Web3 means Freedom SoftwareWeb3 means Freedom Software

It's been over 10 years since the inception of Ethereum and the idea of web3 as a decentralized internet. Yet it seems like we've made almost no progress towards achieving this elusive "web3" thing. So what went wrong? There were so many builders that were excited about this new future of the internet. Somewhere along the way we lost track of what web3 is supposed to enable: a self-sovereign computation stack that sets people free. Much of this can likely be attributed to heavy venture investments in the space, and subsequent embedded growth obligations (EGOs) that force startups to abandon the principles upon which they were founded.

Perversion of the Landscape

While EGOs represent a core part of the moral rot of web3, a second-order effect is that the end users of web3 products have no idea about the actual value proposition of these products. This is because EGO-driven ventures have an incentive to describe web3 with a narrative that fits their growth goals rather than web3's real purpose, leaving end users confused and ultimately disillusioned (the "web3" product is actually worse than the web2 service it replaces). For a large number of people, not only do they not get the true freedom that web3 was supposed to bring, they never even truly learn that these freedoms exist. More importantly, they don't ever learn what they are supposed to look for in order to distinguish a proper web3 product.

So what is Web3 Actually?

If you are philosophical in nature, a good place to start in terms of understanding the principles that should enable web3 is the concept of CROPS, that the Ethereum Foundation recently published. The abbreviation is broken into four main pillars:

Censorship Resistance - No one should be arbitrarily blocked from accessing the system

Open source and libre - Software should be created and distributed freely (free as in freedom)

Privacy - The private information of the users should be protected and it should always be up to the user to decide what to share and when

Security - The software should do what it says, no less, no more

These principles are great, but they are very abstract and don't really help the average person understand what software that respects freedom (web3 software) really looks like. But there are lots of fantastic examples of tools and communities out there. So the rest of this article will be dedicated to highlighting some of these.

Preservation of Culture

Growing up, the first time I got in contact with cypherpunk culture was through sharing music. At first through borrowing CDs from friends and making copies, but as our appetite grew and technology advanced, we quickly realized we could access far more music online. The Pirate Bay was the website of choice, and sharing all kinds of cultural artifacts soon became second nature. Through the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol and indexers like The Pirate Bay, everyone has the freedom to contribute to the largest and most readily available cultural archive in human history. In my opinion, The Pirate Bay is the most successful web3 product ever created.

Beyond mainly entertainment media, we have a set of applications focused on creating open digital libraries. Sci-Hub archives most scientific articles that have ever been published. This is a critical task because, unfortunately, most publicly funded science ends up being published in pay-to-read scientific journals, completely shutting out everyone who can't afford expensive subscriptions to browse and learn contemporary science. Library Genesis is an extensive collection of e-books that has enabled anyone to access books for free. There have been numerous instantiations of LibGen where different operators have re-published the archive because an old site had been taken down, showing the resilience of open digital archive efforts. Anna's Archive is a newer and larger effort that brings Sci-Hub, LibGen, and other shadow libraries together in a searchable database. These projects obviously live in legal and moral tension with current copyright regimes, but that tension is part of what makes them useful examples: censorship resistance matters most when powerful institutions want to restrict access to culture and knowledge. Additionally, anyone can contribute to making the storage of these cultural artifacts more resilient by seeding their torrents using the BitTorrent protocol.

Wikipedia gets an honorable mention here because it's also easy to copy. Projects like Kiwix make it easy to distribute in a completely offline manner. This is crucial for more remote areas without internet access or during connectivity outages.<br>Unfortunately, Wikipedia isn't exactly censorship resistant, and the moderator community certainly has specific biases.

Open Source Software

While being open source (and ideally some form of copyleft) is a requirement for anything to truly be considered web3, being open source software doesn't...