As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice.
Orbis is a proof of concept:
A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.
For example, you cannot see who liked a Tweet on Nitter.
That's exactly what you'd expect from a Twitter archive site. The author's point was that this is the same tech you'd need for a Twitter replacement, and this doesn't need blockchain or web3.
Reminds me of the comment on HN from a few months back "On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script." You don't need blockchain or web3 to fix that either - centralised solutions like bandcamp.com already give the artist 80-90%.
The problem is that whoever builds the replacement can just fuck up the user experience any time in the future. Just like Twitter did.
To look at it another way, how would web3 actually help here? As far as I can tell it would only make this example worse - a more user hostile UI (faffing around with wallets and keys and whatnot), less decentralised (everything going through one API to interact with the blockchain), more resistant to change (forking blockchains is a big deal and only tends to happen when rich people at the top of the pyramid don't like something), more expensive (gas fees), less privacy (your wallet address being essentially an undeletable cookie), more likely to incentivise divisiveness and conflict (flamewars driven by the expectation of personal profit rather than just likes), etc. etc.
That's a positive feature.
Mastodon[0] is a successful decentralized social media without the use of blockchain. Because of federation, users can like and reply to posts from other instances, and other people will be able to see it.
I can even follow a PeerTube channel and have recent videos show up in my feed, because of the ActivityPub federation protocol (a W3C standard).
Best of all, it doesn't require the linking of a crypto wallet and the payment of cryptocurrency to interact with people.
The Crypto wallet you use for Orbis can be a fresh, empty wallet. No need to put any cryptocurrency in it.
Twitter holds a complete information monopoly over all its content. This means they can make hostile changes, such as forcing a login in order to view public content, without much repercussion. If Twitter were to ban me, I would be completely cut off from all of my friends on Twitter. You can't easily move away from Twitter, because Twitter is a huge entity with swaths of content and users already on it.
On the other hand, Mastodon instances have only a fraction of that power. They have control over information only that is on their instance, in a world that contains thousands of such instances. They are tiny entities holding control over small fractions of the content available in the fediverse.
If a Mastodon instance started acting hostile, people can relatively easily move away to a different instance. If my Mastodon instance were to ban me, I can sign up on a different instance (or host my own) and still keep in touch with my friends; unless my friends used the same instance and the owners broke federation with the instance I moved to, at which point a lot of people would probably want to move away from that hostile instance immediately.
I expect most Mastodon instances will be shorter lived than Twitter. So changing from Twitter to Mastodon seems not like a good deal if I want my posts and the comments and likes I get to stay around.
I have decades in the IT industry, and I don't want to self host.
As long as the majority does not self host their fediverse content, the fediverse is not a solution of the problem discussed in this HN story.
It would be important to ensure the integrity of the software running on such servers, though, perhaps via regular check of the binaries also at runtime.
While Bitcoin miners calculate hashes to get transaction fees, Arweave miners store data to get those fees paid upfront for storage.
So the question "what happens in they shut down" is similar to asking "what happens if Bitcoin shuts down?". It is not a single party the suddenly can decide to "shut down".
[0]: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
It took a little jiggering to make it part of my workflow within Sublime and my personal site, but I'm really liking it. I avoid Twitter completely - haven't touched it for a few years. This system allows for a NOW page on my personal site, a stream for communication, and even a private channel for short projects.
Go twtxt!