Fluence
This article aims to explain Fluence in a non-technical simplified manner. We’ll first look at how the internet has come to be dominated by a handful of centralized players who dictate all the rules, then see how Fluence provides solutions to common issues such as cloud vendor lock-in.
The Internet is more centralized than ever
Any app or online business today has to, in some way or other, depend on centralized services, such as AWS for hosting, or Facebook/YouTube for reaching their audience. This is in part due to the commercialization of the client-server Internet model which tends to maximize rewards for companies able to operate a large number of servers at scale.
Such models suffer from critical flaws which are becoming more and more painfully obvious. Services such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube can change their ‘algorithms’ overnight, effectively crushing certain businesses who no longer would get enough traffic to their sites(eg. Little Things after the Facebook algorithm tweak in 2018). These corporations also often arbitrarily revoke access permissions to their APIs on which millions of businesses are built, sometimes going so far as banning entire ecosystems if it somehow threatens their business models. They also tend to arbitrarily ban/censor individuals/content.
These services collect and store huge amounts of personal data in centralized servers, which is then harvested for selling targeted ads. Such centralized data stores also come under attack in case of geopolitical conflicts. Nowadays governments of sovereign states are increasingly becoming reliant on large private corporations for storage of critical sensitive data. Governments can also use centralized platforms to censor opposing views.
How Fluence solves the above issues
Fluence is a network aiming to decentralize the data organization layer of the internet.
App Hosting Marketplace
It is an open application platform where applications run on nodes maintained by other network members and the node operators are compensated(using cryptocurrency) just like any other cloud network. This creates an open and thriving app hosting marketplace that decouples app ownership from its authorship.
As we saw above, traditional centralized services can often arbitrarily revoke access to their APIs or change permissions or push breaking changes without necessarily consulting with the end users, and the latter are forced to update. But here, the app owners ( the hosting providers ) are in control of whether they will host the updates pushed by the author or not. If majority think that an update will do more harm than good, they’ll simply continue hosting the existing version. This prevents the app authorship from pushing arbitrary changes without consulting the end users.
It also gives the app author flexibility of not being locked in a particular cloud provider platform. If someone does not want to host their app, the author can simply find another provider willing to host it.
An open app hosting market thus works both to the benefit of app creators as well as their end users.
Composable Apps
It lets developers compose new apps by reusing existing components.
Imagine you write a barebones photo gallery app. Someone could use your barebones app and add a feed on top of it to make a ( sort of ) decentralized Instagram type app. Or they could maybe add ephemeral stories and disappearing messages for a SnapChat type experience. Other developers could in turn either build on top of these, or compose these together with other components to build an app of their choice. All the apps would be live and usable individually(provided node operators are willing to host them), so no one will be forced to make trade offs in choosing the app they want to use.
Authors earning from their open source works
It provides a business model for open source apps.
In the current scenario, big corporations all the time use open source code bases in their proprietary products, however the respective authors of the open source code are never adequately compensated ( or compensated at all, in some cases) for the profits generated by using their code.
Fluence attempts to change this. Let’s continue with the previous example. For simplification purposes, assume that the barebones photo gallery app was built by 2 people — one database engineer and one UI/UX designer. Their contribution to the app is stored permanently on the decentralized blockchain. Now another frontend engineer comes and builds the Instagram clone on top of their app, and this app gets hugely popular. Not only is that engineer getting paid for this app, but also the 2 authors of the initial app. Since the blockchain will permanently store all the authorship information of the app, any royalties earned by any app will be distributed amongst all the authors of a particular app, as well as the app that they built their code upon. This incentivizes open source development.
So what is Fluence, exactly?
You might wonder that with every blockchain out there claiming to decentralize the Internet, what’s making Fluence stand out among the crowd? Well to clarify, Fluence is not a blockchain , it exists lower in the stack as a decentralized data storage layer that apps on existing blockchains can build upon. This allows decentralized apps to not rely on centralized services for things like backend, file storage and authentication.
Fluence also complements existing blockchains by offering off chain capabilities: that means people can build oracles or move heavy computations off chain to Fluence. The core team behind Fluence has built the open source AquaMarine stack for this purpose. Aqua is a programming language designed for peer to peer workflows. Marine is a runtime that executes hosted code on the nodes. Together, they allow a wide range of distributed applications to be developed.
If this seems interesting to you, you can know more, or get involved via Telegram or Discord .
