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Blogging in 2017 is absurd: most people don’t own websites anymore. Microblogging might be still in, video blogging might be the last-next frontier, and maybe tinyletter will stay underground-cool. It’s pretty weird to run your own website, to care about making it efficient, to keep using last-gen tech like Jekyll.

So, if it’s going to be weird, we might as well go whole-hog and become decentralization hipsters. Decentralizing the web, or at least avoiding the monopoly-fueled monoculture of the web, has been around forever - projects like WASTE and Tor hidden services have been around for forever, but a popular, daily-usable, semi-mainstream alternative to the internet has been elusive and in the period of 2009-2013ish was overshadowed by other trends.

But now in 2017, a re-decentralized web - ‘dex’ for short - is back in vogue and there are some promising projects. There are lots of projects in the space now, with slightly different goals and cultures, like scuttlebutt, IPFS, and Dat. And, critically, Beaker Browser just launched, a user-friendly browser that transparently supports Dat websites: you can go to dat:// URLs just like you can https:// URLs. I’ve been trying it out, and it’s great.

I’m no decentralized-services expert. Dat and other projects are based on deep observations about network topology and cryptography that I’m only barely starting to understand. So, a lot like my data science scratchpad, this is a personal journal and space for loose notes than it is a guide or recommendation: I think folks are starting to tinker with this tech, and we’re all figuring out what’s great, what might be unfinished, and where it’s going.

Intent & aim

I’ve got macwright.org, why also have a dex website? First of all, for fun. And dex also has the potential to remove moving parts: right now when I publish my website with Netlify, it relies on GitHub for code hosting, Netlify for servers, Let’s Encrypt for the SSL certificate, and on the services under those services, like AWS and, hopefully, nothing crazy.

A dex website can just be you, your computer, and the world. Instead of needing to support HTTPS - which GitHub Pages still doesn’t do with custom domain names, and instead of worrying about CDN performance, you can hope that the system does those things correctly, from the ground up.

Starting

I’m starting by trying to host a site on Dat with Beaker Browser and/or the Dat client. Beaker Browser doesn’t support IPFS yet. I also like IPFS, and so does Kyle at Neocities, who knows a lot more about it. Ideally I’d support both, but I have to start with one.

Major kudos to the community around this for their classy and humane discussions, like the one linked above.

Summary of how a plain-vanilla website works

Since this is a leap beyond current websites, we should have a reference point: current websites. Or, to simplify, this website. macwright.org takes this path from me to you, the reader:

  1. I have a directory, ~/src/tmcw.github.com in which I edit files like this one. It is a git repository as well as a directory - it contains a .git database and can be ‘pushed’ to other git repositories.
  2. When I’ve decided that a post is absolutely perfect, I push a commit in the master branch of that git repository from my computer to GitHub, to the tmcw/tmcw.github.com repository.
  3. GitHub sends a notification of that pushed commit to Netlify, my web host. Netlify clones the repository, runs Jekyll to build Markdown files into HTML, and keeps a copy of that built site (HTML & CSS) on their origin servers.
  4. Netlify has a lot of servers that form a Content Distribution Network that handle the final step from their origin servers to you. Content Distribution Networks hold copies of this website on servers that are numerous and located all over the world, so that responses are semi-uniformly fast and floods of traffic don’t have a single point of failure.

Vital notes on this workflow: