I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?
@kensanata my feeling on this subject is that asymmetric access networks are really at fault here -- many DSL and DOCSIS networks are painfully asymmetric -- 16Mbps down, 1Mbps up. 200Mbps down, 4Mbps up! just barely enough to sent TCP ACKs to sustain a passible ingress speed.
the only solution to that foundational problem, is cheap virtual machines available from the plethora of hosting companies. but that just reinforces the client/server model further, imo.
@kensanata @aag
damn it I wanna move to Zurich. How do I get Swiss citizenship?
@Wolf480pl @aag First you get a job. If you’re a EU citizen, that should be the first step.
@Wolf480pl Also, @deshipu moved from Poland to Switzerland. I think he also started with a job at an international company in Poland. Red Hat, I think?
@kensanata @Wolf480pl I actually quit Red Hat to move in here (my team didn't have the budget for the more expensive country), and then I got a 3 month temporary permit for finding a job. Eventually I went back to Red Hat (to a different team), but generally, if you are from EU, then it's really easy.
@kensanata @Wolf480pl When you have a job, you get a 5-year permit. When that runs out, if you are from Germany, Italy or France, you can get a permanent permit, otherwise you get another 5 years to learn the language, and then you can get permanent permit after an exam.
@kensanata @Wolf480pl I think you can apply for citizenship after 10 years. There is a language and familiarity with culture exam, and if you are not in a city, your neighbors have to accept it.
@aag @kensanata while i agree that the asymmetry sucks, in absolute terms the upstream is probably still bigger than the symmetric speeds most of us had in the 90s. A T1 was 1.5Mbps, iirc?
@aag @kensanata ISP firewalling and (especially) NAT obviously don't help, though I can see they have valid reasons (spam, address shortage) for wanting to
@telent @aag @kensanata nothing else comes close to NAT in terms of damaging free software's ability to put power in the hands of regular people.
as far as I can tell the only real progress being made is in SSB-land, which looks to me like a somewhat shaky technical foundation.
in my opinion, the only reason NAT is damaging is because of an inherent flaw in IP -- addresses are both locators and identifiers.
besides, with the processing power available to *every* network connected device, anything useful is going to be an overlay. who really cares about the underlay network?
so I'm back to "asymmetric bandwidth to the end user" is the biggest problem
@aag @telent @kensanata sure; I'll agree that asymmetry in the network is the root cause. but bandwidth availability is only incidentally related to that.
well, of course. but we didn't have machines that could process, or software that required, much more bandwidth than that in the 90s.
NAT destroying the end to end principle was unfortunate, but many a protocol designer has over come that a few times over (with varying degrees of success)
@aag I’m on 1G symmetric so yay me and yay for the city of #Zurich. 😀 But Yes, in general you are right. Then again, shared hosting can be had for less money than the cost of electricity for your own server unless it’s a single Raspberry Pi, I think. So perhaps that’s not really an issue?