Conversation

I think the Great Weirding has finally hit the tech stack. Everything I'm seeing happening to the consumer web experience seems in some way a response to the huge stress test the web 2.0 tech stack endured in 2015-18 due to major pattern failures
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The cultural trend I tagged as domestic cozy is now turning into a tech trend. This is the real Web 3.0 taking shape. SemWeb was a false start, blockchain was an Amara's Law candidate for 3.0 (ie we expected too much too soon) that won't actually happen till 2030+
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I don't know what to call this happening-for-real web 3.0 world, but the elements seem to be: 1. encrypted messaging as base layer 2. JAMstack 3. Graph databases 4. "Tunnel" like UX patterns (threads etc) with an underground vibe 5. Serious attempts to level up hypertext itself
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Things that belong in Web 3.0: all the encrypted messengers, Slack, TikTok, gatsby, Roam, notion,... what else?
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Things I think are being "retired" by the Web 3.0 blade runners: PHP/LAMP stack, WordPress, likely old-UX facebook (pre outcome of pivot to encrypted/group-based they're trying now) Kudos to twitter for being one of the few things that seems to be leaping across the 2-3 gap
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Mastodon is a ??? in my head. It's a blend of this 3.0 stuff, plus elements that look like they're from the distant blockchainy future 10 years out
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Shit, wish I had time to step back and think about this whole thing carefully at a trend level... the last 2 times I did that (big data ~2012 via a CSC project and web 2.0 itself ~2007 at xerox) I had the luxury of a funded research project... something very complex is going on
Hmm... what's happening now is actually what I called out in 2012 in this August 2010 blog post which is equal parts prescient and cringe given what I knew at the time. None of the products I cite, including my own, has survived, but we saw this coming.
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Oddly enough, though a core piece of it (React) came out of mobile imperatives, none of this is mobile-centric. It's almost as if heavy apps and a mobile-centric experience are missing from the equation. This is a browser-level renaissance.
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If I tentatively tag "something something blockchain" as the 4.0 era starting ~2025-30, I *do* not mean things that look like crypto/blockchain ideological visions of today. I mean something built out of the parts being tested today via trial and error.
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Specifically, I do *not* think we're headed to a p2p utopia of Sovereign Individuals. Ideologues with that bent who vaguely sealion me every time I tweet about this stuff remind me strongly of SemWeb/OWL ideologues from early aughts.
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Specifically, the ways in which SemWeb-flavored ideas are actually finally making their way into production web (ht ) don't look at all like the visions the ideologues were painting circa 2004-09. Something similar is going to happen to blockchain/decentralized web
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Anyhow, good times starting again. To the extent medium is the message, new messages require new media, and new media demand new messages, so like it or not, everybody making content of any sort has to go through a stack refactor to engage with this stuff
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I should add, something something logs/event stream processing as a low-level organizing abstraction has something here. Web 2.0 was basically inaugurated by IE enabling the AJAX pattern. Something kinda at that level of enablement seems to be happening.
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