Comment by amarant
7 hours ago
What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS? Why spend time to build an alternative solution? Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?
Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams. I'll stick to TCP and html for now I think.
As somebody working in this "future-web" space, I see HUGE issues with the legacy web stack:
- It requires a server to publish, which is expensive and difficult for regular users with a laptop or a phone. This can be solved with a mix of p2p and federation
- There is no decentralized trust system- only DNS+HTTPS, which requires centralized registration (TLDs). A domain may be cost-prohibitive for somebody who just wants to write comments and a few documents on the web. This can be solved by forming a social graph of cryptographic identity validations (aka, the "web of trust")
- There is no versioning system. This can be solved by making chains of immutable signed content, like we do with git.
- There is no archival system that allows you to "back up" the content of a website in a trustless way. Look at IPFS and BitTorrent for the solution there.
I believe these are the main reasons the web has failed as a social publishing system. Aside from companies and technically skilled individuals, everyone publishes on centralized social media platforms. This is a dangerous consolidation of power.
We hate to admit it, but the open web has taken the "L". The good news: these are solvable problems and I'm not giving up anytime soon!
> Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams.
To distance ourselves from crypto scams, we strongly avoid the web3 label, despite some similarities.
This feels very 2000's. eDonkey, Perfect Dark, Opera Unite....
Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.
P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)
Web of trust never took off - turns out people don't trust their friends' friends' much, some sort of centralized authority works much better.
_Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC - for example, they have only one laptop/phone, they don't back it up, and it breaks regularly. If your system requires one to keep a secret key for decades, it automatically excludes a very large fraction of computer users.
Publicly accessible versioning and immutable content sound cool for readers, but have very few upsides (and many downsides) for writers. And it's writers who select publishing technology.
People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today. Just look at which decentralized social networks are actually winning (like Mastodon) - it's pretty much opposite to what's described in your comment.
P2P and federation tech is really cool stuff! I feel like ipfs is what most non-tech people thought the cloud was, perhaps even what it should've been.
I'll admit I'm a bit out of the loop though. Say I wanted to publish a blog on this.. Let's call it web 4, for lack of a better term..
How would I do it? How would people find it? Last I checked there wasn't really a good solution for that(or at least I didn't find one) but it's been nearly a decade, so things might've changed!
HTTP/HTML are legitimately not good designs for building networked applications besides those actually intended to be rendered as hypertext by a browser.
IPv4 is not a good protocol for obvious reasons, and IPv6 isn’t for political/bureaucratic reasons on top of the baseline inertia (try getting a block and using it IRL). IP is used as a kind of proxy for physical identity that is very ill suited for the task (but the best option available to Internet users outside the application layer) and DNS/CA is in practice captured and centralized by people charging Bob’s Restaurant $10 for a name.
The IANA is captured by both because renting IP addresses and domain names are basically their business model, which they franchise out through multiple layers of hierarchy to business that turn profit off of renting numbers and names to end users and do the dirty work, then contribute back up its governance structure.
Domain ownership, DNS, and IP block assignment are probably the most legitimate possible applications of NFTs to date. One day LEO satellite “Internet” adoption might be good enough for non-IP global networking but until then we have even-worse centralized NFTs rented out by a bureaucracy. Works great if you want true participation at the Internet level to be too expensive, time consuming, and complex for 99% of people. Facebook and Reddit for the plebes to deal with the lack of usability/what they want elsewhere, Cloudflare for us!
Don't see why would LEO satellites replace IP protocol? All the servers are on the ground and wired to each other, and this will never change. Satellite internet is just another way to achieve "last mile", it never has a chance to be its own thing.
And if you don't like DNS/CA/IP ownership, there are always overlay networks - this can give you "non-IP global networking" today. The amount of people participating in them should show how much of the problem existing technologies really are...
> What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS?
The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property!
> Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?
Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future!
For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
I got up to the compuserve bit before realising you were talking about the past rather than the (very corporate) present web.