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"
Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.
Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content.
Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they're alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.
Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity's collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn't rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.
If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can't force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can't buy out the means of production.
Honestly I'm not even sure what the term web3 means but Lemmy does feel... less commercial, which is really refreshing! And I'm noticing alot less criticizism which is excellent. I'm certainly going to be staying here and trying to help it grow in a positive and mindful way.
I get what others are saying about it feeling like how the internet used to be... I'm really excited to see where Lemmy goes. Hopefully it doesn't just end up the way its predecessors have gone! Feels like I'm part of a movement to fight the oppression!! Power to the people woo!
It's pretty dope. Been following the fediverse for a while, but I've never used twitter so mastodon felt kinda useless to me. I've never used facebook, so friendica felt kinda useless to me.
Anonymous strangers posting links and having discussions? Now that's more my jam.
It's nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn't outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it's not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there's no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.
Web 1.0, users form communities on bulletin boards, internet forums and newsgroups. It's the birth of
Web 2.0, investors and advertisers see potential in large user bases. This leads to social media and mobile apps as fronts for tracking users and big data collection. Smart home and wearables become a plot to bring tracking hardware into your life even when you aren't actively engaging on the internet. The tech billionaire is born at the cost of the privacy and wallet of the user.
Web 3.0, a federated Web 1.0 where users take back control of the internet. Tech billionaires live in homeless shelters and eat ramen noodles.
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.
This is what reddit felt like ten years ago ... now it's just a matter of growing the community and making it bigger and better.
I felt bad leaving my old communities at reddit ... but in a funny way, I feel like I've stepped into a time warp and jumped back ten years ... now I'm looking forward to the next ten on Lemmy and Mastadon
Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet's evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a "new beginning" for communities on the internet.
It's so exciting to have another paradigm shift afoot. I feel a little regretful (not sure that's the right word here) that I wasn't born early enough to grow up with the rise of internet forums. It's not all bad because I also would not grown up during this great time of queer development, but it would've been neat. So now I get to live through and experience a similar time with web3 type stuff. The whole concept makes my little CS heart smile.
I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.
With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.
I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.
Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!
web3 was always a cryptocurrency scam and was doomed to fail. Federation is more a return to the early web with a way to link everything together to compete and get similar services to megacorps while distributing costs.
Good call. To me, Fediverse feels akin to the earlier days of the web. Fresh, new, relatively unspoiled. Nobody knows exactly wtf is going on, but the possibilities seem vast.
this feels like what Web 2.0 should have been: the advanced version of user-run platforms with decentralization added in, rather than the adternet and enshittification trap venture capital backed platforms that lure people in and then downgrade quality of life.
This is pretty much the alternate timeline of Reddit. Community driven link aggregators do replace forums, but they stay decentralized and not corporate run
This is it 100%. I don’t think there is a major platform that does not already exist in the fediverse. I’m sure there is something, but even Instagram and YouTube can be replaced… well the YouTube one is hard due to the bandwidth and storage needed. But the tech is out there.
I think at some point this web3 will take over. Things like YouTube, will eventually come, but we need a lot of cost reduction in current tech to be able to do that.
With the quick death of Twitter and the even quicker death of Reddit, we as a community are speedrunning the transition to federated social media. We only need good mobile UX and keeping the growth, and we're set.
It feels like a post-apocalypse right now, and I am not sure how to feel about it.
Interested to see this develop. It's my first experience with a federated social infrastructure and feels like something I need to work towards. Rewarding in a way.
The web3 that can be named is not the true web3, or something like that.
The "branded" Web3 was about "how do we create the third Web BUBBLE" more than "how do we create the third Web experience." The people who missed buying AOL shares in 1996 or Amazon in 2002 wanted their chance to get in on speculation, except without the utility of an actual service or product underneath the hype.
It really does feel a bit like the early days, for me. Bunch of strangers talking to each other in, generally, good faith. 'Course there were also tons of pop-ups, the banner would've taken an hour to download at that resolution... I like this more. lol
It certainly feels nostalgic to me being on here. I miss the days of webrings and message boards and just crawling ever forward into unknown new places. I was a kid then though, so I thought it was just me becoming wiser/more tech-savvy. Now I realize how freaky all the consolidation is. Even some video game modding communities now have more of a presence on reddit than anywhere else. It's convenient but so weird.
I agree with u/Pelicanen that it feels like the uncertain times of the early internet where things were hosted by individuals and their really small websites. I don't know to what extent it will catch on (although Discord is huge with milleninals/Gen Z, no?) but it's interesting to imagine a world where the internet is primarily large consumer/business-facing websites and then highly decentralized communities.
The crypto side of web3 definitely felt way more "consumerist minded" with the way wallets were able to connect to multiple websites(exchanges) in order to "buy" things(alt/shitcoins). But federated social media feels like a much better use of decentralization so far.
I'm enjoying the lemmy.world experience, and I believe decentralised social networking could be the future. I am a refugee from Reddit and hopeful there is hope for a open, community focused platform.
As for this platform, I am apprehensive about somebody running the server I have my account with having the power to remove my account and my posts, but I guess this is true of any network in existence.
My concern in the long run is who pays for the hardware and energy costs even if it is federated. Without some kind of reliable funding model who will pay the bills?
Hopeful for many enjoyable encounters in the Fediverse.
Yeah I feel the same too.
And I think decentralization is the only way to web3.
Distributed networks are very very complex to make. But decentralized networks have the simplicity and features of centralized networks with the addition of freedom that distributed networks give.
I've been arguing for more decentralization for a long time now and have been shifting as much of my usage to self hosted services as possible over the past few years. I'm glad to see others picking up the cause. <3
yeah, i love this new paradigm. i don't understand it but i hope it'll lead to a better experience with cool usability features later on. hopefully a good buffer against evil & suits & etc
i love how post URLs have numbers now. you can get dubs and trips!
I mean I definitely agree that this feels great, but decentralization and federation is what pure Bitcoin and crypto are all about. In many ways this community reminds me of the good vibes and great minds the early days of cryptocurrency discovery encouraged. This predated some of the corruption, VCs, and crypto bros that came around in 2013 during the first boom.
I still think that early soul of empowerment and community is there in Bitcoin itself but you gotta dig a little deeper to find it. I expect Lemmy will also “commercialize” to some extent in coming years, but it’ll always be better than Reddit and other centralized platforms that want to feature gate and censor unfairly.
How do you use mastodon or even Twitter for that matter? I've been active on Reddit for a decade plus, but any time I try to tweet or toot it just goes nowhere to no one and I quickly lose interest. How do you get started with this stuff?
Ditto for this, I can see the fediverse being the true Web 3.0! Love the freedom, flexibility and that kind of pioneering spirit I get by being an early adopter of what could be a new paradigm. Which is I guess an old paradigm, because we've kind of gone full circle to like, BBS and e-mail.
On the other hand I guess the ability to scam sell worthless monkey jpegs to greasy bros was kind of an amusing capability of the old web 3.0
Proof of Stake will keep actual resource costs maintainable, and Blockchain does do some cool stuff for decentralization, and therefore federation. Right now Lemmy instances are tied to DNS. Hopefully in the future they will be tied to cryptographic assets. Distributed Autonomous Organizations are a great example of the potential.
I've been arguing for more decentralization for a long time now and have been shifting as much of my usage to self hosted services as possible over the past few years. I'm glad to see others picking up the cause. <3
I think you don't understand value proposition of web 3. Aside from financial applications, web 3(if realized properly) gives you certainty and even a better ux. Imagine you have a single account, secured and truly decentralized (no one will be able to delete or manipulate your account) you can easily signup in any web 3 site/app and start using it, ideally you content, data or whatever You're generating in this platform is stored on a Blockchain, immutable for ever. No one can censor you! You don't have to trust goodwill of anyone, everything will just work!