Without buy-in from non-technical users, decentralized web services are destined to fail. It's time for the folks who are building the distros of the future and the folks who are building the web of the future to see what we can offer each other. Come hear what we've done so far at MediaGoblin, where we think the tricky bits will be and then join us in building the computing, sharing, connecting environment of the future!
Let's be honest. Most of the people who currently run a node of a decentralized web service are pretty technical. The rest of the world uses massive centralized services. These large centralized service providers are prone to easy surveillance, hard for users to customize and rife with arbitrary censorship. But people want to connect and share, so if we aren't building free web services for everyone, then we may as well not be building them at all.
GNU/Linux distributions could well be the missing link. If users could install the software to host their own node of MediaGoblin, Diaspora or Pump.io as easily as they choose an application like VLC or Audacity then we might start to see the multi-node network that federated services need to succeed. Of course, there are a few hurdles we'll have to overcome before we can expect easily deployable federation in every distro. Some of the great new innovations from the world of devops (prepare for all the failure) and the magic of containerization (assemble once, deploy everywhere) could help us bridge the gap.
It's time for the folks who are building the distros of the future and the folks who are building the web of the future to see what we can offer each other. The folks at MediaGoblin have been thinking about this for quite a while. Come hear what we've done so far, where we think the tricky bits will be and then join us in building the computing, sharing, connecting environment of the future!
Speakers: Deb Nicholson