The man who keeps predicting the web's death
tedium.co
tedium.co
Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is?
There could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS.
Or have we forgotten how to simply even build a web from scratch? Didn't CERN do this in a lab like 40 years ago?
Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams. I'll stick to TCP and html for now I think.
The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property!
> Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?
Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future!
For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want?
IPv4 is not a good protocol for obvious reasons, and IPv6 isn’t for political/bureaucratic reasons on top of the baseline inertia (try getting a block and using it IRL). IP is used as a kind of proxy for physical identity that is very ill suited for the task (but the best option available to Internet users outside the application layer) and DNS/CA is in practice captured and centralized by people charging Bob’s Restaurant $10 for a name.
The IANA is captured by both because renting IP addresses and domain names are basically their business model, which they franchise out through multiple layers of hierarchy to business that turn profit off of renting numbers and names to end users and do the dirty work, then contribute back up its governance structure.
Domain ownership, DNS, and IP block assignment are probably the most legitimate possible applications of NFTs to date. One day LEO satellite “Internet” adoption might be good enough for non-IP global networking but until then we have even-worse centralized NFTs rented out by a bureaucracy. Works great if you want true participation at the Internet level to be too expensive, time consuming, and complex for 99% of people. Facebook and Reddit for the plebes to deal with the lack of usability/what they want elsewhere, Cloudflare for us!
And if you don't like DNS/CA/IP ownership, there are always overlay networks - this can give you "non-IP global networking" today. The amount of people participating in them should show how much of the problem existing technologies really are...
- It requires a server to publish, which is expensive and difficult for regular users with a laptop or a phone. This can be solved with a mix of p2p and federation
- There is no decentralized trust system- only DNS+HTTPS, which requires centralized registration (TLDs). A domain may be cost-prohibitive for somebody who just wants to write comments and a few documents on the web. This can be solved by forming a social graph of cryptographic identity validations (aka, the "web of trust")
- There is no versioning system. This can be solved by making chains of immutable signed content, like we do with git.
- There is no archival system that allows you to "back up" the content of a website in a trustless way. Look at IPFS and BitTorrent for the solution there.
I believe these are the main reasons the web has failed as a social publishing system. Aside from companies and technically skilled individuals, everyone publishes on centralized social media platforms. This is a dangerous consolidation of power.
We hate to admit it, but the open web has taken the "L". The good news: these are solvable problems and I'm not giving up anytime soon!
> Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams.
To distance ourselves from crypto scams, we strongly avoid the web3 label, despite some similarities.
Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.
P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)
Web of trust never took off - turns out people don't trust their friends' friends' much, some sort of centralized authority works much better.
_Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC - for example, they have only one laptop/phone, they don't back it up, and it breaks regularly. If your system requires one to keep a secret key for decades, it automatically excludes a very large fraction of computer users.
Publicly accessible versioning and immutable content sound cool for readers, but have very few upsides (and many downsides) for writers. And it's writers who select publishing technology.
People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today. Just look at which decentralized social networks are actually winning (like Mastodon) - it's pretty much opposite to what's described in your comment.
> P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)
Yes, most people will rely on servers because phones are terrible p2p nodes. When identity is properly owned by the end users, the servers have nearly zero lock-in, unlike traditional hosting providers. A community's server can go down for some reason and the community can easily transition to other server(s), keeping their conversations and knowledge intact. Sadly this is not the case with Mastodon or even Bluesky.
> _Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC
This is probably the single biggest problem we are facing, because it impacts UX. There are several tools available to mitigate this issue, but I don't believe there is a perfect solution. Keys can be linked across devices with cross-signing, there are mechanisms that can enable key rotation: DNS, social media connections, and social/manual rotation in the worst case. The plan is to leverage existing tools that are used to keep secrets safe for regular people: system keychains, password managers, passkeys, smartphone "wallets".
> Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.
People become very comfortable in their virtual prisons, and most people won't change unless they have a reason to. Maybe they have legitimate work or content that is stigmatized and censored by other platforms. Maybe they live under an autocratic regime. But I think most people want better control over their content moderation and feed algorithm.
> People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today.
I'm not laughing at your exaggerated use of "no one". Decentralized and censorship-resistant technology is society's fail-safe. Maybe your social media oligarch isn't abusing their power too much today. Maybe your government actually supports free speech today. What about tomorrow, the next decade, and the next century?
For some reason, most of the decentralized people assume there are only two options: Megacorp-controlled media (facebook, X) or start from scratch (P2P + crypt-identities). It sure makes for an easy argument or a flashy slogan, given how much bad stuff megacorps do.
But the thing is, those slogans all look very cringy and naive to me. The "open web" is not dead, and never will be. There are traditional websites, activitypub, bluesky... They are still very much alive, and most of them are not megacorp-controlled. They are the real competitor to all the new upcoming p2p technologies and "future-web" startups.
You are not building replacement for Facebook or X, you are building a replacement for Bluesky or Mastodon.
I'll admit I'm a bit out of the loop though. Say I wanted to publish a blog on this.. Let's call it web 4, for lack of a better term..
How would I do it? How would people find it? Last I checked there wasn't really a good solution for that(or at least I didn't find one) but it's been nearly a decade, so things might've changed!
People will create links from social media. With some basic SEO, your content can be indexed by your favorite search engines. Increasingly these "web4" sites will link to themselves, leveraging the built-in social features that are portable across sites/servers/peers.
Those are called "websites"
XSLT, XML, Gopher, Js-free web, etc. are all different parts of the multivaried web.
As soon as you make a case for more technologies. Google or the React team or someone tied to the Business Web will tell you it’s not a good idea because security or lack of support or some side stepping reason.
No. CERN (aka, Tim Berners-Lee) came up with HTTP and HTML, but he built on top of TCP/IP and DNS.
> using different protocols besides TCP
QUIC is going in that direction, by running on top of UDP.
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In any case, without replacing the protocol stack we already have different webs, thanks to the walled-garden nature of modern social networking platforms. Linking to an Instagram reel or a Tiktok video is a pain in the neck; if you do not have an account there's a good chance you won't be able to see the content anyway. X is going in a similar direction. This (as well as their non-textual nature, of course) makes them hard to crawl and index for search engines. Fragmentation and niches inevitably ensue.
Actually, making a second web is not so hard, that's arguably what Facebook is, it's making a web that is able to occupy the same privileged position on the Internet that is difficult. DNS, Domains, CAs, and IP allocations are all de-facto centralized. You could in theory convince a bunch of friends to use different DNS/Domains/CAs but IP touches real infrastructure so you need it for anything of notable size. But regardless, go ahead. Unless people can make HTTP GET requests to your Domain A/CNAME records and receive HTML it'll probably be like your web doesn't exist.
Our network includes identity as a first-class citizen, and when you make internal-internal requests, terminates both ends of the connection, so it does do crazy stuff to cache/serve/resolve data, including site contents. It's kind of like a "shadow realm" for the Internet because it only lives in datacenters and whatever "wormhole" connections you make into that network from outside of it. That does allow us to evade the icy grip of Big Internet Protocol, but not the ghost of internet protocol past and present.
Actually the problem with the web is that nobody wants it in its current form, I think. Partially maybe because it got polluted/embrace-extend-extinguished as a consequence of platforms like Reddit, Google Search, Facebook, etc. But also because the cost and time complexity is too high for regular people, or even most technical people, to make full use of it on a personal basis. My hope is that we/someone can make it dead-simple and cheap to setup, create, and host non-trivial websites used by real humans to do real human things besides marketing and the content that enables marketing.
Interestingly, Facebook managed that, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
I'd argue Discord servers are another Web as well.
Because you don't understand the problem with the current web.
1. You find something interesting and put it on a site.
2. Other people find it interesting too come to your site.
3. Those other people have their own interesting things too, so you decide to allow them to put it on your site.
4. Your site grows bigger.
5. Other people see the people on your interesting site as targets to advertise to and the cycle of spamming and filtering spammers begins.
6. You give up because it's too much work fighting the spammers.
7. Only large sites exist.
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>here could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS
No the web isn't authoritative, so how is your 'person web' going to prevent non-personal sites. How is it going to prevent proxies that take IP and allow it to access your whichama-protocol?
>even build a web from scratch
It's both easy to do and useless. Who is going to access it, they don't have your software. And, this is what major providers already do with their lockin since they have a means of distributing their software.
Once you start getting into analytics and development and payments and seo and hosts that aren’t just static sites, it’s just too much. There are some companies that try to hide it all behind products positioned towards non-technical website creators but really very few that do a good job at taking you from nothing to a full site. We’re about 2 weeks away from becoming one of those because I think it really isn’t as simple as saying “make your own site” now, even though it could be.
Which curves back into discoverability. How is anyone going to find it? A search engine? They typically have to profit somehow, so they'll gladly link to a site with your same data that has ads on it first.
Site just for fun, we have that now. Either nobody knows they exist, or you suddenly find you're sticking it behind cloud flare to keep your traffic costs reasonable from the mass amount of junk hitting sites.
Nothing is solved, we are back to the original problem in the article.
Often the problem is that we have higher expectations from our technology. It's no longer okay to send a message over clear text on a network. We expect things to be fast, latency free and with security primitives. These additional elements are hard to implement without infrastructure, and hardware that is optimize for the particular task.
By having an index of the data, and then applying masks, you could reshape one payload into another by knowing the delta between what you have, and what you want to communicate.
It could allow for a layered internet, which leverages the infrastructure that exists already, the traffic that exists already but allows for content to be transferred for free (or pennies)
You could then send out multiple different videos using mostly the same traffic, all masking off the deltas from the source to the destination.
Most content is now on <10 big platforms. nearby no one has a website just to tell other people some stuff or what he has done for fun. only reason to have a website today is profit. active websites write in the first part of a article only bullshit to get found by google. Sites that are really like in 1999, just fun sites would never been found via google anymore. And now AI crawls all this and steals traffic from this sites without giving credits until no one beside of bot's will reads them anymore.
The web is not dying, the web is already dead! A commercialized part of the money making machine, nothing more anymore.
Next step: AI is dying because there are no new data to learn because it makes no sense anymore to create websites. Welcome to the stone age.
It doesn't take all the text of the public Internet for someone to learn to talk, and all these companies are much more in the data curation business for the purposes of teaching models.
Scraping is to make them up to date on current events (and has obvious alternative sources), or the actions of the start up space which don't already have such datasets.
Says he on a web site.
When the web was nascent sites like Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others created indexes you could browse by category, right?
There was never “the” frontpage.
and yet day after day, HN is flooded with links to ... wait for it ... web sites (more specifically, content on web sites thought to be potentially interesting to the HN crowdf).
what are you talking about?
The web that people were familiar with and loved back then had already died at that time. The new web is fundamentally different in both underlying technology and business models.
But AI stuff is everywhere, and AGI-generated material is growing rapidly. If this continues, traditional search engines will soon be overwhelmed by AI-produced content. In that case, you’ll have already stepped into the so-called “AI world.”
After all, AGI-generated content is so cheap, and at some level it does satisfy certain simple needs — so it’s inevitably going to be overused.
And we haven’t even begun to address the logic behind things like AI web crawlers, data aggregation, and the entire backend ecosystem. In the past, your users and their data were just “data.” But now, real human data can actually command a price — because it represents genuine, authentic human behavio.
Something has definitely changed — perhaps we could even call it the death of the traditional web. The old operational logic hasn’t disappeared, but it no longer seems competitive. Users may still like it or feel nostalgic about it, but it no longer creates the kind of appeal or value that companies need in the capital market.
HTML is a markup language, and not all of the elements and features are semantic in nature. The "span" tag literally exists to provide a way of affecting a bit of text where no tag with more semantic meaning applies.