when downloading torrents you have a bunch of seeders and maybe most won’t be online, but some will be. I’m so so tired with services and monopolies. Do you think it would be possible to create an internet where instead of large servers we just have individuals hosting their email service, the communities they like to post in and sharing files. essentially it’s just torrent with email and message board

19 points
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You should check out IPFS which is pretty similar to what you’re describing, at least for file storage (which can be used to host web content).

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1 point

Thanks, yep. found that after some research. found some email client with ipfs and proof of replication but it’s some crypto scam shit that’s dead anyways

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2 points

Unfortunately a lot of the IPFS community seems to have been inundated with crypto nonsense. Which is a shame, since I think the basic idea is a good one.

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13 points

You’re sort of describing Freenet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

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9 points

So basically the internet before the World Wide Web?

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3 points

I never got to use that Internet.

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4 points

Not many people did. Universities and government mostly.

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1 point

It was really cool and fun. I kind of miss it.

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3 points

Yep, back when nothing was encrypted and all email was trusted. There was peace at the beginning then scammers and spammers found out everything was trusted and started spamming the hell out of everyone.

People would enter credit card info into random web forms what would store the full info in email hosted by that party.

Then fraud became a huge issue, email got dmarc spf dkim checks, websites where mandated to have https, and credit card and private info had laws about safe storage and liability.

There were also a lot fewer users, you could host a simple website for thousands of viewers easy but now scaling for 10s of thousands of viewers if your site is linked from a popular source could easily take you down.

However it is still 100% possible to host your own stuff, the technical know how however is a barrier for most.

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6 points

You are describing IPFS. If you install IPFS, then browse to some IPFS content (like a wikipedia mirror: ipns://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/), that’s cached on your system, if someone else requests those assets, your computer will help distribute it. You can “pin” content, keeping/seeding a copy.

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4 points

You watch Silicon Valley recently? Haha

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2 points

not recently lol. after doing some research i sadly discovered that crypto has taken a big fat shit on the general publics oppinion of ipfs and proof of replication. filecoin etc. greeeeeeeed is cancer

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2 points

Yeah I am not very versed in crypto but the greedyness of it put a big stink on it for me.

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