Searching for Web5

I am a big fan of qualitative signals: Those repeated comments you keep hearing from different developers about some platform or another being great. That trend which keeps coming up over and over again. Those moments when the smartest people you meet tend to keep referring to some project or another.

Having been in developer ecosystem for the last 15 years working on a wide range of platforms and technologies, usually those signals are pretty valuable. I have learned to look for them as they are often early hints of future trends.

You know what isn’t a future trend? I’d have to go ahead and say Web5.

This isn’t to dunk on Web5, I am just saying that it “isn’t.” There is nothing there. Not even a puff of smoke. After talking to several hundred people at ETH Seattle, Consensus, NFT.NYC, various Discord and Telegram channels: Web5 just isn’t coming up in a single conversation that I have had with a single developer.

I haven’t seen or met a single person going: “You know, our first approach with Web3 was a good start but it failed. What we really needed to do was Web5.”

As a developer relations person, I am excited about whatever developers are excited about. Energy is a force of nature. When a group of people really believe something, really have a vision — they are motivated to work on it non-stop and spend 90 hours a week bringing a vision to life.

I see this energy every single day in REFI. I see it in the Cosmos ecosystem. I see it in the developer ecosystems growing in Africa via Twitter. I see it amongst people who are excited about COSMWASM. I see it in the discussions around restructuring DAO governance and aligning public good incentives.

Haven’t seen it for Web5.