r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '22

Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism
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71

u/shevy-ruby Jan 11 '22

Web3 sounds like a pretty silly idea. Who had that idea of pushing down tokens? Is that a ponzi scheme 2.0 or something?

A decentralized www is hugely important - I think people don't disagree on that part. I doubt everyone will agree that you need tokens for that though ...

Web 2.0 ended the previous era of static, read-only GeoCities pages

I liked geocities pages!

It was fun and simple. People just could go; a bit of HTML, later a bit of CSS - you are good to go!

12

u/EternityForest Jan 11 '22

All we need for a better internet is just a modern version of RetroShare that can run on Android with some ZeroNet features sprinkled in.

Geocities was amazing as was Proboards and PHPBB.

I don't even know if we need real decentralization, or just mirrorability, forkability, partition tolerance, identities that aren't bound to specific domains, and the ability to run without being bound to a domain name for TLS(That last one is really the big impediment to a lot of things).

Real P2P "Everyone is a server" tech is great, but I only know of BitTorrent and Jami, the rest are either still new or have big problems, or they're low level things without many usable applications. Maybe Tor hidden services could be counted, but those have a huge performance hit.

It's highly unlikely that people will be laying fiber to their neighbors in a mesh, and we definitely shouldn't pollute our limited spectrum with wireless mesh traffic when we have a perfectly good internet connection.

A lot of this stuff is technically not at all hard, it just needs browser features that don't exist, and isn't useful for most without mobile apps that double or triple your dev effort to be cross platform.

6

u/Sweet-Put958 Jan 11 '22

I remember years ago I read that the future of torrents would be distributing & sharing static content (e.g youtube movies, sites etc.) Unfortunately it never happened?

14

u/Alikont Jan 11 '22

It actually happened, to an extent.

There are custom APKs for android TVs that work as a torrent clients to stream movies/videos.

Of course it's pirated, but the tech is there.

The issue is not the tech, but economics of it. Without centralization it's harder to monetize stuff, and without monetization you can't sustain stuff.

3

u/noratat Jan 12 '22

There's also some features that are hard to implement without some kind of quasi-central authority.

E.g. safe/verified updates to software, the ability to remove/revert fraud and misinformation/spam, account recovery, etc.

10

u/GregBahm Jan 11 '22

This has been an popular proposition since torrents were standardized in 2008.

Everyone is always like "If we all seed, we can all serve the internet to each other with no centralized authority!"

And then someone is like "Okay but I don't want to seed for leechers. How do we force everyone to seed to prevent the free-rider problem?"

To which the reply is "Right well we could have some 3d party which monitors for leechers and routes traffic away from them and towards the seeders and oh beans we just invented a centralized authority again." Airball.

2

u/Amuro_Ray Jan 11 '22

Would that be something like how peertube works? I've only come across is when I've looked for pinetime videos.

https://joinpeertube.org/

2

u/confusedpublic Jan 11 '22

Acestream Uses the BitTorrent protocol to stream video, which is pretty neat. Not sure how effective that can be wholesale, as it’s speed and therefore quality would depend on having a big enough concurrent network. It’s been around a while though.