Are you ready for Web 3.0?

Most of you – probably not.

I’m repasting this at various locations, those of you reading this on Akasha and Steemit are well on your way – the rest of you read close.

Web 3.0 is a very discernable step in the way we connect to each other over the Internet. The difference between web 2.0 and 3.0 is bigger than the difference between 1.0 and 2.0.

For a refresher – let’s define “web levels”. First of all – the levels are fuzzy, not universally accepted, and in general “buzz words”, but the descriptions aren’t useless.

Web 1.0 was the Internet as we originally knew it. Static webpages – most user generated content was on hosting sites like Geo Cities and Angel Fire. Email was done with POP and SMTP servers (and it still is to a large degree but there’s additional complexity now that didn’t exist then), Usenet/Newsgroups was still good and useful and people were for the most part trying to get a handle on what the web could do. This was the “Wild West” era of the Internet – from the day the “Internet Happened” in 94 or so. It was back when CGI scripts were exploited, the dancing baby was everywhere, and the “best viewed with” buttons were on half the pages around. The novelty of the web was rampant.

Web 2.0 is what we largely think of today. It really started good with – what? Myspace? Pages became dynamic, content cross-linking at database levels became common, apps (especially for mobile) that tie into the web became common. In fact much of Web 2.0 isn’t even accessed in general/traditional web browsers anymore. Apps have become king, but even those of us who don’t jump on the app bandwagon can still use our browsers for the most part. One of the biggest changes on the “normal” browser end of things is browser developers finally started to put their foot down on plugins and started supporting “multimedia” content natively. This is in the process of wrapping up now, with just a few legacy things lingering around that require Flash. The days of Quick Time, Real Player, and Windows Media Player pulling under-handed take overs of each other’s extensions but not working is finally winding to an end. We’ve even more or less standardized on a couple of formats.

Web 3.0 is different. Big brother has been creeping in, censorship abounds, and search-engines are being manipulated to give partisan results, not natural or best results. YouTube has an effective monopoly on video, and has cut off the money supply to most of its content creators – especially those who don’t tote Google’s left-wing pro globalist line and in many cases even those that do but express a couple of opinions that don’t tow the official line. Twitter has been shadow-banning some of their most popular users It’s so bad that professional services that have sprung up specifically to test if you’re shadow banned and to fix things if it’s happened to you. For those of you who don’t know: A shadow ban is when you’re barred from posting, but they don’t tell you. If you make a post it shows up on your account as though you’ve made a post, but no one sees it. The idea is they want you to feel like the lame kid on the playground. You show up with a ball but everyone just sits in the sandbox with their backs to you and no one offers to let you in on their game of hop-scotch. Only it’s not really the case, in fact if they let your post be seen those kids might just play ball with you – you’re just invisible and don’t know it. Web 3.0 is in response to government and corporate overlords who think they own the web and your attention.

Web 3.0 wrestles control away from corporations and puts it back in control of the people.

The way this is done is rather complicated – sometimes it’s a little complicated to use (don’t worry I’ll tell you an easy way to get started later), often times it’s not as smooth as web 2.0 – but don’t worry – that will improve with adoption. Literally – the way Web 3.0 works is the more people who participate, the better it works.

First of all – much of web 3.0 is based on blockchain. Blockchain is most famous for being used in crypto currency, most famously Bitcoin – pretty much the original crypto currency, and Ethereum which despite being a bit lesser known than Bitcoin is pretty much the center of most Web 3.0 blockchain tech. A blockchain is more or less a distributed ledger. All transactions are recorded and those transactions are copied to every single system on the chain. One of the first steps to joining a blockchain is downloading the entire chain – which continuously grows. Each time you disconnect then reconnect to the chain you have to download all the additions that happened while you were disconnected.

The advantage to blockchain – you can’t really delete anything even if you undo something the original transaction is still visible. This is why it’s appealing to get around censorship.

In addition to blockchain there is another technology meant to do the heavy lifting which is heavily used in Web 3.0 – IPFS. IPFS stand for Inter Planetary File System – and as the name would suggest is a distributed file system with no central location, and it could theoretically be truly Inter Planetary if we had data links to nodes on other planets….. IPFS is both the strength and Achilles Heel of Web 3.0 content.

Let me explain as simply as I can how IPFS works. Data on IPFS is broken up into blocks and these blocks can be reassembled into solid content – the instructions for assembly are contained in the blocks themselves and the whole content/file gets a hash assigned to it. The hash is a unique ID that’s created by running a mathematical formula on the content itself. It’s very complicated on some levels, but we don’t have to worry about all the details since it’s automated. If you want to watch a video on D.Tube when you click on a video you request the file from an IPFS gateway (more on this later). The gateway ask whatever IPFS nodes it’s connected to for blocks of that file – if only one of them has it then that node will start sending you the blocks – and it may take a while. If none of them have it they start asking around until someone says “I have it!” that takes even longer. Sometimes no running nodes have it. Bummer. If it was a particularly popular video then every node it’s been viewed on and is still stored on will send you blocks – this is why I said Web 3.0 gets better with more people using it, then you’re receiving blocks as fast as they can be sent to you. Steaming HD video that’s popular is very easy to do if it’s been viewed a lot. Your 640x480 video that only one guy in Albuquerque on DSL has will be quite slow.

The obvious advantage is that as long as people view your content it can’t be deleted – even by the person who originally uploaded it. It’s censorship free. Right now since Web 3.0 is still relatively new it’s quite common for user published content to be unavailable, I see broken images on Akasha all the time, but this will change with increased use and when people learn to leave their nodes running. Web 3.0 is – as of this writing (July 12, 2018) just creeping into existence. Only the hardcore nerds and people burned by censorship on Web 2.0 platforms have really adopted it. I of course am in the hardcore nerd category. I’m not going to say I don’t say anything controversial, I certainly do, but I’m not as active as I was during the Web 1.0 days and I’ve had my tolerance for arguing with idiots lowered over the years. I’m not sure I wasn’t sent a barrage of idiots simply to make that happen.

The easiest way to get started on Web 3.0 I can think of is to just sign up for an account on Steemit. That one actually takes a little bit of a background check – don’t worry, they don’t ask a bunch of invasive questions, they just want to find out if you’re a real person or not. It took about a week between signing up and getting approved for an account in my case, which to me was just a mysterious process that I nearly gave up on, when suddenly I got a welcome email. This takes the difficulty out of the process. On the other hand, even though it’s on the blockchain there is little indication you’re on something Web 3.0, it’s pretty transparent. Even though it gets you there it’s sort of like Web 3.0 on 2.0 training wheels except where the “monetary bonuses” and contribution payouts are concerned. It’s a very active community and a great place to get your feet wet. I see it has a great hope for getting people away from the heavily biased and policed Facebook, but I don’t see the older generations moving until there’s not choice in the matter. The hardest thing about getting people away from Facebook is the fact that everyone’s on Facebook. Steemit is heavy on the blockchain, light on the IPFS. If you know what you’re doing with IPFS you can still use it to host pictures and what have you for Steemit posts, but it’s not transparent to the user.

Now, if you’re serious about Web 3.0, you want IPFS to work smoothly and are willing to do your part there’s many ways to get started. Among the most important is to run an IPFS node and use it. There’s the geeky right way to do this, then there’s a really easy way that works about as well.

To get IPFS running you can install it directly and run the daemon, which is how I started out and I was quite successful with it. I don’t recommend this for the average person, it will just make you mad and turn you off to the whole concept. Fortunately it’s super easy to do with a different social network. Download and install Akasha from Akasha.world. Installing Akasha turns your system into an IPFS node and it runs a blockchain node directly on your computer – you become part of the network. As long as a couple of other people are running Akasha it will continue to work even if the Akasha.world website goes away. Sadly Akasha isn’t super popular, the more people who follow my guide here, the more people who will check it out, only time will tell if it will start gaining in popularity or not. As a social network it’s hit and miss for now, as a tool to make it easy to do web 3.0 it’s hard to beat. Akasha is easy to setup - but it takes a long time. Remember how I mentioned you have to download the whole blockchain? You start by doing that.

Now for the IPFS gateway part I mentioned I would get back around to later – you need to use your own gateway. You don’t really have to, but it sort of creates a cache on your local system and it’s faster in the end, especially for content you revisit. There are many public IPFS gateways out there. Since the FS in IPFS stands for “File System” when you request something from IPFS on the public Internet a gateway has to serve it up to you. Many of these gateways are overloaded or inefficient. When you’re running an IPFS node you can be your own gateway – when you’re in the Akasha app (use the app – not the web version – you’ll figure out why if you do it the other way). If you’re using Firefox get IPFS Companion it will redirect IPFS request to your local gateway instead of the public one your link references and automatically set you back to a public gateway if you’re not running yours (you closed Akasha), if you’re using Chrome/Chromium get IPFS Station which works about the same way though I haven’t personally tested it. Sadly my favorite browser – Brave – doesn’t currently support an IPFS plugin.

I highly recommend watching the demo video for IPFS on ipfs.io if anything I sort of want to chastise the creator for putting the video on YouTube……. It does get a bit advanced, but I think the first part of it and some of the demos might help everyone. So to summarize if you want to get started on Web 3.0 and stick it to the man:

Start using D.Tube instead of YouTube

Use DLive Instead of Periscope.

Start using Steemit instead of Facebook.

Use IPFS on your own node instead of DropBox for public file sharing – the plugins will show you how. (I have other suggestions and ways to share files privately that I won’t discuss here, that’s another topic, but there are private ways to do it with IPFS as well.)

Use Akasha to get started as your web 3.0 backbone, especially if you’re not in the super geek category. (I jumped straight into IPFS and found Akasha later)

If you’re using the Akasha method leave Akasha running even when you’re not using it or your computer to host your own stuff so it gets out there and doesn’t leave broken images until enough people see it.

Right now if you follow my advice you’re going to suffer from early adopter issues. The fact you’re the only one you know doing it this way does make it difficult to do. Hold on, keep doing it, and start sending people links to gateway hosted things, in time you can explain to them how to make things faster/better and get them to join you. It will take time but adoption will increase. Since adoption is still not common across the board Web 3.0 hasn’t really been targeted for control. Expect collective hissy fits from lawmakers and content owners as popularity increases. I don’t know what this means exactly – it can’t really be censored on a technical grounds, but laws can still be passed telling you not to use it. We’re once again living in the Wild West where Internet 3.0 is concerned.

There’s a lot of good stuff in Web 3.0 but it’s really hard to find. Stick to the links above and you’ll do great. Dig for more if you’re adventurous.

Advanced User Suggestions:

If you’re the geeky type I might recommend installing a permanent IPFS node in your home and pointing all your other devices to use it, maybe even using SSH tunnels when you’re away from home to offload the work and setup a multi-system cache. I’m seriously thinking about setting up an ODROID-HC2 for this. Running Akasha on a laptop can be somewhat taxing on the system, especially if you’re doing other tasks. Of course don’t use the Akasha method if you’re running a dedicated IPFS system – actually install IPFS and use it. The exception being if you want the dedicated system to run it and you want to access the Akasha client with X-exports, but that’s getting complex and if you understand that you don’t need me telling you what to do. Once you get a server running mount IPFS as a file system and share it with NFS on your network. This can really help with file transfers.

Web 3.0 is here, but it's in it's infancy. You can embrace it now or get dragged into it once it achieves momentum. I personally want to be the guy knowing what's going on before I get clubbed over the head with it and get suckered into someone else's onramp that exploits the users for their piece of the pie. Yes, in Web 3.0 you do get paid for you content based on popularity - the value of the "money" is subjective but should solidify alongside other cryptocurrencies in time. I'm hoping to get some of mine early on.