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Torfinn

@risottobias @EposVox I’ve never used google scholar before looks great. So what happens when an important journal that’s hosted privately by some individual institution say burns down, or they decide to remove it because they defund whatever dept was hosting it in order to pay for a new football scholarship? Also what motives are there for google in this are we simply trusting that they present these search results in a way perpetually that has no internal motives or bias? Surely the algorithm they use will never be public…

39 comments
Risotto

@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 the content is made in my scenario. The problem isn’t generating it it’s hosting it perpetually to ensure that it’s never lost. Things unfortunately occasionally burn down. Tax payers pay for this research they have a reasonable expectation that it’s availability is permanent. In our present scenario we’re placing that responsibility on say a few thousand independent IT departments each with their own unique disaster recovery plans at who knows what level of implementation. I guess we just tolerate that?

@risottobias @EposVox the content is made in my scenario. The problem isn’t generating it it’s hosting it perpetually to ensure that it’s never lost. Things unfortunately occasionally burn down. Tax payers pay for this research they have a reasonable expectation that it’s availability is permanent. In our present scenario we’re placing that responsibility on say a few thousand independent IT departments each with their own unique disaster recovery plans at who knows what level of implementation....

Risotto

@Torfinn @EposVox internet archive's got you covered :)

Torfinn

@risottobias @EposVox you describe a lot of points of failure you’re very confident in 😜

Torfinn

@risottobias @EposVox also thanks for introducing me to indie web and google scholar!

mav :happy_blob:

@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.

Torfinn

@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”

Torfinn

@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”

mav :happy_blob:

@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.

Torfinn replied to mav

@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.

addie replied to Torfinn

@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

Torfinn replied to addie

@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

addie replied to Torfinn

@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

Torfinn replied to addie

@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 :happy_blob: replied to Torfinn

@Torfinn @EposVox @risottobias I genuinely do not understand how a blockchain and IPFS have anything in common at all, other than decentralization. They're completely different structures. "NFTs, IPFS, DeFi" lists two concepts and a protocol (or set of protocols.)

And as far as use in browsers go, browsers build visual interfaces for things, but I wouldn't call a modern web app exclusively browser-based. Anything with a complete API could have its interface based on anything. So I guess I'm a little confused about exactly where you're going with all of this.

Is the problem HTTP? I am really confused here and to be honest I'm not really sure what the point of continuing this is.

> What would you call all this stuff?

Well, I'd call IPFS an IP based, decentralized object store, and I'd call NFTs and DeFi pointless, harmful garbage.

@Torfinn @EposVox @risottobias I genuinely do not understand how a blockchain and IPFS have anything in common at all, other than decentralization. They're completely different structures. "NFTs, IPFS, DeFi" lists two concepts and a protocol (or set of protocols.)

And as far as use in browsers go, browsers build visual interfaces for things, but I wouldn't call a modern web app exclusively browser-based. Anything with a complete API could have its interface based on anything. So I guess I'm a little...

Risotto replied to Torfinn

@Torfinn @mav @EposVox trying to resolve ownership is pointless - there can be as many copies as you like :)

Piracy for the win

There are only public keys and the people willing to believe them

Torfinn replied to Risotto

@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?

mav :happy_blob: replied to Torfinn

@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.

mav :happy_blob: replied to mav

@Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox suddenly this place feels a lot more like Twitter.

Torfinn replied to mav

@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

mav :happy_blob: replied to Torfinn

@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.

Brian Hawthorne replied to mav

@risottobias @mav @EposVox

There’s a really easy way to fix that. Bing! I just fixed my feed.
Blocked the crypto bro.

mav :happy_blob: replied to Torfinn

@Torfinn @EposVox @risottobias I haven't no. Please tell me it doesn't use a blockchain.

mav :happy_blob: replied to mav

@Torfinn @EposVox @risottobias so having very briefly skimmed that, it kind of goes where I expected it would based on what I had already read. It's a distributed object store and it sounds like a really cool one if I had a use for one. It does seem like a logical place to start with a kind of distributed archive for key pieces of information.

What I don't understand is this whole web3 thing, and how this relates to cryptocurrency. I don't see that they relate at all, other than they use cryptography and are distributed. Lots of things do those two things.

@Torfinn @EposVox @risottobias so having very briefly skimmed that, it kind of goes where I expected it would based on what I had already read. It's a distributed object store and it sounds like a really cool one if I had a use for one. It does seem like a logical place to start with a kind of distributed archive for key pieces of information.

Torfinn replied to mav

@mav @EposVox @risottobias curriculum.pl-launchpad.io/cur so after reading the white paper at a glance I think you can recognize that not only is IPFS distributed peer to peer network, but also that it relies on a chain of immutable data as described in the IPFS launchpad curriculum I linked.

Note, IPFS is considered by the designers and maintainers of IPFS as the linkage between web2 and web3 by enabling content addressable data the mission of filecoin to incentivize distributed decentralized data storage and ultimately safeguard all of humanities most important data. Content addressable is a step in a process.

@mav @EposVox @risottobias curriculum.pl-launchpad.io/cur so after reading the white paper at a glance I think you can recognize that not only is IPFS distributed peer to peer network, but also that it relies on a chain of immutable data as described in the IPFS launchpad curriculum I linked.

mav :happy_blob: replied to Torfinn

@Torfinn @risottobias @EposVox yeah, I'm uncertain how you tell the difference. I really thought 'web3' was synonymous with 'blockchain'.

So is SyncThing web3?

Torfinn replied to mav

@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

Torfinn replied to Torfinn

@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.

Risotto replied to Torfinn

@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

Torfinn

@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? 😏

Risotto

@Torfinn @EposVox amazon and cloudflare making their own use of blockchains kinda confirms my biases - one is after money and the other never enforces their terms of service.

post on own site, syndicate elsewhere (POSSE, indieweb) is superior to web3 because it's simpler and more portable.

Torfinn

@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.

addie

@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

Torfinn

@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.

Torfinn

@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.

Torfinn

@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.

Torfinn

@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.

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