[liberationtech] Web3 is BS

[Yosem Companys]

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.

Elon Musk is right. Web3 is BS.
By Maciej Baron
Jan 9 2022
<https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7>

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.

Musk however, recently tweeted something that I wholeheartedly agree with:
“Web3 sounds like bs”.

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”.

This all sounds wonderful and looks good on paper, but in reality, it’s
simply bullshit.

WebBs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blockchains, NFTs and crypto-bullshit

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

[snip]
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