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The web needs a genuine "Web 3", a new era of decentralized creativity that will be brimming with possibility and attracting developers passion as it did in the

The web needs a genuine "Web 3", a new era of decentralized creativity that will be brimming with possibility and attracting developers passion as it did in the past. It does not look like such a rejuvenating phase is coming anytime soon. The centralized app era has cornered the web and its economics and will for sure perpetuate itself at least for the short/mid term future. Still, to the degree people can afford it, its worth experimenting with fundamental web technologies and patterns (e.g., ideas like htmx, activitypub, linked data etc.) that might get us back to an interesting path. While climbing out of the gravity well of centralization requires enormous energy, there is plenty of potential energy lying latent in the structure of the web... What we need is a spark.

pixl97 2y ago
You mean brimming with bots and scammers? They days where humans controlled discourse on the internet has flown past us. Anyone that attempts to decentralize will have deal with colossal torrents of attacking bots spitting 100s of gigabytes of data their way if they draw the ire of such forces. There may be islands of refuge on this water planet, but from this day forth understand the ocean is made of piss.
- beej71 2y ago
  One problem I've grappled with is how I could prove my humanity to you. I have a tiny little web page, some programming guides I've written, and no ads or tracking. So if you went there, you'd probably think I was human, or at least the site was run by a human who either wrote or had an AI write the material. How can I prove that I'm human and that I wrote the material? The closest I've been able to think of is some kind of web of trust thing, but that's only so good.
llm_trw 2y ago
LLMs are that. When you use tools like perplexity you get the feeling of the internet circa 2004 back. The future is here, currently it requires a credit card to access. You can start seeing how you'd use it locally too, the hardware requirements are too high today, but within the next 5 years they will become widely available.
- mondobe 2y ago
  What? The old-Internet feeling comes from the fact that everything was made by people - that's the whole point.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Turns out robots make for better people than people. Also I remember the refrain that "I'm just text on a screen dude" made more than once on the boards I used to visit at the time.
- openrisk 2y ago
  For me LLM's are on a different page of the tech book (the models/algorithms side). The Web as such being literally about computer networks, interconnectedness of people and machines and sharing information [1]. It is possible though that the more widespread adoption of data science / ML / AI stacks will make a newly decentralized Web more interesting (along the lines of federated learning etc.) It may take a while. You don't need gigantic language models to create interesting things in this direction but the current environment is not conducive, that is why it is not happening. Five to ten years is not an unreasonable projection (assuming nothing extraordinary happens in the meantime). [1] Perversely, LLM's would be much harder without the old Web making lots of data available, but that is a different story.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    We're missing the open source search engine, but LLM + obscure web pages makes for some interesting reading. Getting a mix up of different ideas is very much what first exposures to the internet were like. You had your towns ideas, then we went online and you had a wild world of ideas you'd never seen before. For a lot of us it was the first time we belonged anywhere.

pixl97 2y ago

You mean brimming with bots and scammers? They days where humans controlled discourse on the internet has flown past us. Anyone that attempts to decentralize will have deal with colossal torrents of attacking bots spitting 100s of gigabytes of data their way if they draw the ire of such forces. There may be islands of refuge on this water planet, but from this day forth understand the ocean is made of piss.

beej71 2y ago
One problem I've grappled with is how I could prove my humanity to you. I have a tiny little web page, some programming guides I've written, and no ads or tracking. So if you went there, you'd probably think I was human, or at least the site was run by a human who either wrote or had an AI write the material. How can I prove that I'm human and that I wrote the material? The closest I've been able to think of is some kind of web of trust thing, but that's only so good.

llm_trw 2y ago

LLMs are that. When you use tools like perplexity you get the feeling of the internet circa 2004 back. The future is here, currently it requires a credit card to access. You can start seeing how you'd use it locally too, the hardware requirements are too high today, but within the next 5 years they will become widely available.

mondobe 2y ago
What? The old-Internet feeling comes from the fact that everything was made by people - that's the whole point.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Turns out robots make for better people than people. Also I remember the refrain that "I'm just text on a screen dude" made more than once on the boards I used to visit at the time.
openrisk 2y ago
For me LLM's are on a different page of the tech book (the models/algorithms side). The Web as such being literally about computer networks, interconnectedness of people and machines and sharing information [1]. It is possible though that the more widespread adoption of data science / ML / AI stacks will make a newly decentralized Web more interesting (along the lines of federated learning etc.) It may take a while. You don't need gigantic language models to create interesting things in this direction but the current environment is not conducive, that is why it is not happening. Five to ten years is not an unreasonable projection (assuming nothing extraordinary happens in the meantime). [1] Perversely, LLM's would be much harder without the old Web making lots of data available, but that is a different story.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  We're missing the open source search engine, but LLM + obscure web pages makes for some interesting reading. Getting a mix up of different ideas is very much what first exposures to the internet were like. You had your towns ideas, then we went online and you had a wild world of ideas you'd never seen before. For a lot of us it was the first time we belonged anywhere.