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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that crypto-rooters took the term "Web3" and inevitable tied it to crypto. There are other decentralized approaches that could become a decentralized successor to todays web, (CCNs, IPFS) but are not blockchain/crypto related. So please don't buy into the "only crypto/blockchain" is the future of the decentralized web narrative.

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This is too nuanced a take for most people, the kind who want to engaged in polarized 'discussions', to care about. Or use-case specific coins that solve a particular problem (Filecoin <-> IPFS relationship). Web3, crypto, blockchain have all become poisoned topics that are mostly divorced from the technological characteristics underneath them.

This combined with the idea that if those technologies don't solve a problem for "me" then they're not useful technologies just makes these discussions worthless. I'm sure there are many more Ukrainians and Russians who will permanently think differently about "crypto" in a way that most USA resident will (hopefully) never need to. Some will use it for good, some for evil, but underneath that morality is just a technology.

The thing is that no one has the authority to decide what "Web3" even is. It kind of implies a succession to the established Web 2.0 term. But Web 2.0 is also no clearly defined term, and it was also not established a-priori. I.e. the term Web 2.0 was somehow coined as a reference to a broad set of technologies in the Web sphere that were supposed to change the web. It is mostly associated with the evolution from the "Web 1.0" desinged for news-paper/static content style of content, to a web of rich, dynamic applications. The technologies often associated were the (then upcoming) HTML5 standard, plus advances in JavaScript and browser technology (stuff like AJAX but which existed in all major browsers when the term was coined). But these technologies were all on the horizon/in development when the term was coined.

Now, with the term "Web3", crypto enthusiasts try to establish it a-priori. That is, nobody knows exactly what kind of technologies/changes will be in "Web3" and even the problem it solves are not considered problems that need fixing by others. And it doesn't matter, because whether "Web3" will be a thing that changes the web as we know it will not be decided by evangelists, it will be decided when it has been adapted by the broad majority - and my personal take is that what currently is proclaimed as Web3 will not see broad adaption (by users, enterprises, network operators etc.).

Nobody has the right but there are obvious ways to differentiate them. You pool a set of majority features together that did not exist in a previous iteration. Really its hard to do before the implementation is complete. basically its hard to define web3 before there is a web3. What is happening is that there are parties who are actively trying to make major changes to how majority of the internet is used, that new version is therefore web3.

Its like how we different between epochs or periods of time. They are just abstractions of ideas/things/beings put into a bucket.

Web1.0 was essentially a static web with static pages. Its just how the internet was mostly used during that time period. Web2.0 essentially transformed HTTP + javascript to the standard OS used to run programs. No more installing software locally... well guess what in web1.0 days people still had dynamic websites (php, cgi, flash, java applet) and in the web2.0 days I still have to install video games from steam. They are just general buckets to help our brains more easily categorize time periods and the major differences between them.

Having been interested in decentralization for many years, I never heard the term 'Web3' before 'Crypto'. Maybe it existed but certainty hear it about 1000x more now.

But the web is not a decentralized place. You put content on servers, and everybody downloads that content from there. There a copies or caches, yes (CDNs but also old-school http proxy caches). But if I remove content from my server (or a tweet), its no longer accessible by standard means. We build a whole set of technologies to not have a single-point-of-failure (i.e. load balanced servers + replication) but for example in CCN/IPFS you can publish content a single time from a very slow dialup line, and in theory it could be accessed by millions of users (which in todays world is only possible if you put it on a CDN or run your own datacenter to satisfy requests at that scale).

There are hundreds of companies providing managed object storage and likely tens of thousands with file storage.

And you are free to create your own. It IS decentralised just at a different granularity to IPFS.

> but for example in CCN/IPFS

That is why I a fan of those. Not sure what you are arguing. My you misunderstood my initial comment.

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