I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse.
Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.
The big step that dweb has taken in the past year is that it's now possible to build all the same protocols without requiring users or community managers to run servers themselves. Everything can be done in the web browser, and nothing requires user to have uptime anymore.
With "dweb" do you refer to getdweb.net or to one of the many other alternatives that have sprung up?
Can you explain how it works, is it available via the regular browser by typing in an url? What's the selling point? Sorry, I know I could do this research myself but I did that several times now with various alternatives and it just doesn't seem like any of them are good enough. Does dweb help against DDOS?
We already have a technology where people don't need to run servers: torrents. That's because everyone that uses it is simultaneously a server.
A big problem of torrents (and IPFS, and most p2p technologies) is how to give proper incentive for people to contribute. There are "cheating" clients that don't upload back for example. And there are people that close the torrent as soon as it is downloaded. Well, you can sometimes rely on people's sense of belonging to a community; or you can sometimes shun noncooperating people from the community (as in private trackers).
I think dweb's main contribution is giving the option of monetary compensation for participating in the network. Perhaps such incentive wasn't needed when people were just seeding things they are passionate about, like movies and music, but it may enable more boring stuff to be decentralized as well. Hence, blockchain.
Most current p2p protocols are about sharing data in a decentralized way, but you can also execute algorithms on this data. That's what's being done with blockchain today (technically you wouldn't need a blockchain for this, but we already established we might want a way to give monetary incentive to peers, so, there's that)
This scheme may or may not work. I think it may have adverse effects, like when the web was taken down by advertising and commercial interests. But it also opens a path to a new kind of web.
About ddos: existing protocols have a big problem with scaling; an actual denial of service attack would make things much worse. That's why Lbry (which is a decentralized Youtube of sorts) is mostly accessed through a centralized site, Odysee - funnily enough, Odysee doesn't use any form of decentralization to serve the videos. It could make peers serve themselves using webtorrent or other protocol on top of webrtc, and it might some day just do it, but it doesn't at this time.
Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.