the web
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Brian Picciano
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_posts/2021-01-14-the-web.md
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---
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title: >-
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The Web
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description: >-
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What is it good for?
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---
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With the recent crisis in the US's democratic process, there's been much abuzz
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in the world about social media's undoubted role in the whole debacle. The
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extent to which the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, etc, have
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played a role in the radicalization of large segments of the world's population
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is one popular topic. Another is the tactics those same companies are now
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employing to try and euthanize the monster they made so much ad money in
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creating.
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I don't want to talk about any of that; there is more to the web than
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social media. I want to talk about what the web could be, and to do that I want
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to first talk about what it has been.
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## Web 1.0
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In the 1950's computers were generally owned by large organizations like
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companies, universities, and governments. They were used to compute and manage
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large amounts of data, and each existed independently of the other.
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In the 60's protocols began to be developed which would allow them to
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communicate over large distances, and thereby share resources (both
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computational and informational).
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The funding of ARPANET by the US DoD led to the initial versions of the TCP/IP
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protocol in the 70's, still used today as the backbone of virtually all internet
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communication. Email also came about from ARPANET around this time.
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The 80s saw the growth of the internet across the world, as ARPANET gave way to
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NSFNET. It was during this time that the domain name system we use today was
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developed. At this point the internet use was still mostly for large
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non-commercial organizations; there was little commercial footprint, and little
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private access. The first commercially available ISP, which allowed access to
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the internet from private homes via dialup, wasn't launched until 1989.
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And so we find ourselves in the year 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) first
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proposed the World-Wide Web (WWW, or "the web"). You can find the original
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proposal, which is surprisingly short and non-technical,
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[here](https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html).
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From reading TBL's proposal it's clear that what he was after was some mechanism
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for hosting information on his machine in such a way that others could find and
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view it, without it needing to be explicitly sent to them. He includes the
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following under the "Applications" header:
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> The application of a universal hypertext system, once in place, will cover
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> many areas such as document registration, on-line help, project documentation,
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> news schemes and so on.
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But out of such a humble scope grew one of the most powerful forces of the 21st
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century. By the end of 1990 TBL had written the first HTML/HTTP browser and
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server. By the end of 1994 sites like IMDB, Yahoo, and Bianca's Smut Shack were
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live and being accessed by consumers. The web grew that fast.
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In my view the characteristic of the web which catalyzed its adoption so quickly
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was the place-ness of it. The web is not just a protocol for transferring
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information, like email, but instead is a _place_ where that information lives.
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Any one place could be freely linked to any other place, and so complex and
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interesting relations could be formed between people and ideas. The
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contributions people make on the web can reverberate farther than they would or
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could in any other medium precisely because those contributions aren't tied to
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some one-off event or a deteriorating piece of physical infrastructure, but are
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instead given a home which is both permanent and everywhere.
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The other advantage of the web, at the time, was its simplicity. HTML was so
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simple it was basically human-readable. A basic HTTP server could be implemented
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as a hobby project by anyone in any language. Hosting your own website was a
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relatively straightforward task which anyone with a computer and an ISP could
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undertake.
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This was the environment early adopters of the web found themselves in.
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## Web 2.0
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The infamous dot-com boom took place in 2001. I don't believe this was a failure
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inherent in the principles of the web itself, but instead was a product of
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people investing in a technology they didn't fully understand. The web, as it
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was then, wasn't really designed with money-making in mind. It certainly allowed
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for it, but that wasn't the use-case being addressed.
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But of course, in this world we live in, if there's money to be made, it will
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certainly be made.
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By 2003 the phrase "Web 2.0" started popping up. I remember this. To me "Web
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2.0" meant a new aesthetic on the web, complete with bubble buttons and centered
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fix-width paragraph boxes. But what "Web 2.0" actually signified wasn't related
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to any new technology or aesthetic. It was a new strategy for how companies
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could enable use of the web by non-expert users, i.e. users who don't have the
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inclination or means to host their own website. Web 2.0 was a strategy for
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giving everyone a _place_ of their own on the web.
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"Web 2.0" was merely a label given to a movement which had already been in
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motion for years. I think the following Wikipedia excerpt describes this period
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best:
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```
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In 2004, the term ["Web 2.0"] began its rise in popularity when O'Reilly Media
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and MediaLive hosted the first Web 2.0 conference. In their opening remarks,
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John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as
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Platform", where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon
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the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that
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"customers are building your business for you". They argued that the
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activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or
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pictures) could be "harnessed" to create value.
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```
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In other words, Web 2.0 turned the place-ness of the web into a commodity.
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Rather than expect everyone to host, or arrange for the hosting, of their own
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corner of the web, the technologists would do it for them for "free"! This
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coincided with the increasing complexity of the underlying technology of the
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web; websites grew to be flashy, interactive, and stateful applications which
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_did_ things rather than be places which _held_ things. The idea of a hyperlink,
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upon which the success of the web had been founded, became merely an
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implementation detail.
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And so the walled gardens began to be built. Myspace was founded in 2003,
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Facebook opened to the public in 2006, Digg (the precursor to reddit) was
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launched in 2004, Flickr launched in 2004 (and was bought by Yahoo in 2005),
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Google bought Blogger in 2003, and Twitter launched in 2006. In effect this
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period both opened the web up to everyone and established the way we still use
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it today.
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It's upon these foundations that current events unfold. We have platforms whose
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only incentive is towards capturing new users and holding their attention, to
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the exclusion of other platforms, so they can be advertised to. Users are
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enticed in because they are being offered a place on the web, a place of their
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own to express themselves from, in order to find out the worth of their
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expressions to the rest of the world. But they aren't expressing to the world at
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large, they are expressing to a social media platform, a business, and so only
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the most lucrative of voices are heard.
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So much for not wanting to talk about social media.
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## Web 3.0
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The new hot topic in crypto and hacker circles is "Web 3.0", or the
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decentralized web (dweb). The idea is that we can have all the good of the
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current web (the accessibility, utility, permanency, etc) without all the bad
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(the centralized platforms, censorship, advertising, etc). The way forward to
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this utopian dream is by building decentralized applications (dApps).
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dApps are constructed in a way where all the users of an application help to
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host all the stateful content of that application. If I, as a user, post an
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image to a dApp, the idea is that other users of that same dApp would lend their
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meager computer resources to ensure my image is never forgotten, and in turn I
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would lend mine for theirs.
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In practice building successful dApps is enormously difficult for many reasons,
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and really I'm not sure there _are_ any successful ones (to date). While I
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support the general sentiment behind them, I sometimes wonder about the
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efficacy. What people want from the web is a place they can call their own, a
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place from which they can express themselves and share their contributions with
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others with all the speed and pervasiveness that the internet offers. A dApp is
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just another walled garden with specific capabilities; it offers only free
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hosting, not free expression.
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## Web 2.0b
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I'm not here solely to complain (just mostly).
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Thinking back to Web 1.0, and specifically to the turning point between 1.0 and
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2.0, I'd like to propose that maybe we made a wrong turn. The issue at hand was
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that hosting one's own site was still too much of a technical burden, and the
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direction we went was towards having businesses host them for us. Perhaps there
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was another way.
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What are the specific difficulties with hosting one's own site? Here are the
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ones I can think of:
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* Bad tooling: basically none of the tools you're required to use (web server,
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TLS, DNS, your home router) are designed for the average person.
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* Aggregiously complex languages: making a site which looks half decent and can
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do the things you want requires a _lot_ of knowledge about the underlying
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languages (CSS, HTML, Javascript, and whatever your server is written in).
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* Single point-of-failure: if your machine is off, your site is down.
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* Security: it's important to stay ahead of the hackers, but it takes time to
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do so.
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* Hostile environment: this is separate from security, and includes difficulties
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like dynamic home IPs and bad ISP policies (such as asymetric upload/download
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speeds).
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These are each separate avenues of attack.
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Bad tooling is a result of the fact that devs generally build technology for
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themselves or their fellow devs, and only build for others when they're being
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paid to do it. This is merely an attitude problem.
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Complex languages are really a sub-category of bad tooling. The concesus seems
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to be that the average person isn't interested or capable of working in
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HTML/CSS/JS. This may be true today, but it wasn't always. Most of my friends in
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middle and high school were well within their interest and capability to create
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the most heinous MySpace pages the world has ever seen, using nothing but CSS
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generators and scraps of shitty JS they found lying around. So what changed? The
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tools we use to build those pages did.
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A hostile environment is not something any individual can do anything about, but
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in the capitalist system we exist in we can at least hold in faith the idea that
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eventually us customers will get what we want. It may take a long time, but all
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monopolies break eventually, and someone will eventually sell us the internet
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access we're asking for. If all other pieces are in place I think we'll have
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enough people asking to make a difference.
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For single point-of-failure we have to grant that more than one person will be
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involved, since the vast majority of people aren't going to be able to keep one
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machine online consistently, let alone two or more machines. But I think we all
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know at least one person who could keep a machine online with some reliability,
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and they probably know a couple of other people who could do so as well. What
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I'm proposing is that, rather than building tools for global decentralization,
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we need tools for local decentralization, aka federation. We can make it
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possible for a group of people to have their presence managed by a subset of
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themselves. Those with the ability could help to host the online presence of
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their family, friends, churches, etc, if given the right tools.
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Security is the hard one, but also in many ways isn't. What most people want
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from the web is a place from which to express themselves. Expression doesn't
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take much more than a static page, usually, and there's not much attacking one
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can do against a static page. Additionally, we've already established that
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there's going to be at least a _couple_ of technically minded people involved in
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hosting this thing.
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So that's my idea that I'd like to build towards. First among these ideas is
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that we need tools which can help people help each other host their content, and
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on top of that foundation a new web can be built which values honest expression
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rather than the lucrative madness which our current algorithms love so much.
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This project was already somewhat started by
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[Cryptorado](https://github.com/Cryptorado-Community/Cryptorado-Node) while I
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was a regular attendee, but since COVID started my attendance has fallen off.
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Hopefully one day it can resume. In the meantime I'm going to be working on
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setting up these tools for myself, and see how far I can get.
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@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ clean_title=$(echo "$title" |\
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)
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)
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description="$2"
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description="$2"
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if $(echo "$description" | grep -q '[^.$!]$'); then
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if $(echo "$description" | grep -q '[^.$!?]$'); then
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echo 'Description needs to be a complete sentence, with ending punctuation.'
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echo 'Description needs to be a complete sentence, with ending punctuation.'
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exit 1
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exit 1
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fi
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fi
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