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Dumb question. We already have a social network called the internet. What exactly are we trying to add on top here and why does it need a blockchain? If it's t
by civilized 4y ago
Dumb question. We already have a social network called the internet. What exactly are we trying to add on top here and why does it need a blockchain?
If it's the ability to publish and subscribe to content, why not just do some fancy version of RSS?
- bsedlm 4y agoI think that's the wrong question IMO, a better question (two questions) is where is RSS now and how did RSS get there?
- civilized 4y agoThose seem like follow up questions to my questions rather than suggestion that my questions are the wrong questions.
- k__ 4y agoI think, blockchains are a reasonably well understood mechanism, albeit not the one with the best performance characteristics. If you look into the specs for decentralized identifiers (DIDs), they don't define how a "method" needs to implement its interface. There are solutions that use blockchains (Ethereum), others use DAGs (IPFS, IOTA) and some are even static without any server required.
- NoGravitas 4y agoObviously not a dumb question at all. My favorite "social network" currently is the Gemini and Gopher blogging community. No bad incentives, people are posting things that genuinely interest them, and it's easy to follow anyone who's posting stuff that interests me. It's also usually easy to directly communicate with people about things they've written, via email. The bad side is the barrier to entry (a hobbyist-level knowledge of internet protocols, and the ability to either self-host or seek out a managed server). It would be nice for people to be able to just install a program and be able to both write and read things. This is something that will require some protocol and application design to keep decentralized, but there's no reason to believe that a blockchain is needed, or even helpful.
- varunsrin 4y agonot a dumb question. if you squint, the protocol i've described is really a fancy version of RSS. In fact, the original brainstorm doc for this idea was titled RSS+ :)
- rambambram 4y agoNice! Did your original brainstorm doc contain more ideas about RSS than in this final article? I just subscribed - by RSS - to your blog. I'm looking forward to read more about RSS.
- civilized 4y agoI could note that RSS has worked fine for decades without a blockchain, but for a web3 visionary, I imagine that's beside the point.