Hi there,
So I came across this nice post from r/DataHoarder where they share the victory of archiving more than a thousand books and many more scientific articles thanks to people contributing to seeding and other actions.
I find this wonderful (I believe scientific findings should not be kept behind closed doors whatsoever and I think paywalls contribute to that), yet I’m disheartened to read that they keep changing domains every month or so because the keep being taken down.
I believe that what The Eye, LibGen, SciHub and the community are doing is a very laudable goal. Yet it seems a very hard battle.
Would this be any better under Holochain? How does Holo/chain solve the issue of Domain Name registrars, ICANN and the like? And what about the storage (AFAIK, the storage part in decentralized systems is still in its infancy, right?)
Cheers,
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I’d say that Holochain addresses these issues partially but nicely — one of our core intentions is for a Holochain DHT to be an unencloseable carrier. That means that it can’t be shut down as long as someone’s interested in keeping it alive. And within that DHT, the data is discoverable by anyone who belongs to it, as long as they’ve got good connections to a few reliable peers. Trying to shut down a DHT is like playing Whac-A-Mole; you could shut down some peers but not all of them.
Now, the issue that remains is that this works great only once you belong to the app’s network. Discovering that network is the hard part, because you’re probably trying to find this DHT using the centralised medium of the web with all of its officially assigned names and numbers. And once you find the right DHT, you probably want to connect to it by finding some trustworthy peers to start gossiping with.
I’m not saying “it’s hopeless; let’s just give up”; my intention is to (a) be realistic about the limitations within the current system, and (b) provoke some discussion which will hopefully uncover some creative solutions.
One possible solution is to have a ‘DHT of DHTs’, a well-known, uncensorable network that lets you find the networks you’re looking for. I believe we plan to build something just like that. As with above, this is still subject to censorship at the discovery level, but it’s a good start.
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I think I get a great deal of what you are saying here: if everybody were on the DHT, everything would be golden, but the thing is migration from centralized mediums to fully decentralized without centralized mediums is still an issue.
I’m way better at posing questions than coming with answers, for the moment. I’ll soak into your answer for now.
Thanks,
I like questions as much as I like answers; thanks for poking at weak spots. This isn’t a problem with just Holochain; every P2P DWeb project is struggling with this right now: https://twitter.com/wmhilton/status/1216446621963210754
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