[liberationtech] Web3 is BS

Mon Feb 21 16:20:27 CET 2022

As a (probable) web expert I still don't know what was web2 and don't
know what is web3

That's more marketing terms that do not mean anything

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)

But indeed NFTs or blockchains are somewhere bulls until they realy get
decentralized (and anonymous)

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

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

The problem remains that you need to bridge between the different
worlds/crypto and this does not exist


Le 21/02/2022 à 15:06, Yosem Companys a écrit :
> 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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