I stumbled upon this just now and I gotta say I was blown away when I saw videos showing off how MaidSafe works. Centralized hosting is how the internet has always been, and it is kinda outdated and voulnerable. I’m thrilled to see how the SAFE Network handles safe distributed hosting and storage.
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Welcome to the club! The internet was originally decentralized actually. Not the one that we’re all using for years now as it indeed relies on servers. But the first nodes were connected in a way that even in a nucleair holocaust the messages would route around the destructed cities still reaching the end point. So the inventors of this stuff already thought about decentralization.
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Okay so what happened? Why did things get so centralized and how do we keep SAFE from becoming centralized like internet 1.0 did?
More people started using the internet. And people ran their own servers from home/an office to host their own website. It was more easy to host it at some hoster… That was a step. And the story of Google and Yahoo etc. serving as the entrance to the web is well known I guess. On SAFE you’re better of without the server as you get all the benefits of the server and even more. Why run a server if your website is already online without one?
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I recently posted a link to an interesting article in Off-topic that is related to this. For example I didn’t know that tier 1 internet was also known as an “autonomous system”. I know that using existing infrastructure is prudent and makes the most sense but I think the good work that MaidSafe is doing in the software arena is going to need to have some sort of complementary effort undertaken for hardware infrastructure. I think one way to get the ball rolling is to market the hardware project as the physically SAFE network that serves as a redundancy or fail over just in case the “regular” internet were to have issues. If designed right, maybe it could eventually compete with existing infrastructure in order to spur innovation, the two networks being analogous to left-brain / right-brain. It’s pretty hard to beat fiber optics, so I think we’d need to be looking into some some sort of point to point li-fi combined with gigabit wireless.
Kind of like how the centralization of food production happened. People starting making a business of hosting and others stopped “hosting their own” as it were. So just like with food where we need to grow our own to decentralize the web again we need to host our own too. But that’s easier said than done because most don’t know how to set up a web server let alone run one. That’s another reason maidsafe will make things simpler because it creates an easy way to decentralize things.
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