Excellent shot!

I've been typing for a couple hours now and have to get moving with my day, but I want to leave this thread with a few clarifying statements.
1. What I'm pitching is a verifiably half-baked utopia. It will never shake out like this in real life.
2. I still think it would be a cool social experiment.

As you interact with others in real life, that interaction gets logged as an authenticated node, and as others interact with the person you interacted with, those interactions are authenticated by proxy. It's the utilization of the same predatory data gathering technology big tech uses, but for good

I think this part's open to discussion, but I get a personal kick out of imagining it being something much simpler than that: it's literally driven by genuine human contact. You literally start a chain of interactions where you are the first genuine human being in the network.

So... what's the mechanic that vets users? Is it biometrics? 2FA? Some sort of blood-drawing dongle you carry around on your keychain with NFC or bluetooth capabilities? Is it a crypto auth coin?

We live in an era of distrust. The Bright Web is a half-baked take on what a solution to that distrust might look like. If nothing else, it would be an interesting social experiment.

The Bright Web would aim to be a space where we go for complete authenticity. It would also be a place where real, genuine connections with other people could happen earnestly and organically. It would be a place where users would be allowed to let their guard down and take things at face value.

The difference is that was a side-effect of an aspirationally trustless space that also sought to be anonymous. The entire point of the Bright Web from the jump is to reduce anonymity of its users in order to create a trustworthy space.

Now... for anyone that's watched through that video (and especially anyone whose watched through it as many times as I have) (it's a lot) you might be surprised by the suggestion of an authenticated internet. That is, after all, what MetaMask and other auth tokens were seeking.

The dark side of this can be seen with the boom and bust of Web3, aka NFTs. The details of which are summarized well in the YouTube video "Line Goes Up" by Folding Ideas (aka @foldablehuman.bsky.social ) www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_x...

Increasingly, we can't fully trust what we see. We are in the age of the grifter; of the scam artist. Broadly speaking, we've gone from the Information age to the disinformation age (though I've come across a more cheery classification of it as "The Imagination Age" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagina...)

As the internet has become more and more an all-encompassing aspect of the average person's daily life, we find ourselves increasingly exposed to bots, scams, and deception. Everything from the news we watch, to our online social interactions, to the content we consume is unverifiable.

The Bright Web is *less* anonymous and, as a result, you can trust what you're interacting with is real, above board legally, and carries societal protections. There will be a real-world mechanic that validates the person on the other side of the interaction - everyone will have an IRL issued ID.

In the same way that the "Dark Web" can be broadly categorized as a place where people are trying to hide their identities as much as possible (mostly to dodge law enforcement, government monitoring, or prying eyes in general) the "Bright Web" is its foil.

I've seen a lot of consternation online about how impossible it is going to become to tell whether what you're seeing online is real. The absence of trust in what you're seeing and interacting with renders a lot of the internet useless. You can't learn, you can't verify, you can't authenticate.