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
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
+1 (817) 754-0431
WACHÍČIŠ’AKE | BLIHEIC'YA YO
On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Yosem Companys <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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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