I'm enjoying the lemmy.world experience, and I believe decentralised social networking could be the future. I am a refugee from Reddit and hopeful there is hope for a open, community focused platform.

As for this platform, I am apprehensive about somebody running the server I have my account with having the power to remove my account and my posts, but I guess this is true of any network in existence.

My concern in the long run is who pays for the hardware and energy costs even if it is federated. Without some kind of reliable funding model who will pay the bills?

Hopeful for many enjoyable encounters in the Fediverse.

The crypto side of web3 definitely felt way more "consumerist minded" with the way wallets were able to connect to multiple websites(exchanges) in order to "buy" things(alt/shitcoins). But federated social media feels like a much better use of decentralization so far.

I do not like using Web3 to refer to federated platforms. Indeed, Web3 is strongly associated with blockchains, cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Yeah I feel the same too. And I think decentralization is the only way to web3.

Distributed networks are very very complex to make. But decentralized networks have the simplicity and features of centralized networks with the addition of freedom that distributed networks give.

The best of both worlds really.

Related: https://web3isgoinggreat.com

@kiriakos or skipped 3 and went right to web 4.0

What we're seeing here seems more like a restoration of the architecture of pre-web Internet services, like SMTP, NNTP, or IRC.

The protocols are built on top of HTTPS and JSON as a session layer, rather than on lines of ASCII as in those classic protocols ... but the architecture looks a lot more like "a bunch of servers under independent administration, that agree to share messages with each other in a network" than like anything with the stink of blockchains on it.

Wasn't web3 about everything being under control of a handful of mega corps that own everything? So more like web4 then.