A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going
141 comments
·September 9, 2025naet
To me "Web3" frequently feels more centralized than just the regular web.
I love that on the regular old internet I can stand up different websites, host them myself, and have anyone with a web connection be able to pull it up on their computer and see whatever it is I'm putting out there. There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do.
That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I can put whatever I want, you can put whatever you want, anyone can access it. Buying into some more distributed web3 type hosting feels more centralized at least in the way that I personally feel. I have to buy into a specific blockchain or platform, host in a specific way, hope that it gets picked up by other distributors, deal with hashing and immutability, etc. Maybe it's a difference in understanding of the word decentralized, or a different emphasis on certain parts of the definition.
pixl97
>That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized.
I mean that is how the internet used to work.
>I can put whatever I want.
Then I make a series of false reports and copyright claims and your ISP boots you.
>anyone can access it.
Anyone can DDOS it, forcing you behind a centralized system like cloudflare.
The internet has turned into a dark forest. Standing out and saying something controversial will ensure something shows up to eat you.
AfterHIA
The real Web 3.0 is the Ted Nelson internet we never got.
fluoridation
Wasn't Project Xanadu just HTML with backlinks? I was just thinking about it in the shower yesterday and realized I had no idea how it could have possibly worked for cross-site links, unless the web was either fully centralized, or fully distributed.
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oytis
The problem with web3 is that it's a solution in search of a problem. People have decided they should build something around blockchain instead of starting with what they want to build and why
tolerance
Ahh! It says a lot about the state of “Web 3.0” that I forgot that it was even a thing. I was hoping that IEEE Spectrum would cover the actual Web re: the efforts to un-silo it that I reckon will result in more silos with just less volume than before.
WesolyKubeczek
Isn't "more silos" the desired outcome, more or less? Has the web been anything but many silos? Of course it might have been different when everyone who wanted to have a presence on it was expected to build their own homepage. Now billions are online, courtesy of their phone, and don't even know what a computer is. So they naturally fall into silos where they and their friends are welcome.
nostrademons
There was a point where "the web" was literally a web, and it was literally "linked" together by...get this: hyperlinks!
I think that what killed that is that hyperlinks work great for browsing & discovery, but as the web matures, a lot of people want to use it for task-oriented things. And all of the Big Tech companies that came afterwards succeeded because they built a task-oriented interface that co-opted the links that were there before and turned them into ways to accomplish the task. Google took hyperlinks, used them to compute PageRank, and then used that to create a better way to solve the task of finding specific information. Facebook took user activity, aggregated it, presented it in a feed, and used it to improve the task of killing time. Amazon took product pages and direct links and used them as lead-gen to increase the ease with which you can buy things. Stripe took embedded Javascript and used it to make paying for things easier; Uber and Lyft took mobile phones and used it to make transportation easier; AirBnB took these large Internet markets and used it to make vacation rentals easier.
Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?"
stahorn
I've become a bit cynic, and I think it will take time until it becomes better. Eventually though, there will be large protests that turn into law that change the dynamics of the now very centralized web.
London was known for having so thick fog from burning coal, and in 1952 it was such a bad event that 4k people died and 100k got badly affected from it. It is was started the Clean Air Act of 1956, that eventually led to clean (cleaner?) air in London.
Another one is Amsterdam. It was a car-centric city up until the 70s, where they started to rebuild it to be a walkable and cyclable city. This started because people protested the dangerous roads, which culminated with the "Stop de Kindermoord" protest.
Maybe if we live long enough, we get to experience a decentralized web again. Next time will come when it's supported by laws, that in turn stand atop a large understanding in the population of why those laws are good and needed.
tolerance
> Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?”
Nice observation and can speak to why anyone intent on selling you content writes a “user story” to outline the tasks that lead to a purchase or engagement.
tolerance
Yes, I think so. I agree with you actually. But it doesn’t always seem like that’s the desired outcome for some people when they mention “decentralization”.
I have a particular interest group in mind here, who lament the current state of the Web to an extent unique to our time. It seems like they’re upset with their loss of agency/authority online. When a free, ad-less *.blogspot.com or LiveJournal presence could net you some clout you’d be precluded from otherwise in the real world.
Take for example any evidence of disapproval you may find from the proponents of ActivityPub toward the development of the AT Protocol in parallel. Also notice how moderation features on these federated platforms essentially centralize them and their respective enclaves. The desire for interoperability between social media platforms conflicts with the imminent re-siloing being examined. Or is it just the same ends with new wiry means attached?
“Decentralization” in this context seems more like separating from the whole with the hopes of replacing it. And I’m not confident that these many new “wholes” can resist jockeying one after the other for political influence.
mips_avatar
I think a different type of decentralized web is growing. It's in Hetzner datacenters but it's a lot more "free". We're at an age where besides GPU inference an indie can afford to create cutting edge web services. There's still players that could really harm this new ecosystem (looking at you cloudflare) but the fact that the majors like Google and Facebook tried to kill it and failed to kill it proves something.
musha68k
Missed opportunities over decades, in EU especially.
Which areas support community‑owned or open‑access networks that enable multi‑ISP competition and affordable symmetric service (aka "true internet")?
k__
I think, the Permaweb is on a good way.
They have decentralised storage (Arweave), decentralized HTTP gateways (ar.io), and decentralised name service (ArNS).
Karrot_Kream
What's some content on Arweave that's good to follow?
verdverm
We're reimagining what web 3 means in atprotocol, without the blockchain and probably avoiding the term "web 3"
koolala
Is there a way to use it without making an account? I really want a permission-less way for two browser clients to send a simple message on the public web.
evbogue
a colleague of mine recently insisted that bittorrent be included in web3 techs since it uses hashing. if we toss torrents under the title of web3 then it's been a huge success.
atproto, however, could learn a lot from torrents and all of the other protos since then. for example, their recent push to centralize bookmarks.
Terr_
> a colleague of mine recently insisted that bittorrent be included in web3 techs since it uses hashing
Related pet-peeve: Folks who say "there's still great promise in private blockchains." This is equivalent to saying that self-balancing Segway-style devices can still become the dominant mode of transportation if we juuuuust make them bigger, enclosed, and add another pair of wheels so that they don't have to self-balance anymore.
verdverm
Yea, the bookmarks thing is interesting, and wearing my conspiracy theory hat (it's not the red one), I wonder if it's not an experiment to see what the people will tolerate or how they will respond. It could equally be attributed to an early win for the new product manager, finally delivering a long requested feature in a POC form factor, while private data gets figured out.
I'm highly involved in the private data work and we'll have a better bookmarks in the long run
I like that atprotocol sits in the middle of web 2 & 3, ideas from both without being beholden to either
verdverm
one thing I would like in atproto is some form of smart contracts
(transactional semantics over accounts and xrpc calls)
evbogue
agreed! we should continue this discussion over on atproto
1970-01-01
Article title was either changed or wasn't correct to begin with!
I'm 100% OK with "Web3" dying a slow death. Garbage in, garbage out.
righthand
I was just browsing Neocities yesterday and having fun online for the first time in a long long long long long time.
koolala
If only we had an totally open universal way to signal between two WebRTC clients. It wouldn't be perfect but it would go a very long way.
jckahn
https://github.com/dmotz/trystero is the closest we currently have.
koolala
I wish one of these networks could be the go-to clear default choice. Options are good, but it would be great to have a best option for a large discoverable community. Actually, their default choice Nostr sounds pretty awesome https://nostr.com/
halfmatthalfcat
868mhz/902mhz ISM bands
koolala
That would be pretty cool if everyday computers could do that. I'm wishing for something that would work in a browser like with HTTP.
Web3 and blockchain are not the only form of decentralization. Email is a decentralized protocol that has stood the test of time.
The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.