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Comment by davepeck | Hacker News Reader

Original author here. Totally. I’m old enough to remember when Web 3 was the semantic web, so I guess I don’t put much stock in the label. And, personally, I’m really interested in crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and some of the stuff the Indie Web community has built. I have no idea if those are, uh, web3 enough for web3.:-)

As for the question of casinos, I think @pinboard’s description of Web 3 as “an unregulated casino with a hip bar scene” (sigh) strikes me as… about right?

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The web3 movement should be be inclusive of IndieWeb and federated ActivityPub ecosystems. Interoperability and open standards paved the way for all of this, and it'd be a shame to toss that out of the window for some pie in the sky vapor.

edit: by inclusive, I mean adoption and funding. The wheel does not need to be re-invented, poorly.

This is so wrong it's astonishing, web 3 is build build using principles and designs that are decades in the making, literally 30-40 years of cryptography, zero knowledge proofs, game theory, and advanced mathematics. It's incredible that these ideas and academic papers are finally becoming real. The web 3 movement is very inclusive, but technology moves forwards not backwards.

decentralization doesn't need a blockchain. A web3 which doesn't recognize this is a web3 I don't want any part of.

Do usenet newsgroups meet the definition of web3?

I'm old enough to remember web 1, web 2, and web 3 , thinking web3 is a casino is ridiculously immature, it's how get rich quick moonboys and the mainstream media view blockchain, without actually spending the time researching the technology and understanding basic economic principles.

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a system-native incentive for the nodes to do their thing, and this system-native thing (BTC the currency, in Bitcoin's case), should have outside value. Many wiser people have said this (not on HackerNews maybe), that money is the only use case for a blockchain.

Mastodon[0] does work at scale.

[0] Or, to be more correct, the ActivityPub ecosystem which is bigger than Mastodon itself.

I’m not sure that Bitcoin offers any special insight here.

We use email; it’s very much a crypto-less federated system that works at scale (of, more or less, every Internet user!)

And there are newer examples: while it’s by no means a Twitter, Mastodon (and the broader ActivityPub universe) is already at a healthy scale. I collected these stats three and a half years ago; the ecosystem has grown substantially since then: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/

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