23 May 2023

Spending time in Web3
-------------------------------


Its been a while since my last post and - besides the time consuming
fact in being the dad of a 3 month old - i used this time in gaining a
deeper look into what some may call Web3 (or Dweb, or Web 3.0
depending who wants to sell you their ideas)... and to the contrary of
what i anticipated i really like many things i have seen.

It all began with a message from a friend who has discovered nostr (a
decentralised microblogging service similar to Mastodon) and urged me
to install it to and have a look. Nostr [0] is - like ActivityPub - a
protocol and is supported by multiple clients, i first sumbled upon
"Amethyst" and installed it. The nice thing is, that you do not need
to give ANY personal information (not even an email adress), but
instead generate a cryptographic key upon first use which will be your
identity on the nostr network. 

Oh boy... there is a megaton of Bitcoin shilling on the network... and
alt-right people, far-left groups... anarchists and lunatics of any
color mixed all together in an international mealstorm of
crazyness. But somehow it seems to work without too much calling for
violence or calls to action against any other groups. What is really
fascinating is the pure "alifeness" (for lack of another word) and
energy that is transported by nearly any post on nostr... perhaps an
uncensored network of this kind simply attracts a special kind of
people. All in all it somehow reminds me of the IRC  and later ICQ
culture of the late 90s and early 00s, which is a good thing in my opinion.

The time i spend on nostr exposed me to some projects out of the Web3
sphere which i had never heard of before (and - to be honest - simply
wasn't iterested in). One interesting project is the
"Internetcomputer" [1], besides their claims of "reinventing the
internet" and "building the web of tomorrow" (and so on, and so on...)
its in my understanding best described as an distributed
mainframe.  I am currently experimenting with the SDK and will write
my next post about it.


[0] https://nostr.com
[1] https://internetcomputer.org