P2P Always Built my Web: Exploring IFPS on @WithKnown
I have never known a web where hackers, activists, and fans did not want a p2p, or peer to peer solution.
In many ways we had p2p networks before the web. Tapes of bands we loved, especially the Grateful Dead, which always allowed free taping of concerts, got shipped through mail, first in magazines and then Bulletin Board Postings.
Then just as I graduated high school and entered college the web exploded on to the scene. Everything changed. Grateful Dead fans made uo the first fandom on the Web. Engineers of the early web enthralled themselves with the marvel of the Wall of Sound. Set list got traded on Arpanet, a precursor of the web, you had the Well, and tape trading immediatley moved online.
In fact mush of the cowboy liberalisim of the web, warts and all, can trace back to the Dead, the lot, and the ethos culture that overlapped geographically with Silicon Valley.
This includes p2p. The dream isn't new and I am excited to find time to carve out and give the plugin developed by Marcus a shot.
My p2p Experience
Tape traders, and then CD tarders, as they emerged (we still say tapes), had, no have, two options for sharing music collections. etree.org began in 1998 and p2p networks became my primary use of the earl web. We would trade lossless copies of music, upload an mp3...tsk ..tsk, to burn to CD or to DAT (a thing for like two minutes). In fact bit torrent, the technology that powered Napster got written with etree in mind.
At first we simply traded over FTP. I didn't have a website but boy did we exploit the Unviersity's free FTP service, it got shut down my senior year in 1999. Then most people started to trade in torrents. Most still used SHN as FLAC, another lossless audio website, just started to make the scence.
We had so much fun. I did not really hand on etree.org. I used a java client called furthurnet, a now defunct site. The torrent client hooked into etree.org but had a fun interface and community chat. I would spend hours in grad school seeding SHN, ripping CDs and hanging with people online. Not just the Grateful Dead, an explosion of jam bands happened in the early 2000s, mainly I believe driven by the web.
Heck Jimmy Fallon had an SNL skit, Jarret's Room, of the web and jam band scene, people had webcasts as soon as people had webcams....except the computer in the background of the Dorm room would be seeding torrent trading music, and legally. It happened out of frame but Goby, who didn't come off too bright, had the best second generation soundboard dat collection ever...
Open original embedded content
While pirating lead to so much oversight we believed in an ethical and distributed community web then and do now.
To this day I do not understand the rise of streaming media in the IndieWeb community. You should own your media like any other data and friends don't let friends download lossy audio...and you don't make friends willing to sacrifice music for low bit rates.
Returning Home
The web and times change. The Grateful Dead limited the available streams on archive.org. You can stream any show you want but it still takes effort to download the shows. I am fine with thas as community drives the love as mush as liberal licensing. Now Dead and Company...probably for cash....release curations on Spotify (they are free but I would have to sign up for Spotify) rather than among family and fans, but we work hard to recreate these list and make sure an equitable offering gets made available on archive.org.
Still P2p always been our dream for the web since day one, files not existing in one place but everywhere at the same time, protection from the heat who might bust you on a cloudy day, and a general sense of communal rather than personal ownership.
IFPS, or InterPlanetary File System (I mean even the same sounds like some DeadHead invented it...don't now who coined the term), is a new p2p way to share all your files in one large "torrent" system.
For me this isn't a new fad but the original dream for the web. A bus came by, we got on, and we have always wanted to split the bus into millions of pieces loosely connected that anyone could pull up and have at the tip of their tongue in an instant.
