Lots of developers DO work with the next generation of stuff, from solidity to matrix.org to LBRY to Dat to IPFS etc. And our stuff too. I am not upset at all! In fact I know where you’re coming from because I have seen it so often on HN.

It just seems very strange to me that this is happening on a site that started with promoting a “hacker ethos” and “hacking on things” — which is totally associated with rebelling AGAINST large centralized institutions and their power imbalance. Whether it’s ham radio operators or DYI culture or the indie engineering… anyone remember the indieweb movement? How about the Decentralized Web with Tim Berners-Lee? He wrote this:

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-... (2014)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/12/tim-berne... (2019)

A month before, I wrote this in CoinTelegraph, and it is still true today: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

What do you disagree with in Qbix? My cofounder and I met Tim’s SOLID team at MIT in 2014 (scroll down on https://wefunder.com/Qbix) and since then he left MIT and started Inrupt. His vision is not unlike Dorsey and Web5 — but Dorsey will work with way better technology rather than Tim’s HTTP and SPARQL:

It uses ION from Microsoft (championed by Daniel Buchner for years until M$ finally relented) that is based on the open Sidetree Protocol anchored by Bitcoin (or any other blockchain). And self-custodied private keys.

I met the lead developer of SOLID - Dmitri Zagidulin — and briefly recruited him to work with us part-time and document our own decentralized identity solution, that was based on pseudonymous identies similar to xAuth from Meebo (years ago). Dmitri left Qbix due to disagreements between us not supporting web standards fully enough in our early iterations, as I believed adoption leads to standards (eg oAuth and HTTP itself) rather than the other way around. Dmitri was instrumental in helping working groups come together to form DID, which is the top spec for decentralized identity. Whereas stuff like OpenID has been largely a shit-show, DID has had adoption by various “methods” including ION btw.

@marknadal wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311

Back in 2018, a mere four years ago, people cared deeply: https://www.decentralizedweb.net/

There is also Fediverse, Diaspora, Matrix, Tor. But far more interesting to me is Dat/Hypercore (beaker browser uses it), PouchDB, IPFS and MaidSAFE. They are truly decentralized.

Look, a lot of people are working hard to decentralize things for society. It’s much harder than yet another venture-funded closed capitalist silo that extracts rents forever. And you can be proud to call yourself a Web2 maximalist, but in every generation the old folks are shaking their fist at the young generation with the new technology and don’t understand why anyone needs the latest stuff. What was so bad about the old cars, anyway? They never broke down, unlike the new crap! Right?

You sound like this guy to the people working on the latest in group signatures, BLS signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, verified credentials and self-sovereign identity:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fs-YpQj88ew

Back then everyone also had no idea why the Internet was any good. Ballmer yelled “search is not a business!” Dave Letterman simply asked: Does Radio ring a bell?

What problem did the Web solve back then? People didn’t know but made fun of all the <blink> and <marquee> tags and the tacky personal home pages. Same here. It’s early days, yet.