Gregory's Server@EposVox decentralized white papers and peer review is a very valid web3 use case
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67 comments
 @EposVox so who hosts the data, and what are the peer review consensus validation systems? If it’s already free then why are the publishers worth billions of dollars? Everyone says web2 solves this just fine and then kind of just don’t account for the fact that taxpayers are paying to paywall their own research they funded so a few pointless companies can make billions of dollars in the process? How can anyone be OK with this?! @EposVox we should be academically careful to separate crypto profiteering from decentralized distributed consensus building systems with content addressable data. I see so many people in tech throwing the baby out with the bath water on these topics right now and I can’t wrap my head around it. We’re defending a system right now that almost no one I’ve ever spoken to perceives as just, or financially responsible. @Torfinn @EposVox Many journals (including those I publish in and review for) are published by academic societies or other non-profit bodies. They can be funded by a combination of library agreements, direct funding and ancillary revenue. Academic libraries and abstracting services are also very good at making sure material is preserved; that’s precisely their job. The problems lie elsewhere. @davidjamesweir @EposVox I’d love to see this be the standard rather than the exception but it seems like if you’re a neuroscientist doing research on something big you’re surely trying to get published in one of the big name for profit journals in order to gain the credit and prestige associated with them and I think that’s indicative of a system/ not situational issue. @risottobias @EposVox so subscribe to every universities rss feed and then locally index the data to make it searchable and just search out peer review results independently? That seems very practical 🤣  @Torfinn @EposVox same problem exists in both a private journal - and for web3 would still exist in the form of "if there's no university to make the content, it doesn't end up on web3" - both twitter and web3 rely on others to add value http and RSS are just a means of transmitting data a university website is a relatively cheap billboard to put things on.  @Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox *sigh* What level of redundancy is acceptable to you, and how many trees are you willing to burn down to get that level of redundancy? Because IMO a file hosted on a few thousand servers is about as redundant as I could practically imagine. @mav @risottobias @EposVox YES!!!! IPFS content addressable data has the potential to unscrew up so much of the ridiculously unnecessary storage practices we’ve just chosen to accept as how things are done. It’s relieving to see someone get it in the wilds out here. If you haven’t seen it I’d highly recommend Joe Armstrongs(RIP) computer science talk “the mess we’re in” @mav @risottobias @EposVox I wasn’t even attempting to address this problem but it’s a huge one that shockingly most folks building systems today don’t even conceive of as a problem because it’s just the “options we have” @Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox I guess I didn't even really consider IPFS as 'web3', since it's a totally reasonable solution to a real problem instead of grafting a blockchain on a currency and calling it revolutionary That said, you could accomplish many of the same goals with, say, SyncThing. Or rsync, if you're feeling particularly masochistic. @mav @risottobias @EposVox everyone that built or is presently building new features for IPFS certainly consider it web3 😜 in fact I’d say most of us think it’s one of the most important web3 primitives. It’s certainly not web2 that’s for sure. @Torfinn @mav @risottobias web 2 and web 3 are marketing terms so you’re going to have a hard time avoiding association with bullshit used for marketing when using marketing terms @EposVox @mav @risottobias when you have an entire tech stack that requires browser plugins to even access I think it’s reasonable to call it more than marketing. Maybe once a browser can natively support some of these primitives we can have that argument but for now there’s an entire translation layer required to even try. Brave is getting there @Torfinn @mav @risottobias I mean… there’s plenty of protocols that have been around for decades that don’t work in common web browsers lol Web3 as a concept is just marketing, was my point. It’s not like we’d only still be on the 2nd version of the web or something lmao @EposVox @mav @risottobias that’s fair. However, arguably this is an entire ecosystem of interdependent protocols which build on one another. I wouldn’t exactly put some one off open source project that presently has no real adoption in that same category. What would you call all this stuff? NFT’s, IPFS, decentralized finance? These things couldn’t be further apart in data model/schemas but simultaneously they leverage the same tech stack/principles. @mav @EposVox @risottobias I have to ask have you actually read the IPFS white paper? https://github.com/ipfs/papers/blob/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf @risottobias @mav @EposVox so what you don’t like about web3 primitives is that they prioritize digital chain of custody and you disagree with digital ownership? @Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox creating digital scarcity from objects that shouldn't be scarce is more capitalism. In a world that needs a lot less capitalism. So this gets into things that I would call "evil" DRM is bad and so is this. @Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox suddenly this place feels a lot more like Twitter. @mav @risottobias @EposVox I don’t know how to say this in a way that isn’t capitalistic but I have data I may not want to share with you but I hope to store and I don’t expect someone to provide that service to me entirely for free although I really like the idea that you could store that data for me and make enough money to justify doing it without giving a bunch of money to AWS at a cost that equates to the cost of running the network and not incentivizing some big organization @Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox But that's not a function of IPFS, you're talking about something like Filecoin. You could just as easily do that with a handshake agreement and a direct value transfer of your choice, and save a lot of trees. There’s a really easy way to fix that. Bing! I just fixed my feed. @Torfinn @EposVox @risottobias I haven't no. Please tell me it doesn't use a blockchain. @Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox yeah, I'm uncertain how you tell the difference. I really thought 'web3' was synonymous with 'blockchain'. So is SyncThing web3? @mav @risottobias @EposVox id never looked into this but this doesn’t seem much different than a distributed hash table at least in principle. So if I were forced to describe this I’d call web2 tech stack leveraging a web3 primitive with the block protocol they describe. We do something like this with our IPfS network indexer building a blockchain if announcement messages leveraging mostly web2 stack but a web3 primitive @mav @risottobias @EposVox to be fair this is an argument people building have all the time. Where is this project at in a x, y, graph of decentralized/distributed vs centrally usable. It never ends. There are endless vectors to explore in this topic. @Torfinn @mav @EposVox web3 is anything that attempts to use coins and hype itself (ipfs is halfway there with ipns) - kinda like fediverse is activitypub Self hosted things like syncthing or tor or ssb just say "this is my public key, this is my router, say hello" So: radicle is a distributed git server, that uses both ssb (as a transport protocol, which is fine) and ethereum (well, "rad") as a governance token - so yes it's a wasteful blockchain @risottobias @EposVox worth a side note that google is definitely looking into leveraging IPFS to make scientific research more permanently open and available. So, I guess so long as google is the arbiter of these web3 technologies you’ll be ok with using them? 😏 @risottobias @EposVox seems to me from doing some reading that a lot of Indieweb will also be hosted eventually on IPFS and resolved through IPNS. @Torfinn @risottobias my big problem with everything you’re saying is that there’s no technological limitation that web 3 would be solving here. The problem is in the institutional structure and publishing status quo @EposVox @risottobias absolutely web2 technologies are the base layer that most decentralization will be built on. The primary purpose of web3 is rearranging the incentive models and empowering individuals to participate and own rather than centralized monolithic profit motivated institutions. @EposVox @risottobias tCP/IP what any the problem with the web. The problem with the web is location addressed data, unnecessarily duplicative storage, and the majority of incentive systems being built on selling advertisements to users by spying on them. There’s no web2 primitive that’s motivated at all to fix these. @EposVox @risottobias I maybe should’ve prefaced this with the statement that I’m not implying that web3 has solved these problems, but that it’s presently the best avenue we have towards solving them at least in my eyes. @EposVox @risottobias one might rightfully argue, are these really problems for which we should be seeking technical solutions? I’d empathize with that argument but simultaneously feel as if we’ve almost no other choice. |
@Torfinn @EposVox no