I am in favour of the term “Web4” to describe small, local, personal, private... | Hacker News Reader

I am in favour of the term “Web4” to describe small, local, personal, private...

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100 pointsdredmorbius73 comments

How about no buzzwords, and instead, we just do things? Like https://indieweb.org ?

You have buzzwords, and you have intuitively naming things to indicate they fall within the same category, especially when the name needs to communicate and inspire a particular vision. We need the latter, and while I really like indieweb, that doesn't cover it.

Buzzwords rally outsiders under our own banner. If it gets a useful change going, I'm happy to go with Web4.

Besides, going with Web3+1 as the chosen name helps emphasize our belief: that Web4 will be an improvement over the current latest and greatest Web3.

Premptively claiming the namespace has certain advantages.

Not that this is bulletproof, naturally: meme, crypto, hacker, ...

So selfhosting becomes web4?

Damn every nerd hobby I've had, has always become mainstream. Ever since gaming on MSDOS and Amiga machines. Then MP3 files, Then IRC / Online Communities, then ... ... The list goes on.

By the way /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab says hi

I know not what weapons world wide web 3 will be bought with, but world wide web 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

web4, also known as web1.0 in the past.

There is a marked difference. Web 1.0 was still a very small community, and the importance of moderation and decentralisation was seen as lower. If we want to stay alive against megacorps and not get ripped apart from the inside while still facilitating large numbers of users, it helps to design these priorities in from the beginning.

On a more technical level, Web1.0 was not as optionally capable as Web4 may be. Crypto strength vs TLS vs no encryption, rich documents vs Markdown vs no formatting, persistence vs not, these are all the choices we can make now. Whereas in Web1.0 you had to be ascetic, and in Web2.x you had to be resplendent, in Web4 you can choose your own adventure.

"far right money-laundering"

... what? Is this a new conspiracy theory I'm not aware of?

There was some recent news article about this. I think it is not unreasonable take, because obviously crypto is safer to use for fringe groups than Visa or Paypal. But I agree the wording is way too hysterical, that is a bad sign.

I'm not from the anglosphere. Google does not spit out anything useful to me. What did happen? I still don't know what you are talking about.

Regarding this week's SPLC report:

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/585306-bitcoin-surge-a...

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/12/08/bitcoin-adoption-am...

https://gizmodo.com/far-right-leaders-are-raking-in-millions...

A random sample of previous coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/bitcoi...

https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-international-news-...

https://decrypt.co/80971/far-right-conspiracist-sent-60000-b...

The 6 articles you linked neither mention money laundering, nor describe something that qualifies (in my understanding) as money laundering.

The original post did not use money laundering in the legal sense but in the ordinary language use sense of the phrase.

Don't bullshit me, we both know it was written with defamatory intent, and it turned out its not substantiable. Its slander.

...which means what? This seems like an odd equivocation. Is money laundering the newest term to get a new, politically useful definition?

I mean, 'money laundering' is a very different thing from 'using a different payment protocol because you've been banned from conventional ones'.

I'm not at all right-wing, but it sets a dangerous precedent to establish 'acceptable' payment protocols run by the dominant monopolies, then ban people whom you don't like, and baselessly accuse them of 'money laundering' when they (obviously) go somewhere else.

I think there's an idea that if someone is thought to have a certain set of beliefs they should be refused basic services such as the ability to store/transfer/receive value and the ability to earn a living. So if something enables them to have these basic services, it's a grave threat.

According to the president of the US, the ideology is the deadliest threat to the US. So keeping money out of the hands of people thought to be sympathetic to the cause is vital.

> "We won't ignore what our intelligence agencies have determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today: White supremacy is terrorism," Biden said. "We're not going to ignore that either."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-supremacy-most...

It's not just far-right either. Cryptocurrency, despite its appearance of full traceability and transparency, provides an incredibly easy method for money laundering in the long term and has been used to do so by every side. Many communist countries utilize cryptocurrency to perform transactions outside international trade law, bypassing blockades and sanctions normally enforced by banks, foreign offices, and physical blockade. Criminals of course love the damn thing, hackers especially. The technology is good but it has so many bad uses that it's still a real ethical gray area for a lot of people. Not to mention the countless scams profiting off people who don't know any better and literally advertised and peddled by modern mass media.

It's literally problems with cash, scaled up to the extent that they become a qualitatively new problem due to the sheer ease and low risk of shifting money.

I wonder if it's even morally consistent to take the view they cash is fine, but cryptocurrency isn't.

Cash seems a lot better for crime, except for international use. "There should be no international cash equivalent" - would you agree with this?

Ransomware operations rarely request cash payments, to note one example.

If your M.O. is to commit crime at a distance, cryptocurrency is ... gold.

Cash is perhaps a little more traceable than cryptocurrency is since most ways it is passed around is in one way or another linked to the physical world and to your actual existence. You can however launder cryptocurrency without leaving your room and without ever being linked to any of that once you slowly bleed it out into cash. The only point at which your physical being comes close to anything traceable is once it's so white the NSA couldn't catch you. And frequently, they don't. Because as said before, it's an international issue.

DPRK often does some money borrowing from the less tech-savvy users out in the west. That money goes into buying that government all kinds of stuff, both abroad and even for the actual physical country itself. Cuba dances around the US blockade with cryptocurrencies. Both of these are of supreme interest to national security agencies in the US. Yet none of them have managed to really get a proper hold on these operations.

David Golumbia has written a book called “The Politics of Bitcoin - Software as Right-Wing Extremism” which goes into the connection between cryptocurrency and far-right ideology. Here is an interview with him: https://overcast.fm/+ZpQA7ciS0

Any US personnel dependent on the academic system writing about anything remotely political or social sciences related (i.e. anything mathematically unverifiable) cannot be trusted as any kind of authority (in the current era). The rabid left-wing student organizations will destroy their livelihood on the smallest whim if their stance is "wrong".

I don't care much for this "Web4" proposal (yet) but can we get our terminologies unified? AFAIK Web 2.0 is the era of user-generated content[1] and, IMO, was the most vibrant era of the internet. That's my "good old days" though I've witnessed the tail end of 1. Even if you're not at all a fan of that Web 2.0 era, what's with the overly-cynical characterization here?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (and oh look, apparently Sir Tim Berners-Lee has also already defined what Web 3.0 is).

Web 2.0 was a loosely defined marketing term which was already extremely controversial when it was coined to promote conferences. Web 3.0 is even more loosely defined.

These terms are purposefully devoid of substance so as to be applicable to as many things as possible. It’s probably going to be hard to get a unified understanding of what they mean.

But these version numbers sure make us feel we're progressing towards something more refined, something that will soon cater to all of humanity's needs as opposed to just becoming better at tracking people, polarizing them and creating wealth for FAANG's and their mother.

my take fwiw: https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-08-11-web-shit-point-oh

Web 2.0 to me means the era when everything got centralised under a few social media providers. The early 2.0 era was definitely just 1.0 with additional collaborative/sharing energy injected into the system, but by the time we got halfway through, it become obvious that the walled gardens are encroaching on traditional 1.0 space and that Google has abandoned the "don't be evil" motto (which I took to be the bellwether of the changes to come).

So, Pied Piper?

(In all seriousness the hyperdrives/hypercore protocol is very cool and I intend to try building my next web-builder on top of it. The OP writes it off too quickly: hypercore is append-only, but hyperdrives are more like bittorrent sync, which I'm very sad never took off, it worked perfectly for syncing large files between peers on a local wifi network, when google drive and dropbox were failing us)

It did take off. See Syncthing: https://syncthing.net/

Oh that's fantastic news, it's been at least 4 years since I looked for it, all I knew was that the bittorrent name got sold off and turned into some token.

It's the first time I read something this ridiculous on HN.

Sometimes you got to fight absurdity with absurdity. May the flying spaghettimonster bless you with its noodly appendage.

the append-only age

That might as well be web3 from where I'm sitting: web3 is trying to solve a problem most people don't have: they don't care about privacy or leaks even when they happen. Those of us lurking on HN maybe, but to everyone else this is a completely normal phenomenon, the same way the sun rises from the east.

Web3 is a co-opted term, much like cryptobros co-opted the term "crypto" from the cryptography community. We need to choose a different term, and Web4 is not a bad one.

I'm aware. What I'm trying to say is that neither 3 or 4 will become mainstream and will only become a party house for a few wildly optimistic and wildly diluted individuals, that is the evangelists and those believing that this will be the next big thing and will make them billionaires because they were the early adopters. We've seen that way too many times already.

What you're witnessing, and participating in, is the epistemic and rhetorical battle over that future.

I'm lending my own support to the term "Web4". I want to see this future happen, and something had to compete with "Web3" semantically. I might as well help.

Web4 is anything shorter than 500 symbols, structured in the unreadable mess of incomplete texts, without beginning or end.

The thing that's funny about web3 is that it's going to absolutely turn into celebrities shilling to the rich. They've always done that, but now it's going to be extra cringy because it's going to be so blatant. The reason it's going to be shilling and not, you know, someone buying artwork that they care about is because data on computers is trivially copyable and, deep down, nobody cares about a photo or a song when it's just signed data. Even print photography is several orders of magnitude cheaper than painted art. So, ultimately, it's going to be a game of access peddling. And when people see that, the market will more or less collapse outside of possibly some minor edge cases where it really does work[0] and even if I'm not interested it, I'm semi-bullish on them at least in the medium term.

[0] Games are the one place where scarcity makes sense. Strong, defined brands from companies with a history of not flooding the market or abandoning a product line could make out huge. Think Magic: The Gathering. Or the Star Wars universe and most players are not Jedi. Or Lord of the Rings and it's some extremely beautiful and intricate dwarven battle axe. The NFT makes it possible to move from rendition of a game to rendition. I'm not sure about the long term (~100+ years) here though.

Wait, isn't that just called Self-hosted?

I'd say the difference could be primarily about ownership of your data and identity. So when you go to someone elses website you bring your data with you, auth through your own keys rather than them storing it for you. Think localStorage but hostable and shareable with granular permissions to data or WebAuthn but usable by normal people.

There'd definitely be a bunch of companies helping the less technically inclined but the point is to make that a choice you can change as opposed to having all your life locked into three behemoths.

are distributed hash tables / magnet links and torrents counted as "cryptographic" ?

psssst, we don't talk about the torrent protocol anymore, it's either blockchain or go home

Hashes are cryptography, so I say yes.

Some hashes are.

There are non-cryptographic hashing functions.

https://dadario.com.br/cryptographic-and-non-cryptographic-h...

Right, I forgot about those. Good catch.

This is Web1, if anything.

Web 1 was a fragile thing. The Information Superhighway is much more hostile these days, so we need nimble tanks (aka Web4) rather than cars with extra plate armour (Web1.0 with patches).

I'm all for rolling release Web. Looking for technological solutions to societal problems will lead nowhere.

So, without financial or similar incentives given to people who host it, how does anyone expect a non-financial model work?

Maybe that "proof of waste" is solving a real problem (though I'd also favor for a more environmentally friendly consensus algorithm)

That's the easy part. In a peer-to-peer network every participant hosts content from others.

Technically it's solved. Socially/economically, without incentives is hard to scale for it to be practically usable for the masses.

Volunteer run organizations are way more fun and high quality than anything commercial.

They of course do not scale, but therein lies the charm.

> Volunteer run organizations are way more ... high quality than anything commercial

In what universe?

Speaking to the quality of the organization - the people in it and the relationships between them.

I used to be part of a couple of hackerspaces. The expertise and labor we received as a volunteer organization could not be bought. Once we started making money and hired staff, the magic was gone. Basically like when your hobby becomes work.

You see it with TikTok and YouTube as well, of course the commercialization pays for a lot of high quality content, but it's basically TV at this point, for every high quality channel there's 1000 people trying anything to get ad revenue and it makes the whole thing hard to wade through.

Compare that with the Vine compilations now archived on YouTube, some of the funniest, more original humor IMO, and no one was doing it to get paid (tho a few were able to pivot into internet celebrity-dom)

Yup, you can't buy passion, not the kind that goes above and beyond to do kindness to the other person. Community and volunteer organizations thrive when this is present.

Volunteer organizations are ultimately about friends*. Be it a church, a dog sanctuary, a small non-profit cafe or cinema, or an open market, the ultimate thing that matters is that we get to hang out and mutually enjoy each other, possibly help those that require it. Other benefits are important, but if not for the social aspect, it would be horribly transactional, which diminishes quality of life experienced.

* Friends = other living beings too, such as pets or other things that we want to see grow and live happily

The models we currently have:

• p2p (like bittorrent) which shifts bandwidth costs to recipients.

• Too cheap to care. For simple things like a blog, cost of hosting asymptotically approaches zero.

• Subsidized by other business. Think why HN is free.

The solution is to create a federated network of installations each serving a small community. Be it that this community is a school, a business, a family, or a group of 20 friends who all play on the same Minecraft server.

They will want to run a community just for the sheer joy (or coordination benefits) of it, as long as we make it inexpensive to run and possible to operate by a power user rather than requiring an IT expert.

would love to see some concrete examples. because we tried building open networks and they get sybil attacked or spammed, and introducing a token to add cost to the transactions on p2p networks did seem to help their security. People dont seem to like the social aspects of that tokenisation, so whats the suggestion? Whats the next step? Is the future you see more like spotify or more like funkwhale or more like audius? How are you delivering it to the general population? How can we contribute?

Those of us working in the web3/crypto space are interested in the same values as the poster has: local, personal, private, self owned, p2p, permissionless. We are looking for ways to work on those things and provide infrastructure for others to build on.

It is increasingly clear that lots of people don't like the money/token/asset ideas of the crypto theyve seen. So do we just give up hacking on money? because i remember it was the deep distrust in existing money systems was why this all took off in the first place.

Or is money just something sacred we aren't allowed to play with? is it morally wrong? Why is it that pictures of the Queen in my wallet on pieces of paper somehow the best form of money? wouldnt you rather trade pictures of dogs in space? One of those is way more fun and doesnt bow down to a culture of inherited power.

Or is it just the mass speculation, and mania in the public which you dont like?(fuelled by abusive relationships with money and desperation to escape everyday life, which seems a bigger problem than crypto tbh). Is that because you are worried about the impact it has on the vulnerable? Could we try explore efforts in speculation-resistant currencies and trust networks like https://joincircles.net

And one point id highlight is that efficiency is often over prioritised, and resilience is more important to the survival of a network. Hosting private local nodes will never be as efficient as datacenters, so is efficiency really your priority? If everyone used Mastodon would that be as efficient as Twitter? Make the system strong and resilient, then as efficient as possible given the first constraint. First you make something that can survive, then optimise it.

But on the other hand, how do we trust the developers of these protocols? I'm not really convinced by the "many eyes" argument since openssh vuln.

Stopped reading at "far right money laundering"

Yeah, wherever Naval goes or the alt-right, crypto, boys go is where I don't wanna go. Maybe that's just gonna have to be the un-Web....

Ok, but can I scam people with it?

if anything I could agree with, the next web should adopt semver /s

But everyone knows you should always be backwards compatible and never go over main version 0.

So we should be using Web0.1, Web0.2, etc. /s

I know HN commenters can sometimes get a little too vitriolic about crypto, but this parody (including takes like “built by the same literal fascists who tried to do a coup”) is too much.

how about we call it the internet and stop trying to confuse media outlets

here is an example of where web3 would be good.

in web2 your handle gets confiscated, in web3 you own it and have the keys https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1470362934496923650

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