(2022-02-26) Sloan Bad Hosts Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Overlay Network

Robin Sloan: Bad hosts, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the overlay network. Concluding my notes on Web3, I wrote that Ethereum should inspire anyone interested in the future(s) of the internet, because it proves, powerfully, that new protocols are still possible. (see (2021-11-11) Sloan Notes On Web3)

accepting my own admonition, I have been tinkering on a new protocol — simple and, shall we say, “hypermedia-ish”

Today, I want to document a realization that struck along the way.

The modern internet has rendered the figure of “an individual hosting a small internet service, all on their own” as antique as a blacksmith

I'm talking about just two things: IPv4 addresses and NAT.

It’s not impossible to host a small internet service from a computer in your home, but it takes some fairly intense tinkering

I am starting to think 50% of the ease and power of centralization is just a stable, public IPv4 address.

There are workarounds for NAT, ubiquitous hacks, but they all require centralized intermediaries

The workarounds are fine as far as they go, but NAT tricks can’t get us the one thing we really want, the foundational internet thing: the ability to simply listen for connections

Computers with the ability to listen on the internet are called “hosts”, and there’s an interesting etymological implication there. Today, as home internet users, we are not hosts; and perhaps we are missing out, therefore, on a degree of etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction.

What of the dream of IPv6? I truly did not have an opinion on IPv6 before December 2021. Suddenly, I am a wild-eyed evangelist

What of the dream of IPv6?

I truly did not have an opinion on IPv6 before December 2021. Suddenly, I am a wild-eyed evangelist

New kinds of apps and services would bloom like flowers in a dry meadow after the rain.

The rise of “overlay networks” is a natural response to the limitations and frustrations of the public IPv4 internet

These are illusory networks established on top of the public internet. Often, you install a small program on your computer, and it allows the rest of your applications to “see” a group of other computers as if they were close at hand on your local network,

I discovered ZeroTier, which allows you to create and manage these overlay networks

There’s a similar service called Tailscale, along with Slack’s somewhat more robotic Nebula, and I’m sure a ton more.

ZeroTier’s founder Adam Ierymenko sometimes calls the service a “planetary data center

Along the same lines, one of Tailscale’s founders, David Crawshaw, has a blog post, actually quite moving, titled Remembering the LAN. He writes:

But, as cool and promising as the overlay networks are, I am not willing to sacrifice “public” entirely, because what is the internet, if not an open invitation

There’s also the peer-to-peer browser called Beaker, a powerfully centrifugal project;

My interest in all of this is a bit odd-angled, because I don’t actually care about decentralization that much

What I’m really interested in — what I dream about — is the opportunity to play with new protocols without taking on, perforce, the burden of infrastructure.