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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:

1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.

2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.

Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.

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It already exists, it's called Geminispace: https://geminiprotocol.net/

Gemini is still client/server, so it encourages the same problems of scale that HTTP has where you can't afford to run a server unless you have a source of income. IE. it would get infested by adtech the same as HTTP if it got popular enough. IMO the only way to get something that wouldn't suffer the same fate would be to make it a peer-to-peer application where everyone using the client application was also hosting a server.

> Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.

This is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you want to only access esoteric websites, you can do that today. If you want to block ads and tracking, you can do that today. If you want to only visit websites that don't require ad support, you can do that today.

What you need is a way to pay people for content so they don't need to have ads. Can you solve that problem?

Peer-to-peer web where people don't need to pay for servers but donate some disk space and network bandwidth to participate. The content generated by passionate people that only wants their content to be out there, not make money out of it. A p2p geocities if you will.

Can't we do this now? We will already have websites that are funded this way.

web3 is that. Pay for content / services you use through micro transactions.

If by web3 you mean crypto currencies then I ask you nicely to stop using web3 for that.

Web3 is things like json-ld and the like and it is tragic that scammers have been able to abuse the term for so long.

I'm really not a fan of crypto claiming the "Web 3.0" title, but the Semantic Web had its chance for many years, and at this point I don't think it gets to hold on to it anymore either.

I’m not familiar with json-ld, other than a quick skim of a Google search that I just did. What is so revolutionary about it (and other technologies in the space, such as…?) that it represents a whole new revision of the web paradigm, comparable from the shift from static pages in web1 to interactive sites in web2?

It is not revolutionary. It is evolutionary just like web2.0 was. That is kind of the point.

But together with other, similar technologies it extends the current with metadata etc web just like web2 extended the existing web with things like ajax interactions, drag and drop and folksonomies ("tags") and other forms of user generated content.

The (IMO) fake crypto peddler "web3" is (again IMO) "revolutionary" unlike web2 and the real web3: it is a complete break from many of the things that made the web great. I'd even hesitate to describe much of it as web at all.

Arbitrary server-chosen microtransactions make things worse in many ways even if the payment process is simple, fast, and free.

Wow, lots of luddites here for what's supposed to be a tech community.

Get your head out of your asses guys. There's nothing inherently bad about blockchain or decentralization.

"web3" is nothing but another crypto-scam.

Please stop.

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