web3 is coming.

But what kind of web is it? How is it distinct from Web 2.0?

[ronin]

Here's Moxie Marlinspike (formerly of Signal) talking about first impressions of web3:

[moxie.org...]

I liked one of Moxie's observations regarding Web 2.0:

A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.

And more reflections on web3 from Chris Dixon:

[future.a16z.com...]

[ronin]

For me, the real key is not how it's done, but what can be done with it.

Yes, I hear you. I'm keen to see examples of what we can do with web3 that we couldn't do with Web 2.0.

Mu hunch is that web3 is sufficiently different in architecture and philosophy and has been building up for long enough that we may well see early examples of this in a year or two.

The World Wide Web (ie. Web 1.0) had guestbooks and forums.

But it lacked both the technology and the culture to enable:

- google maps
- myspace
- gmail
- twitter

I suspect the cultural shift was as important as the technological.

GMail was a radical step forward from Hotmail / Yahoo! Mail and Google Maps was a radical step forward from MultiMap etc. - but that's because they (separately) took advantage of XMLHttpRequest to create early implementations of an loading-from-the-server-without-refreshing-the-page approach which (soon after) became known as AJAX. That's a technical pillar we didn't see in the WWW.

But MySpace and, later, Twitter were radical steps forward from web-based forums, not because they did anything technologically unprecedented, but, chiefly, because they simultaneously harnessed and encouraged a growing culture of mass web participation which simply didn't exist at that scale on the for-hobbyists WWW.

Returning to the present, it's easy to see the technological differences between a centralised Web 2.0 based on mega-platforms and a decentralised, distributed web3, but the latter won't begin to eclipse the former until a culture emerges of wanting to have all the tools, social connections, community participation, educational and information resources etc. without gigantic tech-behemoths sitting on all the data and never willingly forgetting anything or surrendering anything.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Well keep one thing in mind, engine. The elephant not discussed in this thread is where AI fits in.

In the time it took me to craft this response AI wrote untold numbers of articles that few could notice were not written by a human.

AI is behind a lot of the new stuff. Either directly, or being used in the creation process.

Decisions humans are making are now often based on predictive AI. The world is in a big rush to get there but it doesn't know where it's going. Instead of using caution and NOT doing things that can't be undone you'll notice that the opposite is happening.

If you are purely a content creator it's a good time to see how you could reinvent yourself if websites become obsolete. [youtube.com...]

[ronin]

This year has felt like an evolution for web3.

Towards the start of this thread, at the beginning of this year, I wrote:

Marlinspike is right to consider that, for very many people, the notion of safeguarding information and communication from being privately ringfenced / privately captured has absolutely zero resonance.

and Tangor echoed that with:

The average user has no concept of any of this. All they want is everything, and they want it now.

Keep the public satisfied (even if they don't know how it all works) and things will remain the same, regardless of "delivery"...

Eleven months later, those reflections feel... less apposite than they were back in January.

Mastodon, enabled by the IndieWeb and part of the Fediverse since 2016 - and, yes, my position is that the Fediverse and open social protocols such as those authored by the IndieWeb are genuine pillars of web3, even if the financial-token-focused cohort of eth-web3 crypto-bros are unaware of / largely disinterested in them - has seen a huge uptick over the last three weeks.

In November 2022, Mastodon's userbase increased something like 500%.

(I wonder what could have prompted that?)

Consequently, there has been a flurry of renewed positive interest in Mastodon in the blogosphere, even though, throughout the last couple of years, the federated platform has been repeatedly written off in some corners.

One blogger, Max Böck, wrote on Nov 12th:

I think we’re at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.

Source: [mxb.dev...]

Böck seems to be suggesting that we may be at the eve of a significant turn of the tide - even though as recently as the start of this year, many (myself and Tangor included) doubted that with the Web 2.0 platforms of the 2010s so well-established and so (seemingly) essential to the web landscape, caring about privacy and data-ownership and algorithms and the agenda and modus operandi of any platform where Web 2.0 activity takes place would likely never manifest itself beyond a fairly obscure minority concern.

I first became aware of Mastodon, not in 2016, when it launched and achieved its first wave of interest, but several years later, in 2019, after discovering the IndieWeb and reading about the philosophy of Posse there (see: [indieweb.org...]

In the last three years, I've considered setting up a Mastodon account on several occasions but never been sufficiently motivated.

On Monday evening, I set up a Mastodon account. It was easy and it took less than four minutes.

What motivated me in the end was partly referencing the Fediverse recently in this thread (and thinking it was high time I had some direct experience of it) but mostly seeing so many people on Twitter talking about the platform and talking about moving across there.

(N.B. I often say that I "left" Twitter in 2016. That's mostly true but it's not literally true in the sense that I turned my back on Twitter, never to dip into it ever again. It's true in the sense that I deleted the app on my mobile and for several years completely gave up both posting and participating in to-and-fros on the platform. On the three occasions I've drifted back - once towards the end of 2018, once towards the end of 2021 and in the last month, I've certainly never been the Twitter participant that I was between 2009-16.)

It really does feel like there something of an exodus going on right now from Twitter to Mastodon.

But this is especially significant to my mind since, in this instance, the network effect isn't drawing people over from one Web 2.0 platform to another (like MySpace to Facebook) but from a Web 2.0 platform to a web3 platform.

Musk as the accidental Moses of web3. Now there's a thought.

[ronin]

This piece by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic (Nov 10th) doesn't mention web3:

The Age of Social Media Is Ending (It never should have begun.)
[theatlantic.com...]

Nor does this piece by Kate Lindsay, also in The Atlantic (Nov 30th):

Instagram Is Over
[theatlantic.com...]

But together, they present a pretty articulate summary of how:

- in the early 2000s, as the web evolved from the World Wide Web into Web 2.0, Social Networking emerged

- in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Web 2.0 continued to mature and what had been Social Networking evolved into Social Media

- by the mid-2010s, Web 2.0 was everywhere and, ever since then, Social Media has looked increasingly like Performance Media

Today, people refer to all of these services and more as “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist. Many of these sites framed themselves as a part of a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content” - Ian Bogost

The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed. - Ian Bogost

Instagram may not be on its deathbed, but its transformation from cool to cringe is a sea change in the social-media universe. The platform was perhaps the most significant among an old generation of popular apps that embodied the original purpose of social media: to connect online with friends and family. Its decline is about not just a loss of relevance, but a capitulation to a new era of “performance” media, in which we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do. - Kate Lindsay

Perhaps, as the decentralised, stakeholder-aware web3 spreads and (eventually) achieves mainstream adoption, what was once Social Networking... Social Media... Performance Media will metamorphose again into something, subtly different, which reflects the newer forms of architecture it rests on... something like Collaborative Interaction (?)

None of this focus on social media (or the fediverse for that matter) is to suggest that web3 will somehow be dominated or defined by whatever manifestation of social media sprouts from it; I think web 3 as a philosophical reimagining of data architecture goes way beyond virtual social interaction, just as it goes way beyond cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Indeed, I'd suggest that, if anything, web3 will be less defined by its Social Media than Web 2.0 was by its.

I'm even tempted to suggest that one of the reasons that web3's manifestation of social media will lose its ability to define very much is because platform-less, protocol-based collaboration / sharing etc. will become so ubiquitous on web3 as to become essentially invisible - as ubiquitous and invisible as JavaScript is on Web 2.0.

[ronin]

One significant change that a renewed culture of decentralisation across the web will bring is decentralised moderation.

I suppose that - never-ending edit wars notwithstanding - Wikipedia is an absolute pioneer in this field and has shown that most of the time decentralised moderation can produce high quality results.

I've seen some of this already on Mastodon where both administrators of instances and individual users are able to actively contribute to moderating data flows across the federated network.

Here's an article from MIT about an experiment which looked into decentralised moderation in much more detail:

[news.mit.edu...]

researchers sought to create a platform that gives users the ability to provide and view structured accuracy assessments on posts, indicate others they trust to assess posts, and use filters to control the content displayed in their feed. Ultimately, the researchers’ goal is to make it easier for users to help each other assess misinformation on social media, which reduces the workload for everyone.

the researchers built a Facebook-like prototype platform, called Trustnet. In Trustnet, users post and share actual, full news articles and can follow one another to see content others post. But before a user can post any content in Trustnet, they must rate that content as accurate or inaccurate, or inquire about its veracity, which will be visible to others.

“The reason people share misinformation is usually not because they don’t know what is true and what is false. Rather, at the time of sharing, their attention is misdirected to other things. If you ask them to assess the content before sharing it, it helps them to be more discerning,” she says.

“Understanding how to combat misinformation is one of the most important issues for our democracy at present. We have largely failed at finding technical solutions at scale. This project offers a new and innovative approach to this critical problem that shows considerable promise,” says Mark Ackerman, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan School of Information, who was not involved with this research.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I don't think you can get much traffic for newly published purely informational pages anymore. Google has no use for them, AI already has all the information.

You need to publish news, to entertain, or to sell something, to be interesting to Google moving forward.

Site types doing well in Google Discover will continue to do well... but knowledge, it's assimilated now. Move on.

Ask chatGPT to tell you about your topic of expertise. If it can tell you about it, soon AI will tell others and not need your site. Hopefully your AI struggles with your topic a little longer.

Silly Google, there's not much use for a search engine that doesn't take visitors to new sites, is there. Perhaps another engine can focus on showing people websites instead of proudly telling people stuff taken from them, when the time comes.

[ronin]

there's not much use for a search engine that doesn't take visitors to new sites

Indeed, but... Google resolved to be a knowledge engine, rather than a search engine rather a long time ago - back in 2012 or before.

Perhaps another engine can focus on showing people websites

Yes. Let's hope so. A search engine which acts as a discovery vector for new sites would be long overdue.

newly published purely informational pages [...] AI already has all the information

That raises something I'd not considered before which may be very relevant to the future evolution of web3. It's this:

To find written information on the early World Wide Web, you might try a directory or an early search engine and you might be lucky or not. Maybe you couldn't find the info you were looking for. Maybe it wasn't even published online anywhere to be found.

Search engines evolved and before Google, Altavista certainly looked better than much of the competition. From 2000 onwards, Google quickly and dramatically established itself as one of the major ways to look up information. And on Google's heels - but with an entirely different approach - Wikipedia did too.

For all of Web 2.0 Google and Wikipedia have been two primary ways to look up written information on the web. (Although there are others - my first destination for reading up about any standard browser technology is often MDN).

But since web3 is only just beginning to attract some mainstream use now in late 2022 (I appreciate some technologies which make up web3 have attracted mainstream attention for a long time in the press, but there's a difference between mainstream attention and mainstream use), it all coincides rather neatly with AI Language Models also approaching a level of utility where they can present themselves as information-look-up tools.

So, there's a possible near-future, in which information-querying is significantly dominated by non-proprietary AI (ie. whatever forms of AI are a) open source and b) capable enough to have reliably and accurate information look-up utility) and in the public consciousness that becomes one of the signature hallmarks of web3, alongside re-assertion of ownership of personal information, cryptography-based breadcrumb trails and accountability, federated social media, digital assets set free from centralized silos, the resurgence of platform-independent protocols over platforms, the ascendancy of FOSS (you never know) etc.