Table of Contents
Meet Dawson
The Meeting
The Ultimate Crisis - a stolen username
What exactly is Web5?
What is the point of Web5?
Why ...
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Riz, this article is AWESOME, I feel bad for calling it an article, bc it is waaaay cooler!
The storytelling, the illustrations. Did you do that?
You are the best, and TBD is lucky to have you
Just saw that your little sister did the art. she rocks!
Thank you! Yeah she does!!
Yes, I agree;
I also like the art very much!
Thanks Pachi! Miss you <3 <3 and yeah like you saw my sister did the illustrations!
All of the reasons in the Why would someone need ownership over their digital identity? section don't seem to be that well thought out in my opinion. In fact, the whole premise of this thing seems off.
I'm gonna try to explain where I'm coming from by going through each of the reasons you listed.
There’s no way someone can steal your handle, just like what happened with Dawson's "@webheart" username.
You can take your followers and content with you if you decide to switch platforms.
You have full control over how your data is shared, reducing unwanted advertising and privacy breaches.
You can take your medical records with you, ensuring that you have access to your own health information wherever you go.
You control who has access to your medical data, making it more secure and private.
Your financial transactions are secure, and only you have access to your financial data.
You can easily prove your identity for online transactions, reducing the risk of fraud.
Overall, "Web5" looks like it's just repeating the same issues as every other fully decentralized system before it that failed, ignoring those issues, and making outlandish claims about the things it will solve if implemented. It's a solution in search of a problem, or at the very least, a solution designed with total disregard for actual issues that people face.
P.S.
What was that "@webheart" stuff about? That was so random.
Ah, the @webheart stuff was a pop culture reference. As the kids would say, "The girls who get it, get it" haha.
It sounds like a made up situation and super ridiculous, but it's not! Recently, Elon Musk changed the name of Twitter to X, and he also took someone's username @X and only offered them merchandise as compensation for stealing their handle. I was poking fun at the situation and exploring if that would happen if you owned your digital identity.
Check out this blog post by Ebony Louis called "Who really owns your social media handles". It talks about the real life situation a little more in depth.
I get that a DID is a long alphanumeric string. But take BlueSky for example, you have aliases on top of your DID. I will expand on that in future issues.
Thanks for your perspective! I appreciate it, and it helps me to dig in a little deeper to some of the applicable use cases for Web5. I literally posted this my first day on the job. And my job is to learn in public. Those "claims" were my own or what I thought of as I've been exploring Web5. I understand most of your rebuttals, except for the aspect of data portability with followers/social media. That's one of the main benefits of Web5. At the moment, it's still under technical preview, so as it evolves, we will see how that's possible.
Future issues of blog series should allow me to expand on some of my thoughts concepts or even give me room to correct myself.
As inspirational as the reasons given are, I think Web 3, 4, 5, and other look to the future posts are quite meaningless, (in my very limited opinion) based on the fact that Web 1 and Web 2 are basically coined terms to describe a bunch of characteristics seen on the internet - characteristics that evolved organically as society jumped onboard the world of the internet, whereas web 3 and so on attempts to predict and even direct the internet. In my opinion, the attempts are not only feeble at this point, they do not matter much to the masses and the only people who can do anything about these predictions are engineers and readers of these articles.
This is a thoughtful and valid comment! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I respectfully agree AND disagree with you.
I agree that we can’t force the internet to go in a certain direction and that people outside of software engineers don’t care about or even know about this.
However, I think technology is adopted if it’s accessible, has valuable use cases, and enough developer involvement. This is what drives a nice to have technology to become a must have technology.
Example back in the day, there were skeptics of web 1. It was mostly used by academics but once things like email came out, the masses saw the value and it became accessible to them. Or even something like AI. It’s popular now but it’s spent years being this thing that people tried to make popular but it was hard to adopt. There weren’t a lot of use cases and you had to have specialized knowledge to build with it. The companies like OpenAI made it more accessible for engineers to build with it and engineers found use cases like GitHub Copilot to build.
So it’s up to the engineers building this and the developer community to figure out what makes this usable and valuable. So far, the biggest example I’ve seen that some people are using is Blue sky which is a decentralized social media app. We just gotta stay tuned and see what happens!
enjoyed reading this. loved the storytelling style
Thank you, David!
Best of class article, joyful to relevant.
Thank you! That is high praise
Nice illustrations and article , but I have a question - what happened to Web 4?
Was web 4 built by Google and then abandoned right after the launch ? 😀
LOL ha ha 🤭
it's web5 because they're hoping to take the best elements of web 2 and the positive principles of web 3. So web 2 + 3 = web5
"This enables the creation of secure, user-centric, privacy-first applications."
There is no difference to the current WEB 2.0.
No one stops you to build
secure
,user-centric
privacy-first
applications right now with current WEB 2.0 technologies.The Problem ?
Why would any of that change?
Incentives rule the world
Those are really good points. Here's the interesting thing though: I found that there are legit companies ALREADY building with web5. And I found out that a lot of big name companies like Microsoft and Auth0 are heavily investing in decentralization and decentralized identity. Like they have whole teams dedicated to it. And w3c developed a lot of open standards around the protocols and principles that web5 is built upon.
Right now, if I'm being honest..I'm still fairly new to the company I work at, so I'm not YET equipped to rebuttal you. HOWEVER, I'll keep this in mind because I do want to figure out what the incentive is..especially for the companies that are already building with web5.
Thanks for your comment!
This is a parody? What is the point of inventing another version number for the web, even more so after controversy about Web3 and no relevant mention of a Web4 apart from some marketing buzz rebranding Web3 as Web4.
Someone claim the web has does not have the version numbers](hidde.blog/the-web-doesnt-have-ver...) why do people tend to invent the numbers anyway?
Sorry if your post was meant in good intention;
I was just triggered about something seeming like the Web3 BS.
I know the author of the blog post -- Hidde is a great Developer Advocate.
It's not a parody. The name of the technology -- Web5 is a bit tongue in cheek, but the technology is legitimate: developer.tbd.website/docs/web5/
I wrote this blog post on my first day on the job, so some of my views have evolved, but I wrote it with the intention of getting acclimated with the work that Block and TBD are doing.
Here's my latest blog post on the technology if that helps: dev.to/tbdevs/how-web5-and-bluesky...