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+---
+title: >-
+    The Web
+description: >-
+    What is it good for?
+series: nebula
+tags: tech
+---
+
+With the recent crisis in the US's democratic process, there's been much abuzz
+in the world about social media's undoubted role in the whole debacle. The
+extent to which the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, etc, have
+played a role in the radicalization of large segments of the world's population
+is one popular topic. Another is the tactics those same companies are now
+employing to try and euthanize the monster they made so much ad money in
+creating.
+
+I don't want to talk about any of that; there is more to the web than
+social media. I want to talk about what the web could be, and to do that I want
+to first talk about what it has been.
+
+## Web 1.0
+
+In the 1950's computers were generally owned by large organizations like
+companies, universities, and governments. They were used to compute and manage
+large amounts of data, and each existed independently of the other.
+
+In the 60's protocols began to be developed which would allow them to
+communicate over large distances, and thereby share resources (both
+computational and informational).
+
+The funding of ARPANET by the US DoD led to the initial versions of the TCP/IP
+protocol in the 70's, still used today as the backbone of virtually all internet
+communication. Email also came about from ARPANET around this time.
+
+The 80s saw the growth of the internet across the world, as ARPANET gave way to
+NSFNET. It was during this time that the domain name system we use today was
+developed. At this point the internet use was still mostly for large
+non-commercial organizations; there was little commercial footprint, and little
+private access. The first commercially available ISP, which allowed access to
+the internet from private homes via dialup, wasn't launched until 1989.
+
+And so we find ourselves in the year 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) first
+proposed the World-Wide Web (WWW, or "the web"). You can find the original
+proposal, which is surprisingly short and non-technical,
+[here](https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html).
+
+From reading TBL's proposal it's clear that what he was after was some mechanism
+for hosting information on his machine in such a way that others could find and
+view it, without it needing to be explicitly sent to them. He includes the
+following under the "Applications" header:
+
+> The application of a universal hypertext system, once in place, will cover
+> many areas such as document registration, on-line help, project documentation,
+> news schemes and so on.
+
+But out of such a humble scope grew one of the most powerful forces of the 21st
+century. By the end of 1990 TBL had written the first HTML/HTTP browser and
+server. By the end of 1994 sites like IMDB, Yahoo, and Bianca's Smut Shack were
+live and being accessed by consumers. The web grew that fast.
+
+In my view the characteristic of the web which catalyzed its adoption so quickly
+was the place-ness of it. The web is not just a protocol for transferring
+information, like email, but instead is a _place_ where that information lives.
+Any one place could be freely linked to any other place, and so complex and
+interesting relations could be formed between people and ideas. The
+contributions people make on the web can reverberate farther than they would or
+could in any other medium precisely because those contributions aren't tied to
+some one-off event or a deteriorating piece of physical infrastructure, but are
+instead given a home which is both permanent and everywhere.
+
+The other advantage of the web, at the time, was its simplicity. HTML was so
+simple it was basically human-readable. A basic HTTP server could be implemented
+as a hobby project by anyone in any language. Hosting your own website was a
+relatively straightforward task which anyone with a computer and an ISP could
+undertake.
+
+This was the environment early adopters of the web found themselves in.
+
+## Web 2.0
+
+The infamous dot-com boom took place in 2001. I don't believe this was a failure
+inherent in the principles of the web itself, but instead was a product of
+people investing in a technology they didn't fully understand. The web, as it
+was then, wasn't really designed with money-making in mind. It certainly allowed
+for it, but that wasn't the use-case being addressed.
+
+But of course, in this world we live in, if there's money to be made, it will
+certainly be made.
+
+By 2003 the phrase "Web 2.0" started popping up. I remember this. To me "Web
+2.0" meant a new aesthetic on the web, complete with bubble buttons and centered
+fix-width paragraph boxes. But what "Web 2.0" actually signified wasn't related
+to any new technology or aesthetic. It was a new strategy for how companies
+could enable use of the web by non-expert users, i.e. users who don't have the
+inclination or means to host their own website. Web 2.0 was a strategy for
+giving everyone a _place_ of their own on the web.
+
+"Web 2.0" was merely a label given to a movement which had already been in
+motion for years. I think the following Wikipedia excerpt describes this period
+best:
+
+
+> In 2004, the term ["Web 2.0"] began its rise in popularity when O'Reilly Media
+and MediaLive hosted the first Web 2.0 conference. In their opening remarks,
+John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as
+Platform", where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon
+the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that
+"customers are building your business for you". They argued that the
+activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or
+pictures) could be "harnessed" to create value.
+
+
+In other words, Web 2.0 turned the place-ness of the web into a commodity.
+Rather than expect everyone to host, or arrange for the hosting, of their own
+corner of the web, the technologists would do it for them for "free"! This
+coincided with the increasing complexity of the underlying technology of the
+web; websites grew to be flashy, interactive, and stateful applications which
+_did_ things rather than be places which _held_ things. The idea of a hyperlink,
+upon which the success of the web had been founded, became merely an
+implementation detail.
+
+And so the walled gardens began to be built. Myspace was founded in 2003,
+Facebook opened to the public in 2006, Digg (the precursor to reddit) was
+launched in 2004, Flickr launched in 2004 (and was bought by Yahoo in 2005),
+Google bought Blogger in 2003, and Twitter launched in 2006. In effect this
+period both opened the web up to everyone and established the way we still use
+it today.
+
+It's upon these foundations that current events unfold. We have platforms whose
+only incentive is towards capturing new users and holding their attention, to
+the exclusion of other platforms, so they can be advertised to. Users are
+enticed in because they are being offered a place on the web, a place of their
+own to express themselves from, in order to find out the worth of their
+expressions to the rest of the world. But they aren't expressing to the world at
+large, they are expressing to a social media platform, a business, and so only
+the most lucrative of voices are heard.
+
+So much for not wanting to talk about social media.
+
+## Web 3.0
+
+The new hot topic in crypto and hacker circles is "Web 3.0", or the
+decentralized web (dweb). The idea is that we can have all the good of the
+current web (the accessibility, utility, permanency, etc) without all the bad
+(the centralized platforms, censorship, advertising, etc). The way forward to
+this utopian dream is by building decentralized applications (dApps).
+
+dApps are constructed in a way where all the users of an application help to
+host all the stateful content of that application. If I, as a user, post an
+image to a dApp, the idea is that other users of that same dApp would lend their
+meager computer resources to ensure my image is never forgotten, and in turn I
+would lend mine for theirs.
+
+In practice building successful dApps is enormously difficult for many reasons,
+and really I'm not sure there _are_ any successful ones (to date). While I
+support the general sentiment behind them, I sometimes wonder about the
+efficacy. What people want from the web is a place they can call their own, a
+place from which they can express themselves and share their contributions with
+others with all the speed and pervasiveness that the internet offers. A dApp is
+just another walled garden with specific capabilities; it offers only free
+hosting, not free expression.
+
+## Web 2.0b
+
+I'm not here solely to complain (just mostly).
+
+Thinking back to Web 1.0, and specifically to the turning point between 1.0 and
+2.0, I'd like to propose that maybe we made a wrong turn. The issue at hand was
+that hosting one's own site was still too much of a technical burden, and the
+direction we went was towards having businesses host them for us. Perhaps there
+was another way.
+
+What are the specific difficulties with hosting one's own site? Here are the
+ones I can think of:
+
+* Bad tooling: basically none of the tools you're required to use (web server,
+  TLS, DNS, your home router) are designed for the average person.
+
+* Aggregiously complex languages: making a site which looks half decent and can
+  do the things you want requires a _lot_ of knowledge about the underlying
+  languages (CSS, HTML, Javascript, and whatever your server is written in).
+
+* Single point-of-failure: if your machine is off, your site is down.
+
+* Security: it's important to stay ahead of the hackers, but it takes time to
+  do so.
+
+* Hostile environment: this is separate from security, and includes difficulties
+  like dynamic home IPs and bad ISP policies (such as asymetric upload/download
+  speeds).
+
+These are each separate avenues of attack.
+
+Bad tooling is a result of the fact that devs generally build technology for
+themselves or their fellow devs, and only build for others when they're being
+paid to do it. This is merely an attitude problem.
+
+Complex languages are really a sub-category of bad tooling. The concesus seems
+to be that the average person isn't interested or capable of working in
+HTML/CSS/JS. This may be true today, but it wasn't always. Most of my friends in
+middle and high school were well within their interest and capability to create
+the most heinous MySpace pages the world has ever seen, using nothing but CSS
+generators and scraps of shitty JS they found lying around. So what changed? The
+tools we use to build those pages did.
+
+A hostile environment is not something any individual can do anything about, but
+in the capitalist system we exist in we can at least hold in faith the idea that
+eventually us customers will get what we want. It may take a long time, but all
+monopolies break eventually, and someone will eventually sell us the internet
+access we're asking for. If all other pieces are in place I think we'll have
+enough people asking to make a difference.
+
+For single point-of-failure we have to grant that more than one person will be
+involved, since the vast majority of people aren't going to be able to keep one
+machine online consistently, let alone two or more machines. But I think we all
+know at least one person who could keep a machine online with some reliability,
+and they probably know a couple of other people who could do so as well. What
+I'm proposing is that, rather than building tools for global decentralization,
+we need tools for local decentralization, aka federation. We can make it
+possible for a group of people to have their presence managed by a subset of
+themselves. Those with the ability could help to host the online presence of
+their family, friends, churches, etc, if given the right tools.
+
+Security is the hard one, but also in many ways isn't. What most people want
+from the web is a place from which to express themselves. Expression doesn't
+take much more than a static page, usually, and there's not much attacking one
+can do against a static page. Additionally, we've already established that
+there's going to be at least a _couple_ of technically minded people involved in
+hosting this thing.
+
+So that's my idea that I'd like to build towards. First among these ideas is
+that we need tools which can help people help each other host their content, and
+on top of that foundation a new web can be built which values honest expression
+rather than the lucrative madness which our current algorithms love so much.
+
+This project was already somewhat started by
+[Cryptorado](https://github.com/Cryptorado-Community/Cryptorado-Node) while I
+was a regular attendee, but since COVID started my attendance has fallen off.
+Hopefully one day it can resume. In the meantime I'm going to be working on
+setting up these tools for myself, and see how far I can get.