[liberationtech] Web3 is BS

Mon Feb 21 17:02:44 CET 2022

I thinks it’s not “to give up” but rather to keep it in the tech realm and not to expect it’s a “silver bullet!”

Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Yakoke,

Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
<alps at acm.org>
+1 (817) 754-0431

> On Feb 21, 2022, at 9:07 AM, Richard Brooks <rrb at g.clemson.edu> wrote:
> 
> So. Your suggestion is give up?
> 
> I find web3 has some interesting aspects. I do not think
> it has found the right applications yet.
> 
> Will it kill capitalism or reform social media, no? I do
> think it has potential to do more than other things evolving
> right now.
> 
> On 2/21/22 09:36, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes wrote:
>> Right On.
>> It’s a political issue. Technology just obfuscates the whole thing, the mirage of progress. Techie Messianism.
>> Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Yakoke,
>> Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
>> <alps at acm.org <mailto:alps at acm.org>>
>> +1 (817) 754-0431
>> WACHÍČIŠ’AKE | BLIHEIC'YA YO
>>> On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com <mailto:ycompanys at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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 <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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> 
> 
> -- 
> R. R. Brooks
> Professor
> (He/Him/His)
> College of Engineering Computing and Applied Science
> https://www.clemson.edu/cecas
> Clemson University
> 
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