So you're saying that the real web3 was... the friends we made along the way?

I don't know, it just feels like a fancier web 1.0 where things were less centralised (personal websites, forums etc).

What we're seeing here seems more like a restoration of the architecture of pre-web Internet services, like SMTP, NNTP, or IRC.

The protocols are built on top of HTTPS and JSON as a session layer, rather than on lines of ASCII as in those classic protocols ... but the architecture looks a lot more like "a bunch of servers under independent administration, that agree to share messages with each other in a network" than like anything with the stink of blockchains on it.

web3 was always a cryptocurrency scam and was doomed to fail. Federation is more a return to the early web with a way to link everything together to compete and get similar services to megacorps while distributing costs.

The future of the internet isn't artificially scarce digital collectibles? 😲

The crypto side of web3 definitely felt way more "consumerist minded" with the way wallets were able to connect to multiple websites(exchanges) in order to "buy" things(alt/shitcoins). But federated social media feels like a much better use of decentralization so far.

Now we just need a federated Youtube replacement.

This has always been my understanding of the web generations:

• Web 1: Everyone posts content on their own separate website
• Web 2: Everyone posts content on a single website owned by a big corp
• Web 3: Everyone posts content on each other's websites, or on a decentralized network of sites like the Fediverse

I do not like using Web3 to refer to federated platforms. Indeed, Web3 is strongly associated with blockchains, cryptocurrencies and NFTs.