The brand-new struggles of a millennial who grew up with the Open Web — the story of Aquila Network
A short story developed around recent discussions on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702
In the previous decades, the Web offered an unbiased source of Truth to anyone without judging who you are, what your beliefs are. It was a utopian escape hatch from the noisy physical world. Today, we’re fiercely fighting the entropy that is tearing apart our ideals once again in cyberspace.
Ava identifies herself as a polymath. Her interests range across science, technology, philosophy, and art. A millennial girl by birth, she’s determined not to settle but to explore the realm of knowledge and wisdom. She has been a curious student of the Web for more than a decade. Anybody, without a doubt, will agree to this by looking at her bookmarks and knowledge repositories. Just like any other millennial, Ava has experienced firsthand how the Web grew over time. Even though she’s happy with the technology toolset at her reserve, she started feeling small but growing frustration in discovering the right information.
Ava is now in her thirties. She enjoys hanging out with peers of similar interest whom she met online over the years. Even during the pandemic, thanks to the Web, she meets her friends online.
“Web is full of wonders…” She would say occasionally.
One day she happened to meet El Nino from her friend circle. Nino is a web developer who occasionally writes articles reviewing different life hack tools. It didn’t take much time for them to start talking about the “eventual information drain problem” of the open Web. Nino called it “Information Bubble”, which he thinks will continue growing as days go by. Ava recognized it immediately, she had no clue that it was a real problem. Now she knows the real reason behind the growing fake information and biased opinion crisis.
“Is there a solution to this?” she asked.
“There should be multiple solutions to this at different layers. I’m interested in solving one among them” Nino replied. According to Nino, the information discovery layer of the Web should be decentralized.
“You know, simply censoring a public library’s book index could trigger a wave of damages to the society. Similarly, centralized gatekeeping of Web indexes triggers secondary effects which consciously starve and eventually kill independent content creators” Nino paused for a moment. He’s a victim of side effects caused by aggressive SEO optimizations and click-baits.
The good news is, the Web already has a native, decentralized (but limited) content discovery mechanism — a super index — DNS. It has already proven the power and freedom a decentralized discovery layer could offer. With great confidence and hope in his words, he said “I propose a decentralized, native search layer, which will help discover context-specific content. What’s more, anyone can host it anywhere. That will be awesome right?”
“Yeah, super cool! What can I do?” Ava asked with excitement.
Nino continued.
First of all, you can take a look at the technical paper and specifications to make sure that the technology convinces you. Just remember, those are still under active improvement. Any suggestion you have on improving them is heartily welcome. Also, there are reference implementations in progress. You can test them and make pull requests if you think of a necessary change. You could also keep in touch with our team. Our team will let you know of the latest updates so that you can eventually join the collective efforts.