We're fixating a lot on "people don't want to run their own servers".
People don't care. They want to talk to their friends. Watch videos. See pictures of their grandkids. What they don't want is a lot of fiddly administration tasks with weird jargon they don't understand. Whether there's a server running on their computer or not is immaterial. If it's easy enough to use, it doesn't matter, as long as it lets them do the things they want to do.
Hopefully Web3 reaches the point that there's a 1-click installer, like downloading an app, that does everything you need it to do, so people can enjoy all of the things they want from the web with the benefits of decentralization.
Running a server without having to go through fiddly administration tasks with weird jargon has eluded the software community for the past 50 years, or so. I don't know what web3 could do to fix this.
Not sure I agree. What's another hacked-together shell script to a software engineer or system administrator? We've made servers manageable for ourselves, but rarely do we step outside of the bubble to ask how much of it is accidental complexity.
The networking layer isn't gonna change. That's given. Any change at the ISP level needs to be driven by policy decisions. But at the hardware/software-level? All of that is made up, and we could build much easier systems for network administration and app deployment.
people running their own servers would/might have given rise to a more decentralized system in which the putative problems web3 is claimed to fix would not have arisen.
> Hopefully Web3 reaches the point that there's a 1-click installer, like downloading an app, that does everything you need it to do, so people can enjoy all of the things they want from the web with the benefits of decentralization.
As long as web3 depends on everyone running their own server (or using someone else's server), i don't see why we would expect anything to change.
the "running their own server" thing is more retrospective, I think. Moxie's article was basically saying "IF people had ended up running their own servers from 94 onwards, we might not have gotten into this situation".
I don't think that is the point at all. The idea is: the only solution [given current/last gen web technologies like HTTP, email, IRC etc.] to have a decentralized web where most content is not in the hands of a small handful of mega corporations is for everyone to run their own web servers (literally everyone - each and every FB user would have to run their own HTTP server to achieve the same functionality; each and every gmail user would have to run their own email server). This is a major limitation of the internet protocols, and has lead to the current highly centralized web.
The promise of web 3 is to come up with new distributed protocols that allow people to have the same kind of functionality as today, but without having to cede control to FB/Google/MS etc. The reality of web 3 is probably closer to Moxie's article: these distributed protocols are actually closer to email infrastructure than to that promise, and the result will likely be similar to web 2: one or two major platforms will grow and offer a nice interface with the complex distributed network, and the vast majority of people will actually interact with the proprietary platform, not the underlying distributed protocol.
> "IF people had ended up running their own servers from 94 onwards, we might not have gotten into this situation".
with your analysis:
> the only solution [ ... ] to have a decentralized web where most content is not in the hands of a small handful of mega corporations is for everyone to run their own web servers
Maybe we're reading this somehow very differently, but to me these looks at worst highly compatible points, and at best, the same point.
But I also agree with your summary in your 2nd paragraph.
> Maybe we're reading this somehow very differently, but to me these looks at worst highly compatible points, and at best, the same point.
I'm reading a nuance difference into it - the first statement, to me, sounds like it puts some blame on the people, while the second one (and, I believe, Moxie's article) puts the blame on the technologies that forced this situation.
People don't care. They want to talk to their friends. Watch videos. See pictures of their grandkids. What they don't want is a lot of fiddly administration tasks with weird jargon they don't understand. Whether there's a server running on their computer or not is immaterial. If it's easy enough to use, it doesn't matter, as long as it lets them do the things they want to do.
Hopefully Web3 reaches the point that there's a 1-click installer, like downloading an app, that does everything you need it to do, so people can enjoy all of the things they want from the web with the benefits of decentralization.