(2025-05-21) Morris Client Server Internet Is Dead

Mike Morris: The Client-Server Internet is Dead. It's time to declare that Client-Server architected internet "applications" (i.e. applications of the underlying Internet protocols, mainly seen as websites) (SaaS?) are dead. They've been killed by a combination of enclosure of the commons, feudal plantation ownership and everything-harvesting criminal botnets masquerading as "AI" model-building.

It's basically impossible for anybody but the behemoth (GRAFT+)[1] providers to host an open-internet-facing application without hiring the services of a protection racket (aka "Distribution Network"). Without it your server software will suffer a meltdown, swamped by requests from particularly aggressive, egregious and stupid bot software

So what alternatives exist?

The other end of the spectrum would seem to be Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications that talk only to expressly-permissioned partner instances via cryptographically secure tunnels.

You only accept connections from instances run be people you know or have some reason to trust.

Often the trust is provisional at first, because the world is a big place, so we simply assume good-faith engagement as our first convenience. Tit-for-Tat strategy in an iterated prisoner's dilemma

The alternative: block-listing — allowing all connections and then blocking bad actors as they're discovered — suffers horrendously from scalability problems and quickly becomes a whack-a-mole nightmare. The ActivityPub universe is having to face this reality to some extent.

What's interesting to me about the peer-to-peer, small-scale permissioned connectivity paradigm is that it re-inserts our million-year-evolved instincts and mechanisms for relationship management directly into the technical networking loop. And that's largely what is absent from the Client-Server mess

The commercially driven internet is not coming to save us from this mess.

That leaves us leaning on P2P (and federation is a subset of that) protocols.