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Comment by maxwell_xander | Hacker News Reader

I wish web 3 referred to the new trend towards federated, decentralized services, instead of blockchain stuff

It does. Just start calling federated and decentralized services web 3. This stuff is actually useful so it'll out live the block chain pyramid schemes.

as much as I truly despise the current "web 3 is blockchain" trend, I do kinda think "web 3" as "decentralized" works. blockchains are just in vogue (in a big way, to web 3's significant loss) because of a couple unicorns.

maybe this is "web 2.5"? federation brings significant advantages from both centralized and decentralized, while not being fully either.

federation and decentralization are very different; (even if you probably could implement federation on decentralized smart contracts)

Which is why I don't think it fits with "web 3 as decentralization", yeah. It's fundamentally different from either, but we lack integers between 2 and 3, and I doubt web 4 would take off.

You can still use Web 3.0 for that. Alternatively you might use Web0

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29767375

To my knowledge "web 3" is a very vague term that just means "users host their own content instead of relinquishing it to big tech for hosting". So I think it's fair for federation to count as web 3. Even with a blockchain-heavy net, ad-hoc federation will happen in the form of custodian services.

The top result is Wikipedia, "Web3, also known as Web 3.0,[1][2][3] is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains.[4]"

And even then, with federated services you still usually aren't hosting your content, that's really closer to what web 1.0 was, imo.

I guess the term is still nascent enough for it's meaning to be in flux. Hopefully good people are pushing it to align with the best tendencies

It already does. I recently rewatched Juan Benet's presentation from one of the conferences.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=l44z35vabvA

"turning centralized apps into decentralized protocols"

Web3 is an ethos, not a set of discrete technologies.

https://web3.foundation/about/

history will be written by the winners

web 3 will come to mean whatever the next phase of the connected digital computing experience comes to be defined by

the money seems to be overwhelmingly on the "web3" cryptopia

money buys you brainpower so I would not underestimate that juggernaut

but at some point all this speculative money will seek an exit out of its zero-interest rate supersized echo chamber and into the "real economy"

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