Bring Back Web1
midrange.tedium.co
midrange.tedium.co
Overall, I miss Web 1.0 as much as Retro games. And that means looking at screenshots brings me more joy than actually using/playing it. Because let's be honest, it mostly sucked in comparison.
I do find the technical underpinnings of crypto (I refuse to ever use "web3") fascinating and I'm sure there are some valid applications. But everything I see right now is empty hype and usually just an open invitation to land grab in the promise of future profit. The spirit couldn't feel any more different than the original web.
Web3 feels like a by-product of being taught to monetize every hobby we have. Nothing can exist for free anymore. There is no more web to stake without some ad or product being shoved down your throat.
I do hope it's only a trend. I've been itching to create silly sites again, just because.
Don't believe me? Make your silly site and put it on IPFS, or host it on the beaker browser. That is "web3" already.
How is that different from "web2.0"? Do you think that "the web as an application platform" and "freemium SaaS" because of the technical superiority of the web, or because all the money in Silicon Valley needed a place to go, and it ended going to repackage every already-existing utility as a web application, and later on as a mobile app?
Yeah, so a bunch of people now are hyping "web3" and quite likely they are doing it as an attempt to make money out of it. Just like every other industry from our modern globalized society.
I didn't/shouldn't care that Geocities went down. Who would? Back in the day I had a page on my site dedicated to how much I loved the Mets. Putting anything like that on IPFS or whatever is so overkill and for what? So it's always online?
Good luck with web3 or whatever, I'll gladly and kindly stay behind.
But for the absolute majority of people, they don't know or care about "having their own website". Early in the century, those people would go to Geocities/Yahoo. Later on with "web2.0" the mainstream went on to have their blogs and their social media presence, which made it easier for the mainstream, but not without its problems - e.g, people getting into walled gardens, surveillance capitalism, tragedy of the commons due to the eyeball-chasing nature of web content producers, etc...
Now with "web3" the idea is that the individual nodes can be in control of their data, and that the tech is (slowly) becoming easy enough to be adopted by the masses. That's all there is to it.
You can say "I could do that with web1!" Yes, it is true. But it is also largely missing the point. The fact that you (and I) could do these things with "web1" does not satisfy the mainstream that does not know or care about setting up their own pages and setting up a server.
Dissing "web3"on the grounds of "it doesn't give me anything new" is the nerd's version of "I was a fan of the band before they were mainstream".
I'm genuinely curious how this statement differs from
> the mainstream that does not know or care about setting up their own pages and setting up a server.
What is an individual node if not just another server? And on top of that, web3 wants to throw words like "distributed" and "blockchain" at people like they have any more idea what those are than a box that runs code.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
A "node" in decentralized network is both a server and a client, with the difference that it only is required to "serve" the data that is in control of the node operator, right?
> web3 wants to throw words like "distributed" and "blockchain"
Have you seen any demo from the beaker browser? Or have you used the IPFS Companion extension? You can just add a folder there, get a content identifier and share that with anyone. That is literally all that there is to it.
[Edit: autocorrect error]
But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about. It's a false flag and the wrong ideal to look towards.
Even if you go back to Bush's "As We May Think", the focus was on making information accessible and editable using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.
Maybe what I'm aiming to do with stealth aligns with your goals? [1] I'm trying to use the best parts of the web3 idea (decentralization, distribution, sharing of storage + bandwidth) and combine it with the ideas of the old web, where the focus was on distributing information and not on advertisement or social influence.
Weren't decentralization & distribution already part of the “old web” idea too?
I was more talking about what's possible when your Browser can share resources with other Browsers in your local network, e.g. saving redundant downloads when one of your peers already downloaded the very same URL ... or long-term caching everything by default, and making the URLs and their content offline-readable when you have no internet connection.
JS is a web 2 thing though.
- Save web pages to disk (in an usable form, i.e. usable by scripts etc., offline)
- curl + script to handle content - now you need puppeteer etc.
- Easy automation of web pages (same as above) - can't just do POST (yes some pages have APIs. Most are different and require effort)
- Custom CSS that works universally
- Do powerful stuff with proxies (i.e. rewrite requests, responses)
- Link to individual documents or even anchors by default
- Pages are the same for everyone, you can send people a link and expect they see it, and see it the way you do
... the list goes on, but these cover some of the most important points.
Your issue is more that there’s no longer any standardization of the web and the surface area to which sites are designed have increased drastically.
One could still make a site today that can do everything you’re describing
Java applets and flash had the same issues.
It sounds to me (and I may be wrong and picking up on the wrong things) that what you'd really like is something like Project Xanadu? Which is, unlike Web3, a reasonable position to hold, though it's one I strongly disagree with (I consider a fully realized and mainstream Xanadu as a Grim Meathook Future, though one not as thoroughly inhuman and extinctionist as Web3).
What I secretly wish for is a reliable all-encompassing technical reservoir of information without all the cruft that used to be unavoidable (books, libraries, lending, paper copiers, fees etc.). And a working human language that allows for deterministic logic on top. Yes, it's impossible, but some nights I allow myself to dream Frege's dream [1].
So to be realistic, I don't even need this all-embracing technology to exist. I just want current technology to not prevent me from building my own tiny pocket of it.
i’m curious what comes across as so grim to you
Basically, something like Xanadu would work very well as a personal system, or even a closed research system like a law library, but an open-world Xanadu would be even a worse hellscape than the Web-as-we-know-it.
Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive?
The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous.
More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for.
[ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]
It's what I want it to be about, for one.
Nobody's being stopped from making "web 1" webpages. Making a call to action like this isn't going to make big companies suddenly change their mind.
I agree that decentralization will be important going forward. There are some specs starting to emerge that give me hope that a decentralized, open, and free web is still possible. For example: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
Maybe we should call it Web 3.1 or something. The typical bug fix point release.
As an example, my parents subscribed to Time Magazine in the 1980s and 90s. They devoted a lot of pages to cybersex, games (Megawars got an entire page) and porn on networks like AOL and Compuserve.
If this was Shadowrun, my character would find an ic reason to say “same corpies, different corps.”
BTW, I love the way the ASR-33 sounds.
Web3 seems a bit like that now in that the payment and distributed bits don't work very well but may in the future.
This might not be the best platform to complain about the state of things.
When you talk about web1 do it in a web1 way.