From the article:
"Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."
The fediverse is the real Web3
I don’t know anything about Web3, what do people outside of the fediverse say what Web3 ist or should be?
Web3 was suppose to be this decades revolution of the internet, where everything became interconnected and decentralized and without authority figures or something
Then cryptocurrency enthusiasts decided blockchain counts as that and starting calling everything related to cryptocurrency and Blockchain web3. So now web3 just means cryptocurrency, but they still act like it is the future of the entire internet. I think it is pretty dumb, who wants finances intrinsically tied to everything they do online?
To wit: https://web3isgoinggreat.com
I don’t care if something like Bitcoin is used within the decentralised web. If I want a subscription and no middlemen, it’s easier than posting cash. I don’t really want it as the basis of the platform, though. Those usually end up being solutions chasing problems preventing real adoption. Most people will always use credit cards.
Almost anything else, apart from a few cryptocurrencies sharing its likeness, are absolute shams. If minting or the network is centralised, you may as well have a handwritten IOU from the conmen. Cryptobros missed the point and started hyping up the equivalent of Visa with a centralised blockchain (i.e. an inefficient database) but no regulations.
I’ve been thinking we call it web4.0 to mess with the cryptobros. Idk if it is an accurate name, but I bet they would hate it.
I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.
Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.
“History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes” -Mark Twain
It definitely feels like a throw back to before we had these massive centralized ‘social networks’.
Reddit will live on, but I think we’ll see a shift to the fediverse. It’s the best of both worlds. Smaller communities but with that big network feel if you want. Activity pub is great.
