Comment by evv
4 hours ago
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!