Decentralized internet

DECENTRALIZATION. I’ve been digging into this these past few weeks. The idea of the internet we know today being decentralized. If you think that today’s internet is already decentralized because it’s all over the world, it’s actually not. Basically, data goes through “junctions” before it ever reaches its destinations.

When you’re at your local coffee shop and chatting with your friend beside you on a chat application, it may seem like you’re chatting directly with your friend but, in reality, you’re not. Whatever you send goes out from your device then to the internet service provider of your local coffee shop, then to the server of the chat application you’re using before it goes back again to the, more or less, the same route before reaching your friend.

Here’s a fairly old video explaining how the internet works.

The same way when you want to retrieve or search for pieces of information located somewhere in the internet. Say, for example, you wanna read that Wikipedia article on Taylor Swift. You get on your favorite browser, type in the Wikipedia address on the address bar and when you get to the website, you search for Taylor Swift. What just happened here is that you’re now accessing information stored within Wikipedia’s servers. And every time you click on something again and takes you to another Wikipedia article, you’re accessing another part of Wikipedia’s servers.

What if Wikipedia’s servers go down? What if the IP address to Wikipedia gets lost? We wouldn’t be able to access any content at all from Wikipedia. That’s the equivalent of you not getting to read that Fifty Shades book at your favorite bookstore because that bookstore is closed and the only copy of that Fifty Shades book is in that bookstore.

Tragic isn’t it? It is!

Which brings me to something I’ve discovered along the way when I was reading up on decentralization of the internet. It’s called the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Yes, that’s the name. If you’re interested in reading their white paper, you can download it here.

Here’s a video explanation of what it is.

If that was a bit confusing for you, let me try to help.

Basically, IPFS puts addresses on the content itself rather than the location of the content. Going back to our Taylor Swift article example. With IPFS, the content of that article gets a unique address and copies of it are then made available to and in many servers even in your own computer. So the next time, you need to read that article, and Wikipedia’s servers are down for some reason, you can still access the information because it’s available somewhere else.

Remember the bookstore analogy with your Fifty Shades book? What’s happening is that that Fifty Shades book is now available in many other bookstores. So if your favorite bookstore is closed, you can go to another bookstore and still read the book. Nifty, ain’t it?

Now if only more and more platforms, websites and other services shift over to this new file system.

Aside from distributing content, thereby decentralizing the internet, there’s also a side note subject of being able to own your own data. But that’s a different topic altogether. For now, though, let me share this video with you in relation to that.