I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars “web3”
I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars “web3”
What we’re seeing here seems more like a restoration of the architecture of pre-web Internet services, like SMTP, NNTP, or IRC.
The protocols are built on top of HTTPS and JSON as a session layer, rather than on lines of ASCII as in those classic protocols … but the architecture looks a lot more like “a bunch of servers under independent administration, that agree to share messages with each other in a network” than like anything with the stink of blockchains on it.
Pretty much yeah.
But what’s wrong with bolckchains? That technology is good too, a bunch of lowly monetization schemes based around it shouldn’t deface the core idea and its possibilities.
I don’t think anything is inherently wrong with blockchain technology, but what it’s been molded into (a purely speculative profit driven ecosystem ) is a waste of it’s potential.
In theory/research papers, it’s not a terrible idea, a few years ago, 3blue1brown on YouTube did a video about how blockchains and cryptocurrencies work at their core, setting the controversy aside. It is a currency that is actually tied to something of immutable valuable, time and logarithmic growth, and would require much more computational power than any singular entity could control over 50% of. Those goals are good goals.
The the irl problems come in on multiple aspects however, there are only so many graphics cards made every year, so people purchasing for mining impacted the entire market of graphics cards spiking prices higher and higher, they run on electricity which is still generated with a lot of fossils fuels, and cards that break because they’re running all the time and are staying hot end often up in landfills, where lots of useful metals are just sitting and rusting away.
The problem with Blockchains is most of the projects associated with them are scams until proven otherwise. It’s kind of like Western Union transfers, money orders, or iTunes gift cards, nothing wrong with the technology behind them, but when the topic comes up, I immediately think of scams.
The notion that any “Web” technology (i.e. user-facing publication, sharing, & discussion) needs to be coupled with a fraught¹ payment system seems like a fundamentally contentious issue, mostly introduced by people who stand to profit from the success of those payment systems regardless of benefit to Web users.
¹ Regulatory issues, cut-and-run scams, and so on. Some blockchain services have turned out to be securities regulation violations. Some have turned out to be outright frauds where the issuers have just run away with “invested” money. In any event, nobody should today be relying on any blockchain service when creating forums or other services intended for the general public.
See ftx
Sorry but I had to do it
@kiriakos @fubo Blockchain is also a cool technology I think but I don’t think it’s so well suited for social networks because any node needs to store all the data so it becomes quite heavy with time. Blockchain is better suited for financial transactions which it does really well in my opinion.
Blockchain is well suited for storing authentication and provenance information. The Fediverse could benefit from blockchain stored instance, user, and community metadata.