[liberationtech] Web3 is BS

[Richard Brooks]

Cloudflare, CAPCHA's, and possibly web 1.0 are the
real dystopian technologies. I, for one, would be
much happier if they never existed.

On 2/21/22 11:48, Greg wrote:
> Blockchains solve some problems that existing tech doesn’t solve, and 
> HTTPS + DNS insecurity is one of them.
> 
> Video explaining how and why: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLDlEgzZB7eyJ0_Y2U2Y3Vv5kjj7DmeBIM&v=u1IIK8e3A6Q 
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLDlEgzZB7eyJ0_Y2U2Y3Vv5kjj7DmeBIM&v=u1IIK8e3A6Q>
> 
> It’s a shame that so little progress on this has been made, and that 
> Brave, the only browser to do ENS resolution, chose to send it by 
> default through CloudFlare, defeating the entire point of blockchain 
> resolution.
> 
> Cheers,
> Greg
> 
>> On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:02 AM, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes 
>> <alps6085 at gmail.com <mailto:alps6085 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> 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 <mailto:alps at acm.org>>
>> +1 (817) 754-0431
>>
>>> On Feb 21, 2022, at 9:07 AM, Richard Brooks <rrb at g.clemson.edu 
>>> <mailto: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> <mailto: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> <mailto: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> 
>>>>> <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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