Imagine This: A Web Without Servers - Tara Vancil - JSConf EU 2018

The Web was envisioned as an open platform for publishing and sharing information, but that vision has been lost: most people will never publish independently on the Web. What went wrong?

We’ll see how a core facet of the Web platform—setting up and running a server—locks the vast majority of users out of participating in the Web. Finally, we’ll take a look at the peer-to-peer Web, an experiment to re-imagine Web publishing, this time without servers.

Feeling skeptical? I’ll build and deploy a website on-stage using only my browser and text editor.

[MattSpeiser]

I met Tara once at jsla about a year ago, she was super cool and actually tried to explain this to me briefly. I didn't understand the project until now. The idea has an incredible amount of potential. This just gives any one more freedom in how one wants to experience and publish to the web. It just removes these pesky little boundaries to share. I don't think dedicated servers are going away anytime soon, but this just expands so many possibilities for so many people! Looking forward to see how this grows.

[samansinaei]

Dear Tara,

I just paused the video after seeing ur dat website and I am mesmerized, excited and maybe crazy in long term :) I really hope it is online now! I will check soon...

As a web developer who has experienced all sorts of headache around web servers, I was occasionally wondering what if we could pass html files directly to each other. But I hadn't thought about peer to peer! And to be honest I still don't know how a p2p network works technically.

But I know one thing for sure, there are so many bottlenecks in the way of solo person who wants to make and serve a website or app, and computer tools and science are really overcomplicate d and complexed.

Thanks to the YouTube and people like you who are trying to make learning (like web dev simplified channel) and developing/serving easier for every one, I hope we make a better and more accessible web 🕸️ which is as amazing as it's early days 😊

Thank you

[tomasramirezgomez]

All devices together can be the most powerful server ever built

[actsproject]

This is interesting, encouraging, easy to understand and a bit of fresh air :) I especially appreciate Tara sharing her background. Sounds like she would have really loved and benefitted from being introduced to more possibilities as a student and is interested in seeing that happen for future young people. That is super neat and worthwhile.

[rohscx]

Very cool. I like the concept and hope it is adopted.

[sbodi]

Loved the talk. Very interesting concept. Great job!

[brett]

Very exciting... I'm curious about 1) How privacy works; if privacy can be employed, will private messages work when a message is only shared between two people and that other person is now offline; 2) how origins work (e.g., if IndexedDB, localStorage, etc., is shared across all sites, and if one can scope things there for privacy too);

[aya]

wow this is an amazing talk and project!

[raiyansarker]

I've mixed reaction about this. Two things I can say, either it is a bad idea or it is too ahead of its time!

[jordandiamante]

cool... looks like piedpiper new internet

[peq_]

I understand that you can make private login to accounts a thing something like an ID(that Key pair that was said in a comment), but what about those 2 cases:
- I'm trying to login from a different machine into my account. The ID/Key pair, If I understood it correctly, would be different, so how can I make a secure login system(Even though I've an idea for that, which I use in a project of mine, it still wouldn't be as safe as things are with the current way that web works)?
-I've a data base which contains information from all users. How can I safely storage data in it, and allow those I want to to have acess, if its informations are going to be on all devices that acess my website?

[PabloGnesutta]

This is so interesting. I wonder how could you use it to host websites that require backend infrastructure, such as php, node, etc... Because one thing is to share the files, and another to share the runtime environment... Is there anything developed in that regard?

[patpatisserie]

Exciting stuff. Great to see IPFS, DAT etc taking off. See also MaidSafe's SAFE Network and other stuff at the Decentralized Web Summit next week (anyone going?)

[essohanamalou]

This is realy interesting and fascinating. Great talk😍

[Musikur]

This looks like a really cool concept, although it raises some nasty questions about security and privacy which would need to be addressed in some way. Especially being able to produce websites like this which could skim off private details by funnelling someone through your personal, identical looking and functional website which would behave in all of the ways you would expect except it would intercept your credit card information.

[leustad]

Very nice concept but the question is; what's the file size footprint going to be on the p2p devices. I definitely don't want to host truck load of files and how are you managing the private login data? The authentication/authorization and verification without the servers. You can't expect the users all over the internet hold bits and pieces of your private data. Right?

[tomysshadow]

Okay but, when the site owner edits the site they own, if it's P2P, it will take a long time to update as you are the only person out of who knows how many with the most recent copy... beyond that, wouldn't this take a lot of space, to share every website you visit?

Still an interesting experiment though. I love the idea.

[keokawasaki]

amazing Idea! I have a thing for retro design and I think this can totally rock it!

[toxicdesire]

Can someone explain to me where it would make sense to use p2p web, compared to conventional server-client model?

[testkrishanmail]

its amazing. great work. great concept.