Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web | Ruben Verborgh

"Decentralizing the Web means people ... store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need... requires major changes in the way we develop applications... In this post, I discuss three paradigm shifts a decentralized Web brings"

Rather than "accept package deals we cannot customize", redecentralising the web allows us to "choose where we store our data, who we give access to which parts of that data, which services we want on top of it, and how we pay for those".

The three required paradigm shifts are:

End users become data controllers

"we store our data in places of our choice, which improves privacy and control."

But how do we get the services we're used to from centralised services? The answer depends on where we are on the decentralisation spectrum, from walled gardens (one datapod for millions of users) through to Solid (one or even many datapods per user): "everything you post is stored on your own website or server. An app collects all posts from people I am following ... displays them in a feed ... [my] “like” is stored on my server", triggering a notification to yours.

"trust is not derived from a single party" - users are in control of their data, and so can provide proof via a "provenance trail" of data on mine and other servers, via digital signatures.

Benefits: privacy, freedom of speech.

Challenge: scalability.

Apps become views

Apps become "interchangeable views rather than the single gateway to that data", which is decoupled from apps - "you enter data only once—in your own data pod... [where you] and give apps permission to read or write specific parts of your data".

This "creates separate markets for data and applications", stimulating innovation in both: just as net neutrality "strives to maintain the separation of the content and connectivity markets".

Interfaces become queries

"Data will be distributed across highly diverse interfaces, so sustainable apps need declarative contracts instead of custom data requests."

Web apps communicate with servers using processes "hard-coded into the application logic... results in a highly specific contract between a client and a server" - problematic in a decentralised world, where everybody adopting the same API is unlikely, would stifle competition, and would require a wholescale rewrite of apps every time the interfaces evolved.

So "decentralized Web applications should exclusively use declarative queries to view and update data on our pods... queries are processed by a client-side library... shared across many applications ... responsible for interfacing with the concrete Web APIs of the relevant data pods for a given user".

This changes the timing: "data collection will take time", so apps will stream data to the user as it arrives, and "completeness should never be assumed".

Conclusions

He provides a few technical examples of this emerging vision, including "our work on Linked Data Fragments—and its Solid plugin—aims to grow decentralized querying to a Web scale".

But is it a realistic vision? He points out that it's not just datahippies and privacy nuts who want this: "sectors such as finance, law, and healthcare... a promising market for high-security data pods and transparent information access through apps as views".

But "who will pay"? We choose from multiple options, but not all will be free. "if we really want free options, we could even imagine paying with our personal data, giving selected parts away in exchange for ads."

Or LLM training, perhaps?