Yeah I mean, at some level you will need to trust someone if you don’t run it yourself. I’m working on a project that can hopefully be the end game so we don’t need projects like Signal and Confer. Quoting a post on Moxie’s blog he wrote around web3:
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.
The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as a publisher and consumer of infrastructure.
We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger server for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers.
I think this notion motivates Moxie to seek out the transparent “web2.5” option of centralized servers that are run by non profits as a public good. But as a mutualist who has seen plenty centralized and hierarchical human organizations start with all the right intentions (e.g. unions) only to get the wrong people in charge or crowded out by newer and faster competing orgs (e.g. monopolies), it’s not a permanent solution to me either.
I actually trust the 32 auditors in your scenario - especially if they publish their findings well. What I don’t trust is the possibility of the more general notion of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification applied to any benevolent organization as they gain power and/or complacency, incentives move away from serving the people they once serve.
I don’t disagree entirely with Moxie’s premise. I would rephrase it as; People want the servers to run at their house (ownership and agency over their data), but they don’t want to take on the load of maintaining their servers. This is where I could imagine standardizing the ways in which we deploy home data centers. If we follow similar playbooks on self hosting that both lowers the decision space and commoditizes the maintenance of those systems, we can realize an ecosystem where people can run servers, without maintaining them. That will offer new business opportunities to local repair and maintenance shops we once had for computers in the 90s. In the same way you own a home yet don’t need to be a carpenter, electrician, plumber, or HVAC technician, you wouldn’t need to cosplay as a sysadmin to own a server.
This is something I’ve been hinting at a bunch here and hope to share more soon once I run it by the mods.
Anyways my point is that you are right but so is Moxie. We need web2.5 today, but that will be a stepping stone to an idealized web3. To be clear, web3 for me is decentralized ownership of services and data on either your own server running at your house, or a local server farm within about 50 miles of your home. It removes the hyper centralization of web2 and builds ecosystems on open source projects for innovation and economic creation. It is not crypto scams, NFTs, and other BS. I think crypto can play into those economies, but they must be private transactions like Monero.
