The Long Tail of Decentralized Software by Marisa Rowland

so you can still find this inevitable feeling but it's increasingly rare as centralized platforms seep into every city town our homes Our Lives we're missing that feeling when you sold a dozen boxes of Girl Scout cookies to your neighbor Margie or when Carol let you ride the bus with your lizard for show and tell or that feeling when you broke in those kangaroo leather soccer cleats fighting blisters so that they formed perfectly to your feet there was a time when everything was local even personal to we're nostalgic for something that most of us merely glimpsed we blinked and suddenly the internet had brought hyper globalization in centralized platforms to all of us personalization today dances around under false pretenses we see personalized ads custom orders Precision medicine but usually this is just a euphemism for a data asymmetry corporations and institutions know more about you than you do through data aggregation platforms Target you again and again our inboxes are overflowing with personalized ads and emails yet we remain in the dark knowing ourselves through these corporate tarots in awe of the algorithm nowadays instead of browsing the aisle of your local Corner Store you log into Amazon you scroll endlessly maybe you add a few items to your cart did you even select them or did Amazon's algorithm pick them for you uh maybe you saw it on Tick Tock you really can't remember it's hard to feel nostalgic for the generalized digital storefront characteristic of web 2. if we fast forward 50 years this hyper personalized Trend feels a bit more dystopian a world where every aspect of your life is optimized to suit your individual needs and preferences maybe it's a refrigerator that orders food for you based on your continuous blood glucose monitor or maybe it's an app that messages that optimizes all of your messages based on your brain waves or circadian rhythm or maybe it's software that shows you every detail of your purchase down to who you were with when ownership is alienated from the individual and Community the high probability future that affords us these levels of comfort efficiency and well-being cost us our privacy and autonomy in other words personalization is great as long as it's not extractive we're stuck in this uncanny valley of personalization and web 2 but ownership of our tools can unlock true personalization the future is dark if we don't own it so this drive towards a niche anisha's small as you can be seen in the trend of the long tail for those of you not familiar with Chris Anderson's theory that predicted the Creator economy influencer marketing and platform monopolies the long tail is simple the area under the tail is equal to or greater than the area under the Curve um so Anderson identified the opportunity of web 2 is just selling more items to more people as less quantities um which really just means that there's a market for the niche as opposed to before where there are only a there's only room on the shelf or a few hit items uh Amazon best exemplifies this I'm really not sure what you can't buy on Amazon so as web twos drive to capture the niche becomes more and more dystopian I couldn't help but Wonder how web3 changes our relationship to personalization by introducing the ownership missing from web2 so I hypothesize that the long tail can be much longer in web 3. technology Trends towards democratization and web 3 is really no different the rights of peer-to-peer technology such as Sovereign identity decentralized storage and network computing unlock a previously scary and dystopian Future made fun and personal by owning your tools true personalization can only occur when individuals and communities shape their tools and hopefully reap those benefits whereas platforms capture the value of the long tail and web 2 the long tail of web 3 will be owned by you and your community if the long tail of web 3 can be almost infinite then I think we agree that the opportunity here is great all right so what's web three I think we're all pretty familiar with this Paradigm this right read write own Paradigm rate web one was read only web two you could read and write web three read write and own but I think own is really misinterpreted here it's it seemed to be interpreted as its own isolated category and really I think own applies to read and write itself by owning read and write we in our communities become truly autonomous instead of relying on a platform to dictate what we can and cannot do owning our tools allows for the ultimate personalization we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us this is a favorite code of ours and I believe an ethos shared here in the ethereum community before the internet our relationship with our tools looked like this pretty simple we had Direct access to our tools now as platforms have mediated our experience and access to tools it looks something like this which kind of feels like this this isn't to say that web 2 hasn't afforded us Niche somewhat personal goods and services it's just that we're completely dependent on these platforms to shape the tools that then shape us we're already seeing many backlash against this right here's some Choice media headlines um but creators are really the canonical example of alienation from their tools and ownership of their tools creators don't own their access to write or publish information they are reliant on platforms to tell them to whom when they can publish and also just their own access to Capital right so it's akin to building a house but then you say you borrowed the tools from Home Depot and so after you're done building that house Home Depot actually owns that house and everything in the house so not only are we alienated from our tools but we're also alienated from anything that our tools generate such as our data and data aggregation is what web2 is reliant on to connect you to a niche good as I said before it's fundamentally fueled by this data asymmetry in just privacy violations some revered the algorithm that's fed by this data aggregation as like a god they see the for you page as oh it's it's really meant for me but sometimes it's also just so off it really leaves you wondering like is this for me and I mean it's just indicative of how these platforms are doing thankfully an incomplete job of mining your data it's remaining siled between banking institutions social networks and medical facilities we're stuck in this uncanny valley of personalization where you can see one side of yourself reflected in the storefront but never the whole where we're at the mercy of these platforms to dictate access and agency and where everything looks the same but just slightly different so that's also though fail at personalization today um wall web 3 is you know been focused on the global consensus layer uh is unwittingly propagated a less personalized version of web2 web3 has only unbundled the global parts of web 2 such as payments and data storage so it really can't be personal yet um and dumps today fail at personalization in a lot of the same ways that web 2 does right there's still collecting data on centralized servers and there's still a centralizing software behind a company it's actually quite difficult to achieve a web 2 like ease of user experience with adapt which uses publicly available data on the blockchain that means that nft Marketplace can really only show you transactional data not your last browsed nft not your friend's favorite nft not actually the image of the nft if any dab is showing you anything close to this or a recommendation right it's running a centralized server and so a large critique of web3 is that it's still running on web 2 infrastructure or at least imitating the patterns of web 2. I mean who decides what your wallet looks like what it can do like what two to four companies does every dot make API calls to how many of your communities are using Discord notion Telegram Google Docs so we can start to see that our web3 tools aren't really our own and web3 is falling back on the extractive patterns of web 2 to fuel this personalization to give web3 some credit is starting to get personal a little bit more personal right if Global state is ethereum local state is l2s we're still missing personal estate there is a dark web 2 parallel here where web3 we could decide to write all our personal data to the blockchain however this would be expensive and inefficient use of Technology blockchain we know is better suited for recording and verifying transactions rather than storing large amounts of data but really not everything should live on a blockchain not everything should be public I don't need consensus on all of my personal activities okay story time that feeling when web3 gets personal for those of you who are hungover this is a good time to just close your eyes you wake up deeply rested in Idaho Springs your endocrine system hasn't quite recovered from the ravage of notifications in your young adult life but it is quiet and calm you take a stroll to the Town Square where there's a portal Community memory 3. you log into your computer with your biometric ring that also holds your private key the screen reveals landscape NOS of sorts and your dashboard to the digital world there is a collection of apps some you've even built yourself this online environment feels like home it's instantly familiar not because you've grown used to it or because it's designed to appear familiar but because you built it this way it's an expression of you not an approximation because no one's at the other end of this tool with anything to gain from your engagement or from predicting or motivating your next move your tools service you and your community for as long as you need them you log out and exit the Town Square breathing in the fresh Colorado Air okay you can open your eyes now the most fundamental tool that anyone could own in this digital age is our personal computer well web3 as I said has only begun to touch these Global Parts of web 2 payments and data storage to become a true competitor and unlock personalization web3 needs a personal compute solution only then can we realize the long tail of web3 and so as I said before not everything should live on a blockchain not everything should be centralized to a centralized server um but I think it should be centralized to you it should be on a personal server if we replace the client server model with a world of decentralized personal servers then the cost of Distributing truly custom software Falls to nearly zero and the unique combinations of Financial social and medical data becomes desirable and even possible when your data is centralized to you Robin Sloan talks of a time when apps are so personal that they're akin to a home-cooked meal imagine this for your community your garden your Dao and what's really exciting today is we're actually already seeing some Whispers of this feature right fwb's new app is a great example of a Dao shipping software for its Community another example is serving the people a non-profit community of artists creating a custom app on Urban called cyclopedia it's kind of like a Blog of blogs and also this is nothing new with the history of personal Computing right there were bbs's whole earth electronic link the long tail of web 3 could be so long okay but isn't running a personal server like hard uh uh sure normally it is but we've spent the last decade rewriting the compute stack from the ground up it's called orbit and this is what we at to Long Corporation are working on and building communication and collaboration tools on top of for communities so the long tail that previously looked like this uh is really ours to own the long tail of web3 will be owned by individuals and communities and will shake up the existing World Order and will be the aggregators of web 3 not the monopolistic platforms as distribution costs fall to nearly zero local or tomorrow from Robin Sloan home cook software becomes possible so like FWB or STP your Dow club or team or your Town Co-op or garden can have their own truly custom software we can follow our Nostalgia forward in creating a deeply intimate future the future is bright as long as we own it so I'll read this poem that hopefully illustrates just how natural technology can be I like to think and the sooner the better of a cybernetic Meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming Harmony like pure water touching clear sky I like to think right now please of a cybernetic Forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if there are flowers with spinning blossoms I like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined Back To Nature returned to our mammal brothers and sisters and all watched over by Machines of love and grace so if you'd like to learn more or join us in conversation you can use this QR code here to join the network also feel free to find me later all right thank you this is