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<p>As a (probable) web expert I still don't know what was web2 and
don't know what is web3<br>
<br>
That's more marketing terms that do not mean anything<br>
<br>
But I don't agree with the article (which contains some technical
mistakes, webtorrent or IPFS are everything but designed for anti
censorship), if you want to sustain p2p decentralized networks,
you need crypto (except those that can sustain themselves alone
like bittorrent)<br>
<br>
But indeed NFTs or blockchains are somewhere bulls until they
realy get decentralized (and anonymous)<br>
<br>
I don't see me trolling with a helmet but I think the next web is
the metaverse, instead of going to a web site, you go to the
virtual shop/place, with crypto (or fiat) for money,
decentralizing http, the worse protocol on earth, is just an
utopia<br>
<br>
Frankly speaking I would not have said this some years ago when I
considered that virtual worlds were complete bulls for crazy
people, now with crypto it makes sense and this can easily replace
the web, from a technical standpoint decentraland is interesting
for example<br>
<br>
The problem remains that you need to bridge between the different
worlds/crypto and this does not exist<br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 21/02/2022 à 15:06, Yosem Companys a
écrit :<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CANhci9Hu8OTcnCpJhSpqik+dV1AHh467MfAcV7imPZDa9r=24w@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
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<div dir="ltr">I found this to be an interesting post, especially
in the context of Liberationtech's having supported the
development of Diaspora, one of the most successful federated
social networking sites.<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">Elon Musk is right. Web3 is
BS.<br>
</div>
<div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">
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<div>
<div>By Maciej Baron<br>
Jan 9 2022<br>
<<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7"
target="_blank">https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7</a>><br>
<br>
To put it mildly, I am not Elon’s biggest fan. He’s an
ignorant, narcissistic, reckless, self-indulgent
buffoon who treats his employees like crap, and who
just happens to be amazing at marketing himself, which
helped him become a billionaire, despite running
unprofitable companies.<br>
<br>
Musk however, recently tweeted something that I
wholeheartedly agree with: “Web3 sounds like bs”.<br>
<br>
Web3 is an idea, which even Bloomberg admitted is a
bit hazy, which suggests we can achieve a
decentralised World Wide Web using blockchains. The
proponents of this concept like to talk about how Web
2.0 became centralised and controlled by big
corporations, and how blockchains, crypto and NFTs can
help “give the power back to the people”.<br>
<br>
This all sounds wonderful and looks good on paper, but
in reality, it’s simply bullshit.<br>
<br>
WebBs<br>
<br>
Web3 is bullshit on several different levels, but most
importantly, it confuses a political and
power-relationship problem with a technological one.
According to Web3 believers, blockchain is the
technology that can finally allow the Web to go back
to its decentralised roots. The truth is, blockchains
are not only useless in achieving that, we already
have the technology to do that.<br>
<br>
ActivityPub is a protocol that has been available for
years, and which inspired the creation of fairly
successful decentralised, federated social networks
such as Mastodon. Any community can create their own
ActivityPub instance which is controlled by them —
even a single user can create their own server
instance if they want to, and federate with other
instances. It’s a beautiful architecture that allows
people to control who has access to their feeds, and
what sort of feeds they are exposed to.<br>
<br>
So why haven’t we seen a mass exodus of people from
Twitter and Facebook to Mastodon, or similar
platforms? The technology is there, the platform is
there — all it takes is to register and switch.<br>
<br>
The reason for this is that platforms like Twitter
have already achieved enormous power and influence,
and a large user base that simply stays where most of
the people they follow are. There are plenty of
stories of people switching over to Mastodon, only to
return to Twitter shortly after, because that’s “where
all the action is”. Companies like Twitter spend
millions on “customer retention”; they help big brands
improve their presence online and give users plenty of
reasons to stay and stick to Twitter.<br>
<br>
The monopolistic nature of the biggest social media
platforms is also beneficial to other companies, which
can streamline their advertising and marketing
campaigns — this benefits the wider capitalist system.
The monopoly of the big players is a natural result of
the system we have in place.<br>
<br>
The Web3 thinking is based on the naive technocratic
assumption that technology and “smart ideas” can solve
most of our societal problems. Its naivety also
expands to the belief that free-market capitalism is
the solution to the encroachment of monopolies, and
not the system that is in fact actively creating and
enlarging them.<br>
<br>
There isn’t a technology that will solve this, and
this isn’t happening because of a lack of a certain
technology. We already have tools to create a
decentralised web, and blockchains aren’t even the
right technology to begin with.<br>
<br>
Blockchains, NFTs and crypto-bullshit<br>
<br>
A blockchain is a form of a digital ledger, which
consists of records called blocks. Such a database is
managed autonomously using a peer-to-peer network,
meaning there is no main, centralised machine
controlling the whole infrastructure. Instead
everything is controlled collectively by all the nodes
connected to the network.<br>
<br>
The main purpose of a blockchain, and really the only
reason it can be made useful, is to record
transactions. It is admittedly a fairly clever way of
avoiding the double spending problem — when a digital
token is spent twice (or multiple times), that is,
transferred to multiple destinations at once. This is
also why, so far, the only major use of blockchains is
for digital currency, and artificially scarce digital
assets (Non-Fungible Tokens — NFTs).<br>
<br>
Some people have suggested that NFTs could be used for
recording things like deeds and property titles, but
it makes little sense to use blockchains for recording
anything physical or anything that requires off-chain
validation, authorisation, authentication or
confirmation — even if we consider the use of oracles.
Blockchains only make sense in a digital-only world,
and only for transactional data — and so far nobody
came up with a compelling dapp idea (decentralized
application) that is not tied to cryptocurrency in any
way.<br>
<br>
This is why when some Web3 evangelists talk about how
social media is centralised and how blockchains can
help, you know they’re bullshitting you.<br>
<br>
Social media posts are not transactional data. You may
have “likes” that you can give to posts, but the
double spending problem is not relevant here, because
you have an unrestricted and unlimited supply of
“likes”. We already have decades old technologies like
PGP which can prove the authenticity of a post. We
already have distributed, peer-to-peer technologies
allowing for censorship-proof, decentralised storage
of data (such as WebTorrent used by PeerTube).<br>
<br>
Unstoppable Domains looks okay on paper, but it’s a
for-profit solution that isn’t really as decentralised
as it pretends to be: you still have to go through UD
to purchase domains. Moreover, getting around a DNS
block is quite trivial, and “unstoppable” domains
won’t solve the problem of a hard IP block by your IPS
if used as a DNS provider.<br>
<br>
Projects like the Interplanetary File System (IPFS)
are interesting, and were already used to fight
against censorship. However, the pricing model is
slightly obfuscated, the cost of “pinning” (permanent
storage) is a few times higher compared to regular
storage solutions. If you’re using a company like
Pinata to host (“pin”) your content and guarantee its
permanence while you pay a monthly fee, you should
start asking yourself how much decentralisation you
are really left with if you still rely on your hosting
provider and on the caching policy of independent
nodes. Moreover, we already have magnet links, Tor
Onion services and platforms like FreeNet, which is
nearly 22 years old now (the web itself is only 9
years older).<br>
<br>
The technology is already here! We have had similar
technologies for decades now! …and new technology is
not what we need to fight the enormous power of the
biggest platforms. That’s bullshit.<br>
<br>
[snip]</div>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Sophia-Antipolis, France
LinkedIn: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://fr.linkedin.com/in/aymeric-vitte-05855b26">https://fr.linkedin.com/in/aymeric-vitte-05855b26</a>
GitHub : <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.github.com/Ayms">https://www.github.com/Ayms</a>
Move your coins by yourself (browser version): <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://peersm.com/wallet">https://peersm.com/wallet</a>
Bitcoin transactions made simple: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/Ayms/bitcoin-transactions">https://github.com/Ayms/bitcoin-transactions</a>
torrent-live: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/Ayms/torrent-live">https://github.com/Ayms/torrent-live</a>
node-Tor : <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.github.com/Ayms/node-Tor">https://www.github.com/Ayms/node-Tor</a>
Zcash wallets made simple: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/Ayms/zcash-wallets">https://github.com/Ayms/zcash-wallets</a>
Bitcoin wallets made simple: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/Ayms/bitcoin-wallets">https://github.com/Ayms/bitcoin-wallets</a>
Anti-spies and private torrents, dynamic blocklist: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://torrent-live.peersm.com">http://torrent-live.peersm.com</a>
Peersm : <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.peersm.com">http://www.peersm.com</a></pre>
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