> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will
They would if it's an app on their phone. Currently that's not possible due to the constraints of battery life and, to a lesser degree, mobile coverage and data plan limits.
My First Impressions of Web3
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#142> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd…
Regarding your last sentence, I think that's fine.
I know Moxie criticizes people for saying “It’s early days still" but I really do think it's early days and NFTs have driven crypto into the mainstream too quickly.
Crypto researchers are still chipping away at the math and computer science required to bring the web3 vision to life. What's unfortunate is I've yet to see an article on hacker news about this research and, instead, articles about the hacked together shit that is unfortunately the face of web3 at the current moment.
If you're interested, I'd recommend people check out some of the following topics:
- Smart Wallets for better UX for your average user.
- Zero-Knowledge Proofs (and zk-snarks, zk-starks).
- Rollups (specifically zkRollups) for scalability.
- Single-slot finality for fast transaction confirmation.
- Ethereum Sharding and Data-Availability Sampling. Again for scalability.
- Sign-In With Ethereum.
- And of course, Proof-Of-Stake (specifically Ethereum's Casper algorithm which is being tested right now).
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#143> Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point.
This is almost entirely an educational/labor force issue, combined with a slight preference for the nominal hardware flexibility of cloud setups. The tech community focus from the dawn of the web until today has been overwhelmingly on getting people and tools to be better at creating and managing website content, whereas the traditional sysadmin stuff required to run "your own servers" with contemporary server technology has been viewed with both a level of disdain and also utter intimidation. Finding someone who can do React or Angular for your project might not be trivial, but finding someone who could actually run your servers for you ... much harder.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#144While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat. Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pi…
Art Blocks is completely on-chain :)
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#145Sorry. My "specific" take: Edited and self-censored due to lack of "substance" on the topic.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#146Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear with concise and incisive arguments.
His argument here is that web3, as it exists today, isn't actually decentralized. Also: > These technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immedi…
No, the issue is that he is against a decentralization generally.
He opposes it for Signal.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#147> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. Not really much related to web3/crypto topics, but I think this is an indictment of servers, not people. If managing a server were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures, and yes, to store their bitcoins or other digital secrets - they just don't want to manage a unix or windows s…
while all true; its also true no one wants to run their own servers.
the problems are practical. power and heat. noise. theft or disaster => backups; 3-2-1. updates, botnets, firewalls, static/external ips. ssh, vpn, or port forwarding. vlans? scaling? trust?
each of these things is a rabbit hole of problems and issues to solve.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#148> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd…
> middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a Nintendo". Using a middle aged woman as a stand-in for technologically unsophisticated user is a pretty negative stereotype both of older people and women: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_...
yes, now I use "C-Suite manager" instead.
"So simple, a C-Suite manager could do it"
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that in practice most people probably use those two services? As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." The potential for single points of failure (or even intentional abuse) does exist because of this de fac…
> As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2 juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't need to use them, sure. You can start your own social network. It's just expensive and inconvenient. This is what…
Except that you do need to use Google and Facebook if you want to interact with their data. They literally gate-keep the access to their data. It's not just inconvenient to host your own server that discovers peers and syncs the entire log of all historical events on the Facebook social network and allows you to write new events to that log which those peers will recognize. That's impossible (or at least, it would require some significant and very illegal hacking effort).
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#150> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, ins…
You’re going to run into a problem right off the bat: Your home network is likely behind a NAT and has an IP assigned by your ISP that can change at any time. You’ll need to tunnel through a server in the cloud somewhere (or use a tool like ngrok that tunnels through a server in the cloud). And now that proxy server is “really” the server, because if the business providing the tunnel decides you’re using too much of their bandwidth, they can throttle you, and if you don’t want to get throttled you’ll likely need to pay by the GB/month for a premium tunneling service. You could make your own tunneling service with an EC2 instance, but it’s the same difference: You’re paying AWS, and the EC2 server is now your “real” server.
As far as I can tell (and I’ve looked pretty hard) there’s no good way to run a website from your house without tunneling unless you have a very unusual house or a very unusual ISP.