I like this piece: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html in his conclusion he points out: "*We should try to reduce the burden of building software" Go Future of coding ^^*

It's a great article; finally someone expressing what I've been thinking for so long - nice to have some confirmation from a famous person!

I think there's plenty of good critiques here, but I do want to point out that ‘Web3’ is a very broad umbrella term that's often used for disingenuous marketing hype. There's just such a big chasm between the voices in the space that get millions-billions in VC funding vs the really interesting work going on a bit under the surface. E.g. Ceptr, Holochain, Protocol Labs/IPFS/IPLD, Commons Stack (as one of many groups oriented around commons and public goods), etc. So many really great researchers and research communities that have a lot to offer our community here. And vice versa. It's about a lot more than decentralisation or currency and

Web3 != crypto

. it's sad to see so much public attention around the least interesting parts of the space like bitcoin or etherium or the many predatory businesses that have emerged.

It would be great if the people doing interesting research in this space could come up with a label different from "web3". But some of them seem to be clearly riding on the "web3" wave, perhaps because of the visibility this gives. IPFS, for example, is a project I have been following for years with much interest (and I am even using it a bit), but I am not so happy about their communication which is very much "IPFS is a complement to blockchains".

Moxie's piece is very good. The other, where they say dApps "cannot be shutdown by any Nation State" is hilarious.

@Konrad Hinsen I agree. Can't see it happening though, it's similar to some in this community preferring the term “medium of thought” or something other that “tools for thought”, it's just got so much momentum it's hard to see it changing.

@Jack Rusher well there was this case in Catalonia where they used IPFS to get some voting or information outside which the government of Spain didn’t like , does that count?

Yes good piece. It’s generally worthwhile, and fun, to point out glaring contradictions in what tech is purporting to be and what it really is. In the crypto / smart contracts space there are plenty more outside of the tech itself to point out especially those dealing with socio-economic issues. However, web3 is not crypto or openesea as @Orion Reed you point out (I’ve been trying for a while now to sort out what web3 is and can’t get a clear picture, but p2p is very promising and I think there is interesting work done and to be done there). @curious_reader your question regarding people not wanting to run their own servers. Yeah, even programmers don’t want to run servers (as Moxie points out). But I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that “people don’t want to code” or “people just want good features in their app, they don’t want to change anything” etc etc. There are two issues here. On the one hand it’s vacuous, because if the environments to do these sorts of things are essentially thoughtless, then we should not expect people to want to do these sorts of things. After all, it takes a certain kind of person to want to stare at a terminal full of characters all day, even if you have that solarized color-scheme dialed in just right and even if it is a means to some better end. On the other hand, how do you know if you don’t actually provide people with reasonable expressive, understandable and malleable environments? How do you know if you have never tried? Historical examples show us there is a good chance they actually do. (And what does it mean to run a server really? spin up a “remote” VM in some “cloud” infrastructure which can see the rest of the world and your “client” is set to communicate with. Under the right conditions that could be the same as starting your application or, if we put a lid on the idea of siloed applications, then just starting up your “local” machine .)

@curious_reader "Catalonia didn't stop" is a very different claim from "nation states can't stop". There weren't man dApps working in Kazakhstan last week, for example. People really don't want to run their own servers and mostly shouldn't run their own servers in the sense that he means it (that is in anything like the current technological basis for that sort of thing). There should, however, be convenient computation-as-utility services that people can spin up when they want them. I suspect that he's correct that they are very likely to end up as centralized as gmail in practice, though. Which humans' values should we better translate into technology?

"Which humans' values should we better translate into technology?" yeah thats the question