My First Impressions of Web3

Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by tshaddox on Friday January 07, 2022 @06:09PM (#29846238)

Except that you do need to use Google and Facebook if you want to interact with their data. They literally gate-keep the access to their data. It's not just inconvenient to host your own server that discovers peers and syncs the entire log of all historical events on the Facebook social network and allows you to write new events to that log which those peers will recognize. That's impossible (or at least, it would require some significant and very illegal hacking effort).

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by wizzwizz4 on Friday January 07, 2022 @06:26PM (#29846413)

Heh. “Illegal hacking effort”? In the EU, it's illegal for Facebook to prevent this. In fact, there's even an export button, which gives you quite a lot of the historical data (though not all of it).

To get events, just scrape the Facebook website using Selenium and Python. There are online tutorials for this. Harder than it should be, I'll be the first to admit, but easier than blockchain-based systems. (Blockchain isn't the appropriate solution for social media; use a proper federated protocol like ActivityPub or XMPP.)

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by tshaddox on Friday January 07, 2022 @09:20PM (#29847916)

That covers exporting one user’s data at one point in time, sure. But you can’t read all public events without significant work on a scraper, and you certainly can’t contribute without going through Facebook’s servers. Of course you’re not forced to use Facebook, but in order to use Facebook you must go through their computer systems on their terms.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by wizzwizz4 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @08:16AM (#29851369)

But the goal of most people isn't to use Facebook; it's to keep in contact with their friends. Scraping just the things they care about is fairly easy; scraping what Facebook chooses to put in front of their eyeballs when they're using an account (in practice, what they'd see if they were using Facebook) is really quite easy.

Then you can just reply to Facebook messages on something other than Facebook. That'll annoy your friends a bit, but that's the cost of them still using Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is not that it's hard to get your data off. It's not, really. The problem is that you have to be a programmer to do so; and blockchain stuff doesn't fix that problem.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by motoxpro on Friday January 07, 2022 @11:39PM (#29848682)

Totally, but as the article points out, you only have the URL. You can't store more than a few bytes on chain so the link can point to a Facebook URL, OpenSea URL, etc which you don't own. So unless you are going to store small messages, what's different?

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by BlueTemplar on Saturday January 08, 2022 @04:40AM (#29850099)

There was a discussion recently about gmail and hotmail misbehaving in silently dropping mails sent from small mail servers.

As you can imagine it's kind of hard to push back against these bad actors by threatening them to do the same thing to them, due to their sheer size.

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