Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.

Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content. Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they're alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.

Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity's collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn't rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.

If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can't force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can't buy out the means of production.

So you're saying that the real web3 was... the friends we made along the way?

It's pretty dope. Been following the fediverse for a while, but I've never used twitter so mastodon felt kinda useless to me. I've never used facebook, so friendica felt kinda useless to me.

Anonymous strangers posting links and having discussions? Now that's more my jam.

Honestly I'm not even sure what the term web3 means but Lemmy does feel... less commercial, which is really refreshing! And I'm noticing alot less criticizism which is excellent. I'm certainly going to be staying here and trying to help it grow in a positive and mindful way.

I get what others are saying about it feeling like how the internet used to be... I'm really excited to see where Lemmy goes. Hopefully it doesn't just end up the way its predecessors have gone! Feels like I'm part of a movement to fight the oppression!! Power to the people woo!

It's nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn't outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it's not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there's no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.

Web 1.0, users form communities on bulletin boards, internet forums and newsgroups. It's the birth of Web 2.0, investors and advertisers see potential in large user bases. This leads to social media and mobile apps as fronts for tracking users and big data collection. Smart home and wearables become a plot to bring tracking hardware into your life even when you aren't actively engaging on the internet. The tech billionaire is born at the cost of the privacy and wallet of the user. Web 3.0, a federated Web 1.0 where users take back control of the internet. Tech billionaires live in homeless shelters and eat ramen noodles.

The future of the internet isn't artificially scarce digital collectibles? 😲

I say let’s keep up this momentum and continue making this a space people want to be in and engage with.

We’re already off to a strong start, let’s commit and see what new corner of the internet we can define for ourselves.

What we're seeing here seems more like a restoration of the architecture of pre-web Internet services, like SMTP, NNTP, or IRC.

The protocols are built on top of HTTPS and JSON as a session layer, rather than on lines of ASCII as in those classic protocols ... but the architecture looks a lot more like "a bunch of servers under independent administration, that agree to share messages with each other in a network" than like anything with the stink of blockchains on it.

Long way to go for ease of use, but the foundation is SOLID.

Decentralised without crypto-ifying everything. this is the way.

This is what reddit felt like ten years ago ... now it's just a matter of growing the community and making it bigger and better.

I felt bad leaving my old communities at reddit ... but in a funny way, I feel like I've stepped into a time warp and jumped back ten years ... now I'm looking forward to the next ten on Lemmy and Mastadon

The internet was always intended to be decentralized

Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet's evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a "new beginning" for communities on the internet.

It's so exciting to have another paradigm shift afoot. I feel a little regretful (not sure that's the right word here) that I wasn't born early enough to grow up with the rise of internet forums. It's not all bad because I also would not grown up during this great time of queer development, but it would've been neat. So now I get to live through and experience a similar time with web3 type stuff. The whole concept makes my little CS heart smile.

Yes, I would call it web1. Decentralization are basic concepts of the internet and it was more decentralized in the 90s. Getting back to the roots.

I hate how crypto bros and scammers kidnapped the term web3. In reality is a nice concept, but they just turned it into a libertarian dystopia.

I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.

Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!

It's starting to feel like the 90's again, but without frames ;-) I haven't felt this engaged with the internet in years

web3 was always a cryptocurrency scam and was doomed to fail. Federation is more a return to the early web with a way to link everything together to compete and get similar services to megacorps while distributing costs.

This has always been my understanding of the web generations:

• Web 1: Everyone posts content on their own separate website
• Web 2: Everyone posts content on a single website owned by a big corp
• Web 3: Everyone posts content on each other's websites, or on a decentralized network of sites like the Fediverse

Good call. To me, Fediverse feels akin to the earlier days of the web. Fresh, new, relatively unspoiled. Nobody knows exactly wtf is going on, but the possibilities seem vast.

this feels like what Web 2.0 should have been: the advanced version of user-run platforms with decentralization added in, rather than the adternet and enshittification trap venture capital backed platforms that lure people in and then downgrade quality of life.

This is pretty much the alternate timeline of Reddit. Community driven link aggregators do replace forums, but they stay decentralized and not corporate run

Interested to see this develop. It's my first experience with a federated social infrastructure and feels like something I need to work towards. Rewarding in a way.

With the quick death of Twitter and the even quicker death of Reddit, we as a community are speedrunning the transition to federated social media. We only need good mobile UX and keeping the growth, and we're set. It feels like a post-apocalypse right now, and I am not sure how to feel about it.

The web3 that can be named is not the true web3, or something like that.

The "branded" Web3 was about "how do we create the third Web BUBBLE" more than "how do we create the third Web experience." The people who missed buying AOL shares in 1996 or Amazon in 2002 wanted their chance to get in on speculation, except without the utility of an actual service or product underneath the hype.

This is it 100%. I don’t think there is a major platform that does not already exist in the fediverse. I’m sure there is something, but even Instagram and YouTube can be replaced… well the YouTube one is hard due to the bandwidth and storage needed. But the tech is out there.

I think at some point this web3 will take over. Things like YouTube, will eventually come, but we need a lot of cost reduction in current tech to be able to do that.

We are finally taking the web back.

I finally dipped my toes in and having a blast.

Just need to get Sync/Apollo/etc .. aka the BOYS to come and make some mobile apps and we're SET :)

feels like a modern take on usenet/newsgroups/bbs.

You pick your local server and your chosen feeds and enjoy.

I hope as more small servers start up and die that we don't just end up with a small number of mega size servers though, that goes against the point.

It really does feel a bit like the early days, for me. Bunch of strangers talking to each other in, generally, good faith. 'Course there were also tons of pop-ups, the banner would've taken an hour to download at that resolution... I like this more. lol

Now we just need a federated Youtube replacement.

It certainly feels nostalgic to me being on here. I miss the days of webrings and message boards and just crawling ever forward into unknown new places. I was a kid then though, so I thought it was just me becoming wiser/more tech-savvy. Now I realize how freaky all the consolidation is. Even some video game modding communities now have more of a presence on reddit than anywhere else. It's convenient but so weird.

I agree with u/Pelicanen that it feels like the uncertain times of the early internet where things were hosted by individuals and their really small websites. I don't know to what extent it will catch on (although Discord is huge with milleninals/Gen Z, no?) but it's interesting to imagine a world where the internet is primarily large consumer/business-facing websites and then highly decentralized communities.