FAQ

They already have my data, why should I care?

This is a common argument from the "this isn't worth spending energy caring about" camp, but it's severely flawed as it assumes "your data" is a thing that is already lost. In reality, "your data" is a constant stream of information that advertisers and others want to stay updated on. The more outdated the information is, the less useful it is to them, as it will stop reflecting you as a person as your life changes. If you cut these bad actors out of your life today, chances are the information they have on you will be mostly outdated in 5 years' time. Adding to the damage is the fact that even if it wasn't outdated, they would not be able to tell if it was or not.

So web4 hates monetization? How am I supposed to earn money?

Web4 is not an anti-profit movement. Web4 is an "anti-monopoly-of-ownership" movement. Monetization is still possible — you don't have to be obnoxious to your visitors to make money. Not milking every single drop of your investment at the detriment of your users is a good start. There is a clear difference between making enough to pay the bills and saving a bit of money for rainy days, and maximizing everything for profit in such a way that your users are negatively affected. There are several ways to make money in ways that don't negatively affect users. This includes advertisement, to a certain degree.

As an example, the Mastodon project is working on possible monetization options for instance owners by enabling the sale of premium features.

Web4 hates AI?

With the recent democratization of AI, there is no doubt AI will be an important part of Web4. After all, Web4 is not a "return to the stone age" movement.

However, at least in the fediverse, there are a lot of creative people. The general vibe is that tools like Stable Diffusion are trained by stealing artwork from unassuming artists and therefore morally and possibly criminally wrong. Therefore, there seems to be a general sentiment that most AI trained on crawled data are bad, due to a disagreement in the morale of using data to train models without permission.

When it comes to textual media content, there's not even a single doubt about this. Both ChatGPT and Bard have trained extensively on works published on the internet, without regard to details like how the text is licensed. This disproportionally affects individuals who just want to share information with the commons, both as a way of persisting information on the internet and as a way of advertising their personal capabilities. Their content is being made into a product and sold without their consent and without any form of compensation. Some movements have risen as a result of this, such as nogithub and the GitHub copilot litigation (which is one of multiple lawsuits against generative AI products by the same person).

It is not that web4 nor the people that inhabit it are against AI. Instead, it would be more correct to say the general opinion seems to be that current AI makers act in immoral ways and that while the technology is great, the field is currently dominated by actors with questionable "Move fast break stuff at all cost" morals.

Web4 hates recommendation engines?

Nothing is stopping Web4 services from providing recommendation services either. The biggest difference here would be the goal.

Current state-of-the-art recommendation engines aim to keep you on the site for as long as possible, so you can generate content and ad impressions. These engines feed on controversy — and in turn often hate and anger — as it is an easy way of getting you to stay. In short, they exist not for your benefit, but for the site owners.

A Web4 recommendation engine prioritizes you getting the content you need as fast as possible, so you can move along with your day.

How is this new? People have talked about jumping ship and being decentralized for as long as the internet has existed

This is correct. It is better to look at web4 as a cultural counter-reaction to the enshittification of the internet. The software being used is sometimes old, or at the very least based on old ideas. However, it would be wrong to say that these ideas aren't being modified to fit modern needs. The best way to consider web4 is to consider it as a general movement where people are developing and using services where their own best interests are most important.

It is worth pointing out that the internet is fundamentally a concept for decentralization of information. The internet was born as a way for research environments to share data, sharing access to what was previously internal resources, with other institutions.

By exposing their own services to the common good, these institutions were able to improve the accessibility of information for everyone on the internet. Anyone could share information without further work. All they needed was an internet connection and a computer.

As the internet expanded from research institutes and into the early semi-commons, the number of services and thus the usefulness of the Internet gradually increased. Tech-savvy people created and shared services for their peers and communities, technically endowed or not.

Was it always like this?

Rewinding a bit through history, Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) were the original backbone of the early computing era when it comes to the general availability of communication and file transfer. Hosted by individuals and organizations over phone lines, with plenty of instances available to use. The introduction of USENET proved as a decentralized alternative to the inherently centralized BBSes. Gradually making the transition from phone lines to internet connections, USENET has been cited as the source of many common terms such as "FAQ" and "spam".

As the internet developed, and the adoption of general purpose-computers increased, the "World Wide Web" was becoming more and more tangible. With the introduction of the web as we know it today, "HTTP", the interactive web quickly became a de facto standard for information sharing.

The web was gradually adopted for communications, supplementing the already existing "e-mail" with discussion websites such as web BBSes, forum software, and more. General audience forums and websites were rare, and sites generally focused on specific topics, like a geographical location, a hobby, or a field of study. On the early web, small and individual communities thrived. Discoverability was however an issue.

Web2 services like Facebook tried solving this by siphoning all these communities into one ginormous silo. Search engines like Google tried to solve this by mapping out the entirety of the internet; an increasingly impossible task, drenched more and more in mud by ad-tech. However, a pattern emerged: one after another, once these sites got people hooked, they cut off easy access to the outside internet. You weren't supposed to use their site to find interesting things on the internet anymore, you were supposed to use them as the internet. This has been mostly negative to consumers. Web4 services instead try to solve this through interoperability.

We can see a similar transition if we focus on real-time chat services, instant messaging. With the influx of the internet and multi-user computing, it was possible to connect with more and more people.

The early solutions like e.g. e-mails, BBSes and forums provided these opportunities, but they were not instant. BBSes could rarely serve more than a handful of simultaneous users. Forums and e-mails are quick, but they are more appropriate for long-form content than short messages.

The advent of instant messaging changed this.

Heralded by many an early internet denizen, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was one of many technologies that excelled at making communication more accessible. Users connected to smaller, individual servers that were interconnected to form networks. They could then join any chat group on the network and chat with like-minded people. IRC was fundamentally a decentralized and interoperable technology. Instances could be connected to each other, resulting in large, inter-connected networks of users. Users could connect to any one server that was part of the network, and get the same experience.

XMPP is another example of an early-web decentralized chat technology. Improving some trade-offs seen with IRC, it allowed for an interconnected approach to individual chat messaging. Competing with existing siloed chat solutions like ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, and AIM, it provided a truly interoperable solution to instant messaging. It did however not catch on, and lost out to the contenders MSN Messenger and Skype.

Similarly to the current state of web communities, instant messaging platforms are inherently siloed, centralized, and non-interoperable.

There are a few exceptions. Twitch chat uses IRC as its backend. You can — right now — go to any live streamer on Twitch, look at the stream chat, and see messages delivered using IRC in 2023. It supports interoperability by publicly serving this capability to developers, using the IRCv3 standard to add Twitch-specific features in an interoperable way. Twitch bot developers then use the Twitch IRC endpoint to write chat bots; all Twitch chat bots are IRC bots. You yourself can use the Twitch chat from any IRC client.

Facebook Messenger, however, which was originally built on top of XMPP to facilitate interoperability with other platforms, cut this leg off.

The chat platforms in general continues their grandparents' pattern of fighting any attempts at third-party integrations and interoperability. You can't Messenger your WhatsApp friends. You can't LinkedIn your YouTube creators, be it to their channel or their Twitter DMs.

But some of these used to. You could send messages from MSN Messenger to AIM when MSN launched. You could send messages from Facebook to MySpace when Facebook launched. You could send messages from Skype to MSN Messenger, after Microsoft bought Skype and tried replacing MSN with it.

You can't anymore. This is intentional. The EU is currently introducing new laws that attempt to re-introduce interoperability between the big giants. It will be interesting to see if it works. There's a lot of discussion to be had about whether a government should govern technology like this, and we want to acknowledge it. However, no matter your standpoint, we certainly live in interesting times.