves from bundled data+service packages into applications as interchangeable views, wherein each Web app provides consistent visualizations, interactions, and processing over your personal data pod. Furthermore, those apps let you interact with any other data pods you have access to, such as those of your friends. Applications ask rather than store, and they are able to reuse data create by other apps, avoiding vendor lock-in.
    • Note:
  • Any change in one view is directly reflected in another because they share the same storage.
  • Importantly, this disentanglement of data and services creates separate markets for data and applications. Each of those to markets comes with its own competitive forces that stimulate creativity and innovation at a higher rate, since the ability to provide a service no longer depends on collecting data.
    • Note: What sorts of different incentives will arise for data providers vs. app providers?
  • Indeed, we can regard a fully decentralized approach as a way to realize platform neutrality, where applications and storage solutions become interchangeable, just like websites and Internet providers.
    • Note: how do we get there and unify on an interface to get data and create a world where people are incentivized not to make data silos?
  • The current generation of Web applications communicates with servers through a highly specific sequence of steps that are hard-coded into the application logic. These steps contain specific requests to a Web API, a (typically custom) interface exposed by the server. This approach results in a highly specific contract between a client and a server—which is problematic on a decentralized Web, where data can actually reside in different data pods with possibly different interfaces. It is unrealistic to hope that all data pods will have the same Web API (be it Linked Data Platform, SPARQL, or GraphQL). Not only would this require a standardization effort without precedent, such a standard could never cover all cases. Given that we aim for competition on the data market as well, different kinds of data pods are expected to provide different kinds of interfaces with varying expressivity. On top of this, on a decentralized Web, the data needed by applications will be scattered across multiple data pods. So even if all pods had the same interface, apps would still need to route requests to the right pods and combine their data.
    • Note:
  • Therefore, I believe that decentralized Web applications should exclusively use declarative queries to view and update data on our pods, so their expression of the intended data operation remains constant—even if interfaces are different. Rather than directly interacting with pod interfaces, queries are processed by a client-side library, which translates these queries into concrete HTTP requests against one or multiple data pods. This means that, rather than a horizontal interface orientation or a vertical interface that directly accesses the Web API, decentralized Web applications need a vertical interface orientation with an internal horizontal separation.
    • Note:
  • it implies a complex, cross-API query engine. I envision that multiple implementations of such a query library would compete, and eventually replace the API-specific client-side libraries that are symptomatic of tight coupling between clients, services, and their underlying data. A possible direction to realize this in a scalable way is to split monolithic Web APIs into API features, which can be reused across data pods.
  • temporally different way of interacting with data. In traditional Web applications, the procedure is typically “send query—wait for execution to complete—act on all results”. In a decentralized setting, we know that data collection will take time, so applications should be prepared to do more useful things instead of just waiting. The procedure becomes “send query—act on each incoming result”, processing every piece of incoming data a streaming way. In general, completeness should never be assumed, given that the Web is an open world.
  • And if we really want free options, we could even imagine paying with our personal data, giving selected parts away in exchange for ads. That’s of course how social media are implicitly supported now, but the main difference will be that we decide which data can be used for advertising purposes and which cannot. This proves once more that, at its core, decentralization starts with us taking back control of our data, as a source for a new generation of innovative Web applications

title: Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web author: breaking the tight url: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/ date: 2022-02-15 source: pocket tags: media/articles

Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed back-end database to the open Web as our data source.
  • Ultimately, decentralization is about choice: we will choose where we store our data, who we give access to which parts of that data, which services we want on top of it, and how we pay for those. Nowadays, we are instead forced to accept package deals we cannot customize
  • End users become data controllers. This is the most well-known decentralization aspect: we store our data in places of our choice, which improves privacy and control. Apps become views. As apps become decoupled from data, they start acting as interchangeable views rather than the single gateway to that data. Interfaces become queries. Data will be distributed across highly diverse interfaces, so sustainable apps need declarative contracts instead of custom data requests
  • This idea brings us back to the original vision for the Web, where anyone has their own website or blog and publishes their thoughts on there, rather than in a single stream controlled by one company
  • However, we want the convenience of the single stream without the central control that currently comes with that. We want to continue enjoying the same types of services that nowadays are only available on centralized platforms. So the important question is: can applications on top of decentralized data behave the same way as centralized apps?
  • Other than with centralized platforms, trust is not derived from a single party. For instance, if I claim my post has 124 likes, then we believe this because Facebook says so (and frankly, we have no objective reason to doubt that). In a decentralized scenario, I could prove that by linking to the individual likes that are stored on other servers, which form a provenance trail. And if those links break for any reason (for instance, if people retract their like), I can still prove they once liked it, if my app made a copy of their digitally signed like on my post. This mechanism can replace networks that are largely based on authority
  • The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.
  • The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.

title: “Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web” author: “breaking the tight” url: ”https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/” date: 2023-12-19 source: pocket tags: media/articles

Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed back-end database to the open Web as our data source.
  • Ultimately, decentralization is about choice: we will choose where we store our data, who we give access to which parts of that data, which services we want on top of it, and how we pay for those. Nowadays, we are instead forced to accept package deals we cannot customize
  • End users become data controllers. This is the most well-known decentralization aspect: we store our data in places of our choice, which improves privacy and control. Apps become views. As apps become decoupled from data, they start acting as interchangeable views rather than the single gateway to that data. Interfaces become queries. Data will be distributed across highly diverse interfaces, so sustainable apps need declarative contracts instead of custom data requests
  • This idea brings us back to the original vision for the Web, where anyone has their own website or blog and publishes their thoughts on there, rather than in a single stream controlled by one company
  • However, we want the convenience of the single stream without the central control that currently comes with that. We want to continue enjoying the same types of services that nowadays are only available on centralized platforms. So the important question is: can applications on top of decentralized data behave the same way as centralized apps?
  • Other than with centralized platforms, trust is not derived from a single party. For instance, if I claim my post has 124 likes, then we believe this because Facebook says so (and frankly, we have no objective reason to doubt that). In a decentralized scenario, I could prove that by linking to the individual likes that are stored on other servers, which form a provenance trail. And if those links break for any reason (for instance, if people retract their like), I can still prove they once liked it, if my app made a copy of their digitally signed like on my post. This mechanism can replace networks that are largely based on authority
  • The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.
  • The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.

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