> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.
This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing: nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Piñata is the only one they mention by name which means it’ll be the platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.
The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though.
Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service.
The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.
I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Piñata because my laptop isn’t on all the time. Piñata decides my content isn’t acceptable and removes it. You can’t access my content. Not a problem?
With torrents people actually participate. Piñata should not be viewed as the "database of record", but as a something that complements the desktop at home.
I understand that is still not satisfactory.
I think the real goal is to find institutional users who are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/. Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner, but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very important to the original internet, and should also host public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci Hub prevails the journal articles themselves.
None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into the pinning service game, if only so they can get those university and government contracts! The current cloud computing business as a racket, but them offering support for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make for some real competition.
Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these alternative futures are possible.
Naw, there’s also naive optimists which are similar but distinct from gullible fools. Kind of half and half. They know exactly what they're doing for half the equation.
It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.