What is Web4?

The commercial Internet has failed, and it's self-inflicted. Through greed, most mainstream actors have been gradually adding more friction and dark user patterns to the sites many grew to love, all in the name of profitability.

Google, the world's biggest ad company — and in later years monopolist on web standards — is continuously trying to ensure users and their interests can still be tracked and shared for advertising purposes^[1]. At the same time, they are actively making it harder to run custom code in the browser^[2], arguing with the need for browsers to be more secure environments. However, this also stops users from being able to run ad-blockers (an essential anti-malware tool, as recommended by the FBI^[3]) and other extensions that can help remove dark patterns^[4] in websites one otherwise has to use.

The fact that the world's biggest advertising provider also has a monopoly on what goes and what doesn't when it comes to web browser technology should frighten anyone who doesn't want to live in a techno-dystopia.

In addition to the problems on the technology front, the sudden introduction of models like GPT has made several actors in the field, most notably Twitter^[5] and Reddit^[6], show their true colors. They have done this by heavily reducing their platform's usability in an attempt to stop what they perceive to be data they own — public posts contributed voluntarily by people — from being "stolen".

When you contribute to a service that is "edge-dominant" — one that depends on user input to be worthwhile — you are slowly giving the owners more value that they can later limit your ability to access. Make no mistake, they don't owe you anything.

The internet as it is today is a war fought between companies competing for your attention while monetizing the content you provide, and you are gaining little to nothing in return for it.

Web4 is about retreating from the hypercommercialized web, taking the internet back, and using it on your own terms. Web4 is about trusting a network of services instead of a single one. Web4 is about not putting all your eggs in one basket.

If there is anything 2022/2023 has shown us, it is that some parts of the Internet should be considered public infrastructure.

While the amount of privatization of public infrastructure that should be allowed is a heavy political topic for discussion, we can hopefully agree that many actors have gone too far in recent years. This has been a long time coming, and as a result, many people are "jumping ship" to new platforms. Ploum put it nicely in their article, "Splitting the web".

Technology does not solve every issue

Many programmers grow up hoping they can solve big world problems using code. Software is a great tool that has allowed us to create systems that allow for precision, safety and verification in manners simply not possible in the tangible world. However, it is not the solution to every problem. Any experienced developer will tell you corner cases in the real life is the bane of their existence - it complicates everything.

Blockchain showed up in the wake of Wall Street bailouts, as a fair and decentralized system where dishonest behavior and differential treatment within the protocol was close to impossible. However, while it does have its use cases, it is unable to solve issues that arise outside the protocol, such as rug-pulls on new cryptocurrencies and NFT-related projects. Fairness is also a difficult problem not yet solved.

For example, NFTs are often distributed in air drops - releases of new NFTs and similar where you can sign up beforehand to receive parts of the initial release. Ensuring nobody is able to register twice is difficult, as the blockchain is designed for privacy. Limiting the number of NFTs per wallet does not work as you can create as many wallets as you want. Requiring a deposit doesn't work either - if anything it gives rich actors the ability to gain the market in their favor. Recently Sam Altman suggested that the best solution to this issue is that everyone scans their eyeball and gives them their biometric data^[7], such that every human has a unique identity.

However, as Molly White concludes in her essay on Worldcoin, its claims of privacy are mostly moot and aren't audited by third parties^[8]. It's a solution in search of a problem. It features obvious privacy issues, and any criticism of this fact is met with a "trust me, bro" from the creators.

We suggest that this is common for the web3 scene and that most problems need solutions that are social in nature, not technical.

There are legitimate use cases for the blockchain and decentralized technology spawning in relation to it. However — as of 2023 — the web3 space is riddled with greedy, dishonest actors preying on victims of hype or the assumption of good intentions. The blog "Web3 is going just great" does a great job of summing this up.

Some issues are best solved socially. Some things are too important to entrust to a single entity. Some edge cases are best solved with empathy, not automated checklists. Humans work well when we form small communities that self-police and interact with each other - this is what we in practice do in our everyday lives. Intriguingly, this seems to work well on the internet as well. Smaller communities have social rules that better fit the crowd, and is able moderate itself better due to the moderators having better cultural and social context. This is where the benefit of decentralized yet federated services come in.

Web4 is not a single movement, but a general direction

While Web4 refers to the recent mass migration from mainstream services, there are many reasons why people migrated, and many end-goals. It is therefore best to consider "Web4" to be an umbrella term referring to multiple independent movements with the same overall sentiment.

This website exists to help explain the movement, but please note that nobody will agree with everything posed here. For example, decentralized blockchain-adjacent solutions like Farcaster are generally not talked about on the Fediverse, most likely due to the reputation cryptocurrency carries. Still, these communities are aiming towards a similar goal - decentralization and ownership of content.

How does a Web4-version of the services I use look?

Social media

You do not need brands cluttering your social media feed. Using social media owned by one entity is risky, as it increases the risk of failure, like with Twitter. It would be better if we instead relied on a distributed group of volunteers hosting federated instances that housed people with common beliefs or interests. This is similar to forums, except that forums never had federation.

Federation^[9] means that people from other federated platforms can share, interact and enjoy the content you post on whatever platform you are on, from the platform they themselves use. To give a — potentially unfortunate — political comparison, federation between platforms would be like the free movement laws governing a majority of the European continent. Simply put everyone is free to travel e.g. from Germany to Spain, work there and make a living, without being subject to bureaucracy and legal/state processes.

Federation can also be compared to e-mail, which is also inherently federated. You don't need Gmail in order to speak to a person with a Gmail account. All e-mail services speak the same language and are able to exchange data between each other.

Knowledge

Ad-optimized sites with 90% filler are stealing your time. When is the last time you tried looking up a recipe online?

Do the same to others as they should do to you, so publish short and useful posts on simple blog platforms that don't irritate the user. Use links to recommend useful resources to your readers. Avoid using sites owned by companies that exist to monetize the content you are sharing - edge-dominant software in its mainstream form benefits the owner much more than it benefits its users.

Consider using ethical advertisement providers that don't track users as much as they use the website's nature to decide what ads to deliver. Alternatively, take donations or provide content behind a paywall. We currently have no good recommendations for this.

Web4 aims at building a common knowledge base that isn't dirtied by SEO optimized garbage.

"Web4? What about 1, 2, and 3?"

The term WebN, with N being a number, is used to refer to distinct "eras" of the internet.

• "Web1" refers to the original static HTML internet as made popular by Tim Berners Lee et al.

  Websites were — with some exceptions — managed completely by a handful of people. External content submissions were exceptionally rare, and websites were their owners' platforms.

• "Web2" refers to a cultural and technological change, in which websites existed for the purpose of allowing users to submit their own content.

  This is the so-called "edge-dominant" software. If Web1 is "user-static", Web2 is "user-dynamic". Web2 platforms targeted being a tool for their users, instead of being a platform for their owners' opinions.

• "Web3" was an attempt at making everything run on a blockchain - the idea being that everything is transparent, verifiable and unforge-able.

  This movement is largely considered misguided, as it often consists of enthusiastic developers applying the blockchain unnecessarily, as discussed in the section "Technology does not solve every issue".

• Web4 is a direct reaction to the enshittification of Web2 - the process in which companies became too greedy with user-generated content in their edge-dominant software.

  It is a cultural movement in which people are moving to self-hosted or decentralized alternatives to mainstream services in order to escape the war for their attention.