He's been concerned with this type of stuff for a long time. There are plenty of articles about him talking about the NSA, tech giants, etc. I think he created a social media platform a few years ago as an alt to facebook.
Someone as visionary as TBL surely saw the problems with centralization very early on, even before the WWW started gaining traction.
His original goals for the HyperText project[1] involved two phases. The first to build web browsers, and the second to make it easy for users to publish content. This second phase was never completed, AFAIK.
We've had many attempts over the years to address this, but by the time tech silos and web giants were getting established, and advertising starting to corrupt the user experience—mid to late 90s—it was already too late. Millions of people were getting online, and the understanding that the web works by services being provided, often for "free", by large tech companies, was being ingrained in popular culture.
Reversing that notion once the web had matured, and people had become used to giving away their data and personal information to companies, became more difficult as time went on.
As much as privacy conscious nerds will applaud this effort to take the power back to users, I think it's too little, too late, for it to gain any real mainstream adoption. It would have to be done with a reboot of the current web, or a separate network altogether; not this web3 nonsense. The likelihood of either succeeding is very low.
I don't want to sound pessimistic, and genuinely hope I'm wrong about this, for the good of all of us, but I am a bit _miffed_, to put it lightly, that none of these tech visionaries saw these problems early on and tried to fix them when it was possible, and that we ended up with a corrupted version of what the web was supposed to be.
His original goals for the HyperText project[1] involved two phases. The first to build web browsers, and the second to make it easy for users to publish content. This second phase was never completed, AFAIK.
We've had many attempts over the years to address this, but by the time tech silos and web giants were getting established, and advertising starting to corrupt the user experience—mid to late 90s—it was already too late. Millions of people were getting online, and the understanding that the web works by services being provided, often for "free", by large tech companies, was being ingrained in popular culture.
Reversing that notion once the web had matured, and people had become used to giving away their data and personal information to companies, became more difficult as time went on.
As much as privacy conscious nerds will applaud this effort to take the power back to users, I think it's too little, too late, for it to gain any real mainstream adoption. It would have to be done with a reboot of the current web, or a separate network altogether; not this web3 nonsense. The likelihood of either succeeding is very low.
I don't want to sound pessimistic, and genuinely hope I'm wrong about this, for the good of all of us, but I am a bit _miffed_, to put it lightly, that none of these tech visionaries saw these problems early on and tried to fix them when it was possible, and that we ended up with a corrupted version of what the web was supposed to be.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html