Pre-Web, Web1, Web2, Web3 , Web5 , Web7 and all hundreds of future Web X explained in 12 Toots
Toot is a mastodon tweet — 500 characters long.
# 1- History & Time
History is linear and divided into periods only in history books. People prefer to have it this way. In reality, in the same society could exist simultaneously groups that co-exist in different historical periods.History is not linear it is more spiral and cyclic, and every reiteration affects each other. What does it be to mean for our Web journey? Web2 Web3, Web5, WebX co-exist simultaneously and influence each other. Even more, we will see that all this is not a continuation of each other.
# 2 — History of Human augmentation and extension
We extend ourselves with tools from earlier times. From pictures in a cave to AI agents. We are social creatures that share knowledge and are eager to communicate. The web is a story of social interactions of human, machines, devices, AI and software systems. We extend our brains first with writing tools with machines, mobile phones, and smart devices, and now with AI tools. Now, the future of the Web is a network of you, your IoT devices, smart devices, and AI that interact with you and others.
# 3 — Humans and mainframes
50th was an era of mainframes owned by the government and big business. It was one god machine that held all data and rarely communicated with the external world or interacted via custom vendor lock protocols. People were working via terminals with time-sharing with an engine. So it was a prehistoric cloud-like system that allowed to use a computation power and get access to a shared knowledge and interact with each other via batch files
# 4 — Cold war child — decentralized Internet
The Cold War and 60th brought a necessity to share data between military and science institutions. One of the critical requirements was resilience and guarantee of reliable work even if a big part of the systems got damaged. As a protocol-based and decentralized network arrived with a set of backbone network services and protocols that everybody could redundantly host and recreate and heal itself. It was first time that machines with different architectures connected and started talking TCP/IP
# 5 — Personal PC and BBS / Email
70th brought a personal PC and a generation of hackers that was keen to share and talk with each other. It is blowup a network humans got a new social space. These computer systems allowed users to connect via a modem to download software, read news, and exchange messages in forums. BBSs were especially popular in the ’70s and early ’90s. Fido net like networks. One more big communication tool was email protocol
# 6 — The Web — Hyperconnected ideas
The 1990s as part of Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the World Wide Web, he built a concept of Hypermedia text HTML and as a side application-level protocol that allows the transfer of hypermedia text HTTP. Together with first browsers like Mosaic, we step to era of WWW and Hyper media of an interconnected web of documents and idea. So the big idea was a link <a> tag was a core of the revolution. It will force us to surfe space from link to link and from page to page for hours
# 7 — Web2, Web3, Web5 — is a marketing of tech companies
Let’s be honest: all these web versions are just marketing strategies for companies eager to sell new tech to a community.
Web 2.0 was defined and invented in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty. it separates old static “WEB “and interactive pages that allow users to contribute. Dr.Gavin Wood Ethereum, invented the concept of web3 and demonized web2 as a term. WEB5 is a marketing of Jack Dorsey’s and TBD company that reframe an SSI concept of ownership in a new way
# 8 — Evil WEB2? Freedom over Convenience and lack of ownership
The platform lowers content creation, contribution, and social interaction requirements. So you don’t need to host anything or know how the web works or what it is HTML, etc. Now, it was simple and Convenient but with a price of freedom. The user often didn’t ask or read an agreement that mentioned that content is under the ownership of the platform. We realize it is too late. At the same time, we realize that we don’t have a user-owned identity.
#8 — Web 3 and second system syndrome
We have so many requirements and features for the next web version that we failed to deliver it and got lost.
- Internet for machines and semantic web
- Internet of connected data
- Internet of IoT devices and things
- Internet of identity and ownership
and most recent challenge Internet of AI-powered agent
Satohi's paper and Vitalic Buterin idea of intelligent contracts bring a new view of ownership and economy but ignore heavenly privacy, ownership, and data.
#9 Web3 locks a user in a new glass cage
Blockchain is a promise of WEB 3 and a new era of internet lock users in even more restricted and isolated networks that force to be self-contained and accumulate mainly public data inside a network with highly hight cost storage and require the cost of interaction. Another challenge is a speed of transation — blockchains are slow. So blockchain is cool for assets and a new economy but fail to create a identity and new social space for extended human and machines
# 10 — Web5 and SSI
For SSI, please read my article.
The idea is simple — we build a missed identity layer that treats humans as something more that a private key and gives a tools to create a data point about ourselves and others and freely exchange this data via protocols. We unlock a user for a glass cage of blockchain and from a fragmented nightmare of web2 platforms and apps where you slice yourself to hundreds of you. Now holistic you open to the world
# 11 — WEB5 WEB7 and next
Web 5 and web7 use a DID and decentralized identity to create a network-agnostic decentralized ownership that gives identity to you, your devices, your data, your AI agent.
WEB5 is built around Decentralized web nodes and DIDs and driven by TBD
WEB7 uses a DID as same as web5 but on top of did comm communication protocols but still luck a persistent layer
# 11 — Next is web of trusted computing and AI agents
Now, we could make this tool securely talk to each other. Now we need more — protocols and trusted executed computing that allow users to run their software and AI agents. Now we need the internet of private and trusted computing and secure space where you could train and use AI on private datasets. Let’s make an internet of secure computation edge compute. One cool area is fog computing.
