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My First Impressions of Web3
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
The odroid seems to be at best only the h/w side of the sort of thing I was suggesting/imagining. It's a funky little box, and that's great, but what about the software? "Mom, nginx is gunked up again, do you want me to restart it or just reboot the server?" "Sam, did you put my new portfolio pictures on the site yet? Sorry Jan, ran into some size and format problems and am still working on it". Etc. etc.
For those who have more money than time, Synology NAS devices include mobile apps for common use cases, e.g. photo sharing. There's apparently an open-source clone called XPenology. For simple photo backup, Photosync works on all major desktop/mobile operating systems and can sync to a wide range of local or cloud storage. After 2 decades and billions of investment in web services, it's not realistic to expect a gene…
> After 2 decades and billions of investment in web services, it's not realistic to expect a generic "home server" to serve all possible use cases. Those that work best are usually based on an open protocol (e.g. WebDAV, SSH/SCP, SMB).
Surely HTTP is the common, open protocol here? Other than email, at least. Is anyone using SMB-from-the-cloud for network file systems? Are they serious? :)
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#353> 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…
His point is that a majority of people don't want to bother with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you could build your own car, very few want to. Often they don't even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get them from home to work and back again without killing them.
Yeah and I think the point here is that the cognitive overload is unnecessary.
Most people don't want to build their own car but most people would rather own their own car instead of rent one every time they need to go somewhere. In the server world, the options are to build or rent, there's no real option to just buy one that works already. Even having to set your rear view mirrors and seat position is worthwhile, even having to check tire pressure periodically is worthwhile, to continue the car analogy. If we could buy a box that we plug into the wall, and have simple minimal maintenance and setup UX, like a car, or even like a desktop or mobile device, is not impossible. But it doesn't really exist.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#354This is a really good and well=researched article. I think it highlights a lot of current problems with the existing web3 ecosystem. A few thoughts after reading it:
- For NFTs in particular, I agree that the ecosystem is way too centered around OpenSea. But things also seem to be generally moving in the right direction here too. I've seen a lot of new exchanges pop up recently, some of which put more of an emphasis on decentralization (such as zora [1]). There are also some new standards on the royalty front [2]. Exchanges may or may not pay attention to it, but it's at least a start.
- The ecosystem's current centralization around Infura and Alchemy is also concerning. But as with the other issues, I think there's a definite path towards improvement. In the meantime, choosing an Ethereum node service feels kind of like choosing an ISP. But at least I'm not bound to a single service by physical architecture.
- In the absence of any improvements to Ethereum's scalability, I don't think it has much of a future. Sure, you can do some interesting things on it today, but high gas prices and low tx throughput make it impractical for many applications and most internet users. That said, there seems to be a lot of resources being thrown at various scalability solutions. Whether or not we see them in the near future is one story, but there's at least a viable roadmap, which makes me optimistic. And I think a lot of the centralization issues are a direct result of the scalability issues. So as the latter improves, I'd expect the former to improve as well.
- I disagree with the analysis that OpenSea would be much better as a centralized service. Part of what makes it valuable is that it can (fairly easily, but no seamlessly) integrate with other software (contracts) deployed to a global public network. I'd imagine it would be very difficult for OpenSea to get off the ground if they had to build their own general purpose contract VM that thousands of people would be willing to build on top of. On top of that, it would be a lot harder to tell a convincing story about what happens to peoples NFTs if they go out of business. However, if scalability doesn't improve, I agree that OpenSea and Coinbase will likely move in an increasingly centralized direction until most of the web3 components are stripped out.
- I definitely agree that people (myself included) don't want to run their own servers, but I wonder if Ethereum's Proof of Stake will change things. Supposedly I can run a validator on a raspberry pi. So if there's enough of a financial incentive to keep one running, I may do so.
[1] https://zora.co/ [2] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory you should be able to build a new NFT marketplace and airdrop the shit out of it to replace OpenSea.
And in theory I can build a social network and become bigger than Facebook. The reality however is that market dynamics, acquisition costs, network effects etc prevent this from happening. And these aren't things that crypto can really solve.
No you can't - the social graph is private.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#356I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked. [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."
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…
The concern is that since these companies are iterating faster than the protocol and providing their own API services that apps/products built on these platforms will not in fact be portable, and in practice will suffer from the same lock-in and network effects as web2.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#357> 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…
I'd agree that running a server is easy.
I built one for my company once. It ran on a standard PC (early 2000's).
But for some reason it never worked from my house. (Rogers ISP in Canada)
It took me hours and hours to find out my ISP didn't allow me to run a server. BellCanada ISP did, so the server worked on my co-workers system perfectly.
To be allowed to run the server I would have had to pay an extra 200$ a month, and be classed a business address.
It's not just that the tech is hard, the ISP's don't want it. So they gate keep.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#358> 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…
I think this is an excellent point. People will run all sorts of things they don't directly interface with if the setup and functionality is low friction. People run routers for example. If you had to SSH into your router and troubleshoot it just to figure out why you're not getting connectivity people wouldn't do it. Unplug it for 5 seconds and plug it back in? Still frustrating, but the UX has low friction. If you…
I agree, except for the part about this being physical hardware rather than a cloud thing. I find it very difficult to imagine even 10% of America buying something like this; a likelier model is, imagine that your typical $50/mo wireless plan included a $5/mo virtual server, and an app to manage it that looks like an easier version of cpanel.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. I'd like to make this experience better rather than give up and give in to centralization. I know others have different priorities, but I don't need them to use my servers. I just need them to interoperate minimally.
> rather than give up and give in to centralization As for why Marlinspike might have abandoned the goal of decentralization, I think Upton Sinclair might have some insight.
I don't follow ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#360I always had trouble understanding what web3 was all about because I just couldn't figure out why anyone would be excited for it. I found this article to be excellent at explaining what the platform is but I still can't figure out why people keep bringing up this topic when it's clearly a classic example of a "Solution in Search of a Problem".
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