Nate Cull: "I am in favour of the term "Web4" to describe sma…&qu...

I am in favour of the term "Web4" to describe small, local, personal, private, efficient, cryptography-based decentralisation that is not linked to cryptocurrency, far right money-laundering, slow non-parallel non-deleteable global public ledgers, proof-of-e-waste, proof-of-plutocracy or monetized in any other way.

Web 0: Literally Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT at CERN.

Web 1: I'm using NCSA Mosaic to download NASA pictures of Mars, whoa!

Web 2.0: TV (by Disney Netflix+) with a Buy Button (which is patented by Jeff Bezos, who also owns you)

Web3: The one by David Fincher where everyone is killed off at the start, it's set in a prison colony, Sigourney Weaver shaves her head and it's a giant scam machine built by the same literal fascists who tried to do a coup. Just skip it.

Web4: Maybe we get this one right?

I admit that I am a huge part of The Problem because I use both Netflix and Disney+,

but at least I haven't yet invested in Springtime For Hitlercoins

@natecull In a capitalist society everyone is a capitalist, whether they want to be or not. It's unavoidable.

@natecull i suggested web2.5 but it doesnt work as a hashtag. But does web4 even need hashtags? Maybe there should be a mastodon poll about web-X but does the next web even need polls?

In other words, are we looking for an iteration, enhancement or an altogether alternative branch?

@openrisk

An altogether alternative branch.

Not HTTP based. Not client-server. Radically peer-to-peer, radically offline and syncing only when spotty local networking or sneakernet (or even a website as a sync conduit, if we must) is present.

But not Ethereum based either, because, ewww.

And sadly even Scuttlebutt or Gemini doesn't quite hit the spot for me.

@aral @openrisk

Append-only-log kills it for me, sorry.

I neither need nor want that. I want the right to quietly forget my mistakes (others are welcome to trawl them up IF they want to pay for storing them). What I need and want is to be able to randomly generate my own private key, sign the current hash and version number of my "home page' with that, then sync my homepage hash and blocks of the data making up that page with others somehow.

How storage is paid for is a problem I guess.

@aral @natecull the weaving of the (Mythos) of the individual and the (soil) of community. The second is the bases of what makes us human, the first the sugar of what makes 20th century life interesting.

Food for thought, is tech sugar or soil?

#climatechaos and social disintegration is feed by our sugar addiction and the barrion errosion of our soil. On balance we need less sacarin and more composting.

@natecull

A "commons" architecture and "radically offline" could coexist. The digital realm intertwines in so many ways with our lives, there will probably be various patterns operating at the same time.

Having resilient, self-sovereign building blocks is somehow the basis, but i would expect the most enriching setup to be "ubuntu", deriving meaning through others

@aral

@openrisk @aral

I think so. I remember the BBS era, where both sharing and subscriptions coexisted, but we had more fun on the boards we didn't have to pay for.

I'd like a world where we didn't need either web hosts or mandatory HTTPS certificate granting authorities inserting themselves into our business. That's probably impossible since Google controls the browsers and Wants TLS Everywhere, but, if all our posts were already signed/encrypted end to end, why would we need TLS as well?

@natecull @openrisk @aral TLS was a hurried solution devised in "a series of 4am decisions" by Netscape in the 1990s. It's something that the web got stuck on because of browser monopolies. Untrusted certificate authorities should not be part of any new web design.

@bob @openrisk @aral

I get that registering human-readable names and making introductions to cryptographic identities is a tricky problem, but yeah, I think both DNS and PKI are very suboptimal solutions now. I figure given elliptic curve ciphers, even QR codes ought to be a solution to 'how do I find your name/number" by now.

How blocks can be stored by nodes is another problem. Some kind of "pay your way by hosting content" kind of thing maybe? But I don't wanna host child porn.

@bob @openrisk @aral

(And that's not a trivial observation; Freenet, the original distributed hash table network, was kinda built on the concept of "you will host child porn and that's part of the deal, because how else do we make search efficient" and I was, nope, not gonna do that, find another way. And I'm not sure that problem has been solved yet).

@natecull @bob @openrisk @aral That's also a problem with many current federated systems. I follow the principle that you should be in control of what you're self-hosting. If you're hosting other people's data (eg. backups or fediverse posts) then it should be by personal agreement. Data whose content or origin you're unaware of shouldn't be "conveyed" by your personal server, because if it is then this creates big legal liabilities.

@natecull so, the OG Web, apart from the cryptography perhaps.

@FiXato @natecull I looked it up, and of course other people have already decided what Web 4.0 is. Apparently it's IOT and AI, leading to 5.0 being brain implants and the Singularity. Presumably all floating over the corporate dragnets of 2.0 and the Blockchain oilspill of 3.0.

Small Web is good, though. Bad people usually don't want to be small.

@y6nH @FiXato

But I'm kinda terrified of plugging brain implants into Internets of Things which are plugged into Amazon's AI which is running Log4J

there might be a Singularity at the end of that stack but I think it'll be the kind with tentacles

@natecull is this like star trek movie numbers? Every other internet is a disaster?