The Unofficial Web

If you want to publish a website or app, it's really easy to get out your credit card and pay a company for hosting. They'll happily give you server resources for your site, and your personally identifiable information will be associated with your account in the company's database.

This is the default path virtually anyone who publishes something to the web will take.

There should be an easy way to write and publish a website or app without it being associated with a real-world identity...

Something that abstracts the tenancy of specific applications away such that there's no single place to go to censor them.

This is, of course, part of the ethos of Ethereum - but the vast majority of interesting things on the web: content sites, blogs, APIs, apps, etc aren't really things you can power using just smart contracts.

The same is true with IPFS.

What's missing is a network with a Ethereum's or IPFS's relationship to real-world identities and censorship where you can run arbitrary containers or WASM binaries.

A part of the web where full-blown applications exist without any official association to a person or company.

This could give rise to a much grimier web. It wouldn't be reliably brand-safe. It wouldn't always have positive externalities.

But, I think it would be a place to ship software that doesn't destroy itself via the Platform Capitalism playbook.

Coupled with the right ideas, this could be a place for software that's earnestly a means to a specific end. Authentic, composable, remote software that has no one to serve but the individuals who use it.