I still remember, when the semantic web was Web 3.0…
(Arguably, Web 3.0 rather was the mash-up web of early centralisation of services, with widgets and things like Yahoo! Pipes, etc. Time to to think of Web4.)
The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people's schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful.
You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make contacts.
You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications.
If we'd built Reddit back then, it'd have been topics and comments that were digitally signed and exchanged p2p, with signed voting, interest graphs, and curated peer groups.
Unfortunately, this was just as the VC and ad-money fueled Google and Facebook were coming into prominence. They built centralized systems that were easy to use faster than the Semantic Web community could move. (Semantic Web was much broader - some were interested in predicate logic distributed databases, which were a bit much.)
Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. Do not forget. We can still use the lessons today. This is what the web could have become if the advertising gravity well hadn't sucked it in.
When I studied at University 15 years ago web 2.0 was in full swing and the academics where busy talking about web 3.0 which was at the time understood as "the semantic web".
No one seems to remember the original web 3.0 was the semantic web from almost 20 years ago. It in part enabled the news feed aggregation of modern social media.
FWIW the idea of the Semantic Web pre-dates Web 2.0 by quite a bit, so even the idea of it being Web 3.0 was a bit of an attempt to bandwagon on the success of Web 2.0.
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