Ahh! It says a lot about the state of “Web 3.0” that I forgot that it was even a thing. I was hoping that IEEE Spectrum would cover the actual Web re: the efforts to un-silo it that I reckon will result in more silos with just less volume than before.
What a load of nonsense. The dream isn't "dying", it was never alive: crypto and "Web3" were never about anything other than "number go up" speculation and gambling; anyone who thinks otherwise is either profoundly dumb or in on the con and trying to leave you with the bag.
Very disappointing to see IEEE cover this as though it's an actual thing, would they cover the "dying dream" of Amway knives?
Little known fact: Starlink should be a pure orbital internet backbone to communicate anywhere in the world, right? Because of the laser links between satellites?
Not so much. All the traffic from the US must transit through an earthbound surveillance hub, so the latency advantages are lost. Same with other countries.
(Please anyone correct me if I'm wrong about this, I was gravely disappointed to hear it and would love to hear that I'm wrong)
As goes capital, so goes the web. Capital is becoming more concentrated, and so power over the internet becomes more concentrated. Because at the end of the day, the web serves capital, not individuals. And AI represents the ultimate centralization of information and power.
The failure of Mastodon to break into the mainstream especially in the wake of Twitter/X's debacles is a good example on how decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practice. It turns out that a) people will just join the largest instance/community possible for network effects b) internet discourse is bifuricated enough that preemtively banning instances just in case makes discourse even more bifuricated and c) maintaining and moderating said instances is expensive and time-consuming.
Even though Bluesky did break through to the mainstream with ATProto, it's unclear how ATProto is either a functional or competitive benefit, or if its users even know about it.
The entire point and purpose of mastodon is to not be mainstream social media. Almost everyone there signed up because mainstream social media is so awful. The small and diffuse nature is one of the main benefits. Because it's distributed, there's an extremely niche community server for any subject you might be interested in.
Mastodon captures perfectly what twitter was at the beginning. Just people talking to each other and having fun. Not performative like fishing or whatever. No ads, algorithms, endless feeds, AI slop, or spying and tracking.
It turns out that a lot of people think mainstream social media is objectively abhorrent and want to connect with other humans in a more natural and user-driven way.
Frankly, "mainstream" is a dirty, disgusting concept here. A very large fraction of users would put a significant amout of effort to prevent that from happening. If one server did become "mainstream", as mastodon dot social did, the network treats it as a damage and routes around. Many servers just cut them off because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from the big public servers.
Mastodon won't go mainstream because they don't want to and the system fundamentally cannot operate that way. A few individual servers may go mainstream, but we'd eventually consider it a hard fork. The network would fracture (as it has many times) and the network of small servers will go back to the obscurity we enjoy and cherish.
Case in point: Facebook tried to force their way into the fediverse network through threads or whatever it was called. There was a pretty hard split in the network as nodes that value privacy and safety cut themselves off from a literal hostile invader. Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook. I haven't heard anything about Facebook trying activitypub again, so I guess the quarantine was effective.
I'll post this every time mastodon comes up: to compare mastodon to Twitter, Facebook, bsky, etc. is fallacious in the extreme. Saying that mastodon is "losing" to bluesky is a complete non-sequitur.
Mastodon hasn't lost to these other services because they aren't competing. Nobody on mastodon actually wants to replace Twitter. Mastodon exists explicitly as a rejection of mainstream social media. Calling this "losing" is like saying that a bunch of kids playing basketball in the street are "losing" to pro hockey teams. Not the same game, not the same scale, the only similarity is that they're both playing a sport.
Mastodon doesn't want to compete. That's totally counter to the entire philosophy. Mastodon isn't even remotely playing the same game as twitter and Facebook. It just so happens that mastodon has a text box with limited characters. That's it, that's the only similarity.
Of course a chess club of 10 year olds in Japan isn't going to "win" and displace the entire American baseball league. You'd be laughed down for even suggesting that. And yet, people think that mastodon is "losing".
Mastodon is exactly where it wants to be. The small scale and diffusion are features, not bugs.
Besides that, it's functionally impossible for "mastodon" to go mainstream. To suggest that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what mastodon is, how it works, and how the people involved run it. At absolute most, you could get a few big servers to go 'mainstream'.
When a server gets too big or too popular, the network treats it as damage and routes around. A lot of admins do this purely on principle: huge servers are antithetical to the philosophy and actively bad for the network. The rest block them because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from such servers.
If mastodon went mainstream, the network would fracture (again) and the majority of nodes would re-form the network in the obscurity they enjoy and value.
This is all extremely intentional and deliberate. Mastodon is an explicit rejection of all the things you think it's "losing" at. Mastodon doesn't want to "win", they largely want to be left alone to continue enjoying a small internet with limited connections.
Mastodon has won its own game. It's firmly established itself in a niche, and is not going to move from that niche to chase fads, engagement, metrics, profit. Mastodon wants to be exactly what it is because mainstream social media is a very bad thing
Maybe I should follow you every time you post this. This post is absolutely cope. Mastodon is competing with Twitter. It literally was made due to the creator not liking how Twitter was ran, it used Tweetdeck design, Home feed like Twitter and more. It’s not just some textbox. You clearly don’t know the history of mastodon as I’ve seen others. Or maybe you do and like others you’re attempting to rewrite history. The creator of mastodon himself in a podcast (Dot social)said he wants growth 100/150 million mastodon users. That sure sounds like competing and wanting growth, not staying small
If decentralized is great on paper and not in real life, then the paper is wrong and thus not great. Additionally, if decentralized doesn’t work, please explain the survival of email.
The real challenge is network effects. You can't fight it. If the top dog has a considerable percentage of the population trapped in their platform, then it is already too late.
The only way to get people off the platform is to literally get hired and "trip over the cord" on purpose.. which at this point is likely going to involve very elevated permissions, and a really high chance of jail time.
I think a different type of decentralized web is growing. It's in Hetzner datacenters but it's a lot more "free". We're at an age where besides GPU inference an indie can afford to create cutting edge web services. There's still players that could really harm this new ecosystem (looking at you cloudflare) but the fact that the majors like Google and Facebook tried to kill it and failed to kill it proves something.
The core tenets of web3; privacy, data sovereignty, encryption, open source, open protocols, and peer-to-peer networking are all good. The problem is the movement was never truly about this, and, even to the degree it was, it was taken over by crypto grifters. The ultimate indictment of web3 is that the old school nerds weren't interested, they are the perfect audience, and yet...
Web3 and blockchain are not the only form of decentralization. Email is a decentralized protocol that has stood the test of time.
The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.
Can you really say that email is a decentralised protocol that has stood the test of time? It’s more centralised than the web that you complain is dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. What proportion of mail isn’t sent or received by Google or Microsoft?
For anyone about to disagree with this; you've been lied to.
Many thousands of admins are currently operating independent email servers with zero problem, and have been for decades. Mine is going on 15 years. In practice, you have to actually try pretty hard to misbehave enough for Google and Microsoft to notice and block you. For the vast majority of independent servers, we have no problems at all routing to gmail or outlook.
Reports of the death of decentralized email have been greatly exaggerated. Independent mail servers are alive and well to this day, just as they always have been and (probably) always will.
Yeah... I think that one of the biggest "gotchas" with the web3 crowd is misunderstanding different levels of decentralization. Is it architectural decentralization? Institutional decentralization? Geographical decentralization? etc
The simplest way to answer this is to ask "whose dream?".
We have billions of data points conclusively showing that users don't care about nerd fantasies. No one cares if it's decentralized or not, if it's open source or not, if it's patent-encumbered or not. Maybe there are good philosophical reasons why people should care, but they don't.
So you can keep digging your hole, or you can build products that are simply good and happen to embrace your philosophy without that getting in the way of usability.
In this particular case, the dream the article is talking to was tainted even for the nerd audiences because of the sleaziness of a lot of what was happening under the banner of web 3.0.
In the x86 days p2p filesharing applications unambiguously proved that people preferred a decentralized web, not only were they getting their music for free, they discovered new and hardly known niche artists in genre's they liked (some of the p2p software allowed checking out other music from the same seeder).
What really happens is the transition to ARM platforms (tablets, smartphones) with TrustZone technology, and the resulting lack of FOSS Operating Systems & Software being installed by the user, and a lack of development because average user can't install it either.
Perhaps one could argue that at world population scale people couldn't afford both an x86 system AND a smartphone, and preferred the latter, at the cost of user freedom.
I'm still not a fan of how 'web3' has become a buzzword for crypto. The name seems like it should describe a much more interesting and general concept, not just "it's a service, except you can make money/sell NFTs/whatever".
But I'm not sure I'd write the decentralised web off yet. A lot of the issues it's faced are UX and design problems more than fundamental issues, and the way the world is going makes it seem like a comeback could be inevitable at some point.
After all, a good federated or decentralised system could be resistant to the age gating laws in places like the UK and Australia at the moment, and be a lot more tolerant of content that's critical of those in power than Twitter or Reddit would be (like with criticism of Israel and the goings on in Gaza, criticism of Trump and his administration, protests against authoritarian regimes worldwide, etc).
Large social media services are very willing to bend the knee to those with power (both political and corporate), while a more decentralised service may very well not be, especially if either the people using it are hard to identify or the infrastructure is spread across the world/in places with much more lax laws.
The problem with web3 is that it's a solution in search of a problem. People have decided they should build something around blockchain instead of starting with what they want to build and why
This is the main issue with it yes. Instead of having a compelling user- and/or howter-centric vision of how Web 3.0 could look and why, it was basically just like: like web but with blockchain and yet somehow more centralized and with changes, because we want to make a new thing.
That isn't how you elegantly solve problems and get people to use your solutions.
To me "Web3" frequently feels more centralized than just the regular web.
I love that on the regular old internet I can stand up different websites, host them myself, and have anyone with a web connection be able to pull it up on their computer and see whatever it is I'm putting out there. There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do.
That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I can put whatever I want, you can put whatever you want, anyone can access it. Buying into some more distributed web3 type hosting feels more centralized at least in the way that I personally feel. I have to buy into a specific blockchain or platform, host in a specific way, hope that it gets picked up by other distributors, deal with hashing and immutability, etc. Maybe it's a difference in understanding of the word decentralized, or a different emphasis on certain parts of the definition.
Not advocating for either, but I believe the term is intended to contrast with Web 2.0, which was services like YouTube and Facebook, that centralized content hosting and delivery away from people running their own web sites and putting it into corporate services that offered individual user profiles instead. Web 3.0 was intended to provide a similar level of convenience and not require all people to self-host in order to be producers as well as consumers, but without corporate entities having ultimate veto power over what can and can't be hosted and delivered.
The short version of that is it's not as decentralized as Web 1.0, what you describe, but it's not as centralized as Web 2.0.
> There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do.
This actually related to a fundamental lack of control.
Lots of tech we buy now promises "smart" but because you need to get to it from your phone, some corporation "needs" to "help" connect your device and your phone.
for example - you want a "smart" thermostat. To connect to it from anywhere from your phone to change the temperature, the thermostat contacts the mannufacturer. Then your phone has to talk to them as an intermediary to contact your thermostat.
Conveniently, they can collect data from your thermostat, or your house, or your phone, maintain a "customer relationship" or even charge you for the "service".
if things were properly decentralized, your phone could just contact your "smart" stuff and nobody else would need to be involved.
meh. "cryptographer" usually means someone who practices "cryptography," [or "cryptology" if you live near Baltimore] not someone who participates in "cryptocurrency" transactions.
48 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 58.4 ms ] threadVery disappointing to see IEEE cover this as though it's an actual thing, would they cover the "dying dream" of Amway knives?
Where are the dreamers?
Back in the day tech nerds, coders, and hackers were far more vocal in favor of open standards and decentralized web.
Which areas support community‑owned or open‑access networks that enable multi‑ISP competition and affordable symmetric service (aka "true internet")?
Not so much. All the traffic from the US must transit through an earthbound surveillance hub, so the latency advantages are lost. Same with other countries.
(Please anyone correct me if I'm wrong about this, I was gravely disappointed to hear it and would love to hear that I'm wrong)
Sure, mistakes happen, but it's hard to take an article seriously when such fundamentals are messed up 8 words into the article...
They have decentralised storage (Arweave), decentralized HTTP gateways (ar.io), and decentralised name service (ArNS).
Even though Bluesky did break through to the mainstream with ATProto, it's unclear how ATProto is either a functional or competitive benefit, or if its users even know about it.
Mastodon captures perfectly what twitter was at the beginning. Just people talking to each other and having fun. Not performative like fishing or whatever. No ads, algorithms, endless feeds, AI slop, or spying and tracking.
It turns out that a lot of people think mainstream social media is objectively abhorrent and want to connect with other humans in a more natural and user-driven way.
Frankly, "mainstream" is a dirty, disgusting concept here. A very large fraction of users would put a significant amout of effort to prevent that from happening. If one server did become "mainstream", as mastodon dot social did, the network treats it as a damage and routes around. Many servers just cut them off because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from the big public servers.
Mastodon won't go mainstream because they don't want to and the system fundamentally cannot operate that way. A few individual servers may go mainstream, but we'd eventually consider it a hard fork. The network would fracture (as it has many times) and the network of small servers will go back to the obscurity we enjoy and cherish.
Case in point: Facebook tried to force their way into the fediverse network through threads or whatever it was called. There was a pretty hard split in the network as nodes that value privacy and safety cut themselves off from a literal hostile invader. Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook. I haven't heard anything about Facebook trying activitypub again, so I guess the quarantine was effective.
Mastodon hasn't lost to these other services because they aren't competing. Nobody on mastodon actually wants to replace Twitter. Mastodon exists explicitly as a rejection of mainstream social media. Calling this "losing" is like saying that a bunch of kids playing basketball in the street are "losing" to pro hockey teams. Not the same game, not the same scale, the only similarity is that they're both playing a sport.
Mastodon doesn't want to compete. That's totally counter to the entire philosophy. Mastodon isn't even remotely playing the same game as twitter and Facebook. It just so happens that mastodon has a text box with limited characters. That's it, that's the only similarity.
Of course a chess club of 10 year olds in Japan isn't going to "win" and displace the entire American baseball league. You'd be laughed down for even suggesting that. And yet, people think that mastodon is "losing".
Mastodon is exactly where it wants to be. The small scale and diffusion are features, not bugs.
Besides that, it's functionally impossible for "mastodon" to go mainstream. To suggest that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what mastodon is, how it works, and how the people involved run it. At absolute most, you could get a few big servers to go 'mainstream'.
When a server gets too big or too popular, the network treats it as damage and routes around. A lot of admins do this purely on principle: huge servers are antithetical to the philosophy and actively bad for the network. The rest block them because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from such servers.
If mastodon went mainstream, the network would fracture (again) and the majority of nodes would re-form the network in the obscurity they enjoy and value.
This is all extremely intentional and deliberate. Mastodon is an explicit rejection of all the things you think it's "losing" at. Mastodon doesn't want to "win", they largely want to be left alone to continue enjoying a small internet with limited connections.
Mastodon has won its own game. It's firmly established itself in a niche, and is not going to move from that niche to chase fads, engagement, metrics, profit. Mastodon wants to be exactly what it is because mainstream social media is a very bad thing
This claim is so vague it's meaningless. I could just as well argue that torrents are the purest example of decentralisation, and work amazing.
The only way to get people off the platform is to literally get hired and "trip over the cord" on purpose.. which at this point is likely going to involve very elevated permissions, and a really high chance of jail time.
The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.
Many thousands of admins are currently operating independent email servers with zero problem, and have been for decades. Mine is going on 15 years. In practice, you have to actually try pretty hard to misbehave enough for Google and Microsoft to notice and block you. For the vast majority of independent servers, we have no problems at all routing to gmail or outlook.
Reports of the death of decentralized email have been greatly exaggerated. Independent mail servers are alive and well to this day, just as they always have been and (probably) always will.
We have billions of data points conclusively showing that users don't care about nerd fantasies. No one cares if it's decentralized or not, if it's open source or not, if it's patent-encumbered or not. Maybe there are good philosophical reasons why people should care, but they don't.
So you can keep digging your hole, or you can build products that are simply good and happen to embrace your philosophy without that getting in the way of usability.
In this particular case, the dream the article is talking to was tainted even for the nerd audiences because of the sleaziness of a lot of what was happening under the banner of web 3.0.
In the x86 days p2p filesharing applications unambiguously proved that people preferred a decentralized web, not only were they getting their music for free, they discovered new and hardly known niche artists in genre's they liked (some of the p2p software allowed checking out other music from the same seeder).
What really happens is the transition to ARM platforms (tablets, smartphones) with TrustZone technology, and the resulting lack of FOSS Operating Systems & Software being installed by the user, and a lack of development because average user can't install it either.
Perhaps one could argue that at world population scale people couldn't afford both an x86 system AND a smartphone, and preferred the latter, at the cost of user freedom.
But I'm not sure I'd write the decentralised web off yet. A lot of the issues it's faced are UX and design problems more than fundamental issues, and the way the world is going makes it seem like a comeback could be inevitable at some point.
After all, a good federated or decentralised system could be resistant to the age gating laws in places like the UK and Australia at the moment, and be a lot more tolerant of content that's critical of those in power than Twitter or Reddit would be (like with criticism of Israel and the goings on in Gaza, criticism of Trump and his administration, protests against authoritarian regimes worldwide, etc).
Large social media services are very willing to bend the knee to those with power (both political and corporate), while a more decentralised service may very well not be, especially if either the people using it are hard to identify or the infrastructure is spread across the world/in places with much more lax laws.
That isn't how you elegantly solve problems and get people to use your solutions.
I love that on the regular old internet I can stand up different websites, host them myself, and have anyone with a web connection be able to pull it up on their computer and see whatever it is I'm putting out there. There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do.
That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I can put whatever I want, you can put whatever you want, anyone can access it. Buying into some more distributed web3 type hosting feels more centralized at least in the way that I personally feel. I have to buy into a specific blockchain or platform, host in a specific way, hope that it gets picked up by other distributors, deal with hashing and immutability, etc. Maybe it's a difference in understanding of the word decentralized, or a different emphasis on certain parts of the definition.
I mean that is how the internet used to work.
>I can put whatever I want.
Then I make a series of false reports and copyright claims and your ISP boots you.
>anyone can access it.
Anyone can DDOS it, forcing you behind a centralized system like cloudflare.
The internet has turned into a dark forest. Standing out and saying something controversial will ensure something shows up to eat you.
The short version of that is it's not as decentralized as Web 1.0, what you describe, but it's not as centralized as Web 2.0.
This actually related to a fundamental lack of control.
Lots of tech we buy now promises "smart" but because you need to get to it from your phone, some corporation "needs" to "help" connect your device and your phone.
for example - you want a "smart" thermostat. To connect to it from anywhere from your phone to change the temperature, the thermostat contacts the mannufacturer. Then your phone has to talk to them as an intermediary to contact your thermostat.
Conveniently, they can collect data from your thermostat, or your house, or your phone, maintain a "customer relationship" or even charge you for the "service".
if things were properly decentralized, your phone could just contact your "smart" stuff and nobody else would need to be involved.
I'm 100% OK with "Web3" dying a slow death. Garbage in, garbage out.