A tale of two webs with Kyle Simpson
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Hi there, and welcome to PodRocket, a web development podcast brought to you by LogRocket. LogRocket helps software teams improve user experience with session replay, error tracking, and product analytics. Try it for free at logrocket. com today. My name is Paul, and joined with us is Kyle Simpson. He is a human centric technologist, and boy, Kyle, I'm excited to get into what that means.

He's the author of 11 plus books on JavaScript and beyond, and is currently the principal software engineer at Socket Supply Company. We're going to be getting into your most recent conference talk, A Tale of Two Webs. Welcome to the podcast, Kyle.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate being here.

What a great title, A Tale of Two Webs. So for those who, you know, haven't seen the conference talk, and we can link it in the show notes, you kind of have this futuristic personality and you're talking to us from 2027, right back on to 2023, A Tale of Two Webs. Could you maybe intro us with Why you want to go with that title and why the tail, this idea of [00:01:00] the future and where we're at now kind of inspired you to give this talk.

Yeah, there's several different angles on it. And I always have a very nonlinear way of arriving at talk themes and talk titles. And I often come back and revise the talk title later after I've worked on the talk a while. So this was certainly the same situation. I started out wanting to give a talk about What I think the web needs to do going forward in the future, meaning that the, that there is a set of necessary steps and evolutions that I believe deeply deeply believe that the web needs to go through, and It happens to be that I work at a company socket supply, which I believe is enabling and is at the center of that movement.

But the story of why I joined that company is because I believe this needs to happen. So it's not really causal one way or the other. It's just really goes hand in hand. And so I didn't want to give a talk that was just all [00:02:00] about whatever my company was but obviously I wanted it to play a vital role in it and I wanted to convince people That this was possible because I think a lot of people when I describe what we're pitching here I think a lot of people are going to be very skeptical like oh, you know, it sounds great, but it'll probably never happen and there's two things that I really wanted to avoid with that one is actually this is already happening.

This is not like we're saying maybe someday we're going to be able to do this or we plan next year to release this or whatever. It's already out there. It's already happening. And it's really just a question of whether people are willing to pick up on this and push this. It's not, can we do it, but will we do it?

And also, I felt that it would be easier to pitch that if I was giving a message of what's already happened rather than what could happen. And that's where the idea to [00:03:00] do the sort of time travel ish type of talk came from, was it's easier to tell people what you've already done than to tell you what's not.

tell them what you're going to do. That's a classic sales technique. And so I just thought, Oh, what if I, it's a very difficult for those that haven't seen the talk. It's a difficult to pull off logistically talk because I record parts of the talk. in advance, but at the same venue so that it looks as if I'm there, I have a different outfit on and I record and edit those into snippets.

And then when I'm present and those snippets are from the year 2023 and when I am giving the talk, I am giving it from the year 2027 and I am referring back to those snippets from quote unquote four years prior.

it's quite

Yeah it's, it, and it's a lot to pull off. It was an ambitious talk concept, but yeah [00:04:00] the idea of that was to lean into this narrative that, and I say this towards the end of the talk, there is already two webs. There's the web that we have now. And there is the web that we will have four years from now. And the question that we should be asking is what's the difference between those. It's not will there be, it's that there will be, and what is the difference between them? And how much of a difference do we want and do we expect from that?

That's the real rub of question that I'm trying to address. And I believe that there is a responsibility that we have as makers of the web. We also get to experience and enjoy the web, but we're makers of the web. And we have a responsibility therefore to decide what that's going to be. There's a famous quote that people have probably heard.

Alan Kay, one of the grandfathers of computing science and responsible for an awful lot of what we have today and the internet. He [00:05:00] said famously, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And a lot of people talk about that quote. In the sort of inspirational sense yes, absolutely.

If I'm, if I just have a big vision, I can go and invent it. And then that will become the future. And that's true. That's maybe even possibly what he meant, but I have a different takeaway from that quote that really drives. What I'm trying to do and what I'm trying to push for and that is the responsibility that comes with that because whatever that future is It is our responsibility because we invented it and if that future is not what we want Then we need to avoid that by making different decisions

Could I ask what in your mind is the antithesis of this future? Is it like the matrix when Neo like wakes up and he's like, Oh God, this is what happened. What's that in Kyle Simpson's mind for the domain of the web?

Yeah, I guess to, to rephrase your question, what's the worst [00:06:00] case, right? Four years from now, what's the worst case version of the web as far as I see it? So, what I see happening with the web and what I'm worried about I've described in social media posts as the web collapsing in on itself, kind of like a dying star.

And that's what I see starting to happen. We have been ever more over the course of well over a decade, creating more and more layers of abstraction and complexity into what it takes to produce and deliver web experiences. And... If you try to take any step back and ask, why did we do that? The answer to why we did X is because it was solving a problem that Y created.

And if you keep following that rabbit trail back, what you find is that most of what we're doing today we're doing because we're trying to solve problems that our prior selves invented. We [00:07:00] created these problems for ourselves. And then we came along with a whole new generation of solutions to fix the problems that the previous solutions created, which in turn creates another set of problems that some future version of ourselves is going to have to fix.

And I'm really frustrated that we can't take a step back. We keep losing this narrative. We can't take a step back and say, maybe. We should stop choosing a path that's just going to be get more problems down the road and those problems are not easier It's not like we're trending downward. We're trending upward.

We're trending in the wrong direction more and more sophisticated more and more complicated More and more difficult and I broadly think that a lot of society is doing that but especially our industry is doing that And it troubles me and it troubles me because I know that is not a sustainable pattern And the web, as we know it, and as an industry that I've loved being able to work in for 25, almost, years, and that I [00:08:00] want, future generations of people to be able to enjoy and to work in.

It can't keep doing what it's doing. We are widening the gap between what it takes to start with no knowledge of working in this industry and to become... That gap went from... You reasonably could possibly fulfill that with a six month boot camp to now it's years and years of experience just to get even remotely up to speed on all of the different tools and processes that we do.

And the wider that gap gets, the harder it's going to be for us to keep backfilling this industry with more and more new developers, new generations. We can't train them. We don't really invest an awful lot of effort in training. That's another. Bell that I've been ringing for a long time that we ought to be focusing more on training and mentoring and we're not and so we're widening the gap and making it harder and we're going to eventually come up with a situation which some people are predicting is already happening, but we're going to come up with [00:09:00] a situation where business is going to find a way and that way is to stop asking us to do stuff. They're going to find a way to build it without asking us to be part of it because we have effectively created so much complexity that we're no longer worth it.

Would you call that like a a it's almost like an informatic bubble.

that's a 

there's the housing market bubble and now there's like the mindshare bubble

It is definitely bubble like, , there are some interesting parallels, I guess with some financial market bubbles and things like that. Yeah. The bubble here is not a speculative inflation the way it might've been in a market type of bubble.

The bubble here is like I said, a set of self inflicted wounds that we just keep deciding that we want to create. And I've been trying to convince people that maybe we should stop self inflicting these wounds. So anyway, the This broader, to answer your question of what's the worst case.

The worst case [00:10:00] to me is that the web stops being something that people can, humans can reasonably expect to be able to get in and create an influence on, and it starts becoming something where it's essentially generating itself. Through maybe the generation of AI that we're starting to see, I'm not a huge believer in this being our savior the way some people are, but maybe that starts to take over and maybe what we start seeing of the web is just computers generating more and more of it for other computers to consume and we start being, a secondary aspect.

And I see the web as one of the most, if not the most Certainly one of the top two or three most important things that mankind has ever done in the entire history of our existence. And its potential is being squandered, I think, by some of these choices that we, the makers of the web, are making. So, when you ask me what's this worst version of the web, [00:11:00] it's the one where we stop being centric to the web.

When you mentioned in the intro, my title of being a human centric technologist, the reason I describe it that way, and the reason I'm so committed to trying to talk about this is I feel like I might be one of the only people trying to remind us that we are still humans, we are still people. And we are not simply subjects and slaves and subservient to the machines that we're using.

And there is a version of our future. And I, you bring up the matrix, so let me just. Tell you I've used this visualization when I've explained this to other people. You can think about this, because I remember when Matrix came out 20 whatever years ago. I remember the movie poster, vividly.

This was when there used to be movie posters at movie theaters. I guess that's not a thing anymore, but I remember the movie poster, and I remember going to a theater

they're movie screens, Kyle

Yeah, I know, I know, it's so old school. But I remember it. And there's a version of that movie poster in my mind that I see that represents [00:12:00] a future that I hope we go to where there's a human in the middle and then the technology is all surrounding that human and the technology is all augmenting and improving that human's experience.

There's another version of that movie poster where the technology is in the middle and faded out to the edges are all the souls of people that basically don't matter anymore. And what I'm concerned about is that we are headed towards that future, that second poster rather than that first one in so many ways in lots of areas of society, but we don't have to get too broad about all of those things.

We can just talk about how. We are getting further and further down the line of creating a web where we have some built in assumptions that I think are fatally flawed. One of the fatal flaws in the decisions that we make as web makers is that we assume that devices, device [00:13:00] capability is a substitute for a user preference and desire.

In other words, if a device or a system is capable of doing something, we assume that the people using that device want us to do it. And that is not. The case, and it is increasingly becoming not the case that users do not want to simply seed all of those choices to the device and just have it just tell me what I want.

There are probably some in society that want that, but I am fighting for us to stay in control of our device and to still have the option to choose what kind of experience we want rather than just to have these dumb terminals that we don't have any control over that feed us, whatever the Producer of media wants to feed us.

I don't want that future. I want the future where we're in control and we need to stop assuming that the capabilities of devices are a substitute for that. Expressed [00:14:00] user preference for their experience.

and owning the experience we're talking about the, this experience as an object here, owning the experience is part of it. Owning. There's always the conversation of owning data.

I was just going to go

okay, awesome. Yeah. Please indulge us, Kyle. Before we step in there, though, just because we're like our halfway point, I want to remind the listeners in our great nebulous conversation here that this conversation, this podcast is brought to you by LogRocket.

And if you are making a web app, whether that be big, medium or small, and you want to spend less time debugging, and more time focusing on your user experience, logRocket. com. You can go to LogRocket and surface all sorts of logs, metrics, use pattern finders to find all sorts of inefficiencies you might not have noticed before.

So head over to logrocket. com today and check it out for free. Less time debugging, more time making a better app. And when you're making an app, yeah, one of the big questions is that in the tale of two webs, you [00:15:00] talked about it, Kyle, like we have age old question of where do we store data, how do we index data, there's problems with that, I'm curious about how this better version of the web is different from what we have now about who owns the data, where the data stored, because there's a whole spectrum here I'm, it feels boggling for my mind, because some data is huge.

And I know my device can't handle back shouldering all of that. So how do we move in that direction? And yeah, please just indulge us.

So I said a moment ago that one of the fatal assumptions that we make about the web is that device capability substitutes user preference and it shouldn't and doesn't another fatal assumption that the web has made is that the only way for data to effectively be transmitted, stored, and used on the web is if it's centralized.

And that means that companies establish their presence in the cloud. They [00:16:00] pay, in some cases, huge sums of money, hundreds of thousands a year, to establish these thousands and thousands of different servers out in the cloud. And they slurp up all of our data, and store it and dissect it and slice and dice it up there in the cloud.

And then, when we want access to our data, we have to ask permission to have our data back. And part of the way that we ask permission is we have to have an internet connection, which means we have to pay for something, right? We have to pay somebody to have access to the internet. And then we have to pay for some service that is holding our data and ask them, can you please give me my data back?

Here's my perfect example of this. My banking app. I opened up my banking app yesterday and I looked at my bank account balances and I looked at some of my transaction history and a few things like that. And I occasionally do that. I would say maybe once or twice a week, just to keep an eye on things, right?

Today, if I were to open up my app and if I had no [00:17:00] internet connection, you know what my app would do? It wouldn't even open. It would come up with a blank screen and it would say error, couldn't connect or couldn't log in or whatever and all the data that I saw yesterday is gone even though it's my data and even though I've seen it, it's gone.

It's ephemeral because. They make the assumption in the design of that app that I have to have a live view of that data from their servers, or it's not relevant data, and that assumption is fatally flawed because that data, my purchase data is my data. I own it, and that should damn sure stay on my device, and I should always be able to see it because I might not need to see.

Today's bank balance. I might need to see yesterday's purchases, which I used to be able to see, and I can no longer see because my wife lies down or on a bus or a train or an airplane. So when we talk about data ownership, this is something that is deeply. Meaningful and personal [00:18:00] to me that we have effectively said that the only way to run the web is to monetize to pay for the web with our data, and that is absolutely the wrong currency to pay to be paying for a web experience with that data is mine.

When I created on my device, it should stay on my device, and I should be the only one who gets to decide what happens to that data. If I want the data on my phone to also go to my laptop, I should be able to make that easily happen, and I should even be able to automate it if I want. But that should not have to mean that my data has to go all the way up to the cloud for that to happen.

And yet we've built 20 plus years of the web with that assumption in mind. The only way to synchronize, the only way to backup, the only way to communicate and collaborate, the only way to discover all of these things that are hard problems. We just answered them in the most lazy and least effective way possible, which was [00:19:00] centralization, and it just have just so happens that makes billion dollar companies into trillion dollar companies because they get to extract the vast majority of all business data value by holding on to all of your data.

And these giant cloud providers are extracting trillions of dollars of data. I mean of value from businesses because all of these businesses have come to believe that the only way for them to transact and the only way for them to give the experiences to their users that users want and the only way for them to have access to what they need to make their business better and to grow is for all that stuff to be accessible.

Centralized and owned and take that ownership and that authority and that autonomy away from users. And we have to flip this around. This is the death star imploding on itself, kind of future web that I'm talking about is that more and more of that data is going there and we are getting cut out of the equation. They're happy to take our data to get real sci fi about it. They're happy to take our data. [00:20:00] Just like in the movie matrix, they were happy to take our body heat. We have to fight against that and I'm not talking about I think we're all plugged into the matrix right now. I'm not trying to be like cuckoo about it, but it is a fact that they are currently taking all of our data that we should own and they're making money on it and cutting us out of the equation and that's the version of the web that we're headed towards that if we don't fight, it's going to happen and that's what I'm trying to prevent.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on education of the general populace and how this might move the needle. If I have somebody who has never touched a computer or command line before, and then I say, Hey, there's a way, like we can use SCP this weird thing, right? Let me show you how a terminal works.

And this is a true story. Like it's actually, we've gone from zero to SCP in the time span of two hours. And they were like, what? I can just do this right on the LAN. I was like, yeah, believe it or not. I feel like that might move the [00:21:00] needle, right? As more and more people can just hop on YouTube, hop on like you had in your talk chat GPT and actually get to an operable point, maybe in web dev.

I might feel the same way that it's getting more and more difficult for newcomers. But there's this concept of like education. Do you think that plays into this?

I think it's incredibly important. I'm glad you brought it up. Probably one of the biggest points of skepticism when I start talking about idea, so briefly socket supply creates a free runtime that lets you take a web app and make it into a peer to peer capable native app. So you use your favorite web app technology, but now you have the capability for this app to live on a device.

Talk to another app instance on another device without the cloud. That's the big thing that we're doing. And when I talk to people about that, immediately people started saying, well, wait a minute, you're telling me that all of my data would reside only on my device. What if I drop my phone in the toilet or if I lose it or somebody steals my phone or whatever.

Okay. [00:22:00] So that's, Their first instinct when you talk about users, whether they're developers or not, their first instinct is, I know that I might not always permanently have this device. And if you're telling me that what I should value as a person is that my data resides locally on my device, even without being a technical person, I worry, what if that's the only place that data is?

Because it could be lost, just like a home can burn down and all my valuable paperwork can be lost, that data could be lost and I might not be able to get it back. So even a non technical user has a question like what happens to my data if I lose my device?

That was a whole selling point back in Web 2 when it came out. It's back it up. Yeah.

exactly. Back it up. And I'm not suggesting that there's nothing wrong, that there's nothing virtuous about backup. But I am suggesting that centralized backup is not the only model for backup. It just happens to be the one that's most beneficial to Amazon execs, right? There are other ways that we could manage and create that kind of Safety.

So one of the things that I get is a lot of skepticism from [00:23:00] people like that. They say, well, I would never do that because I wouldn't want an app that only keeps my data there because I'm worried that I might lose it. Another question that people get is I don't want to an app where my phone and my laptop or my two phones or my wife's phone and my phone.

They're out of sync. And I never know which data is real and live and correct. So even a non technical user has experienced out of sync problems and can express in even non technical terms that this is a concern. So these skeptic, these skepticisms that we get from non technical users, when you talk to a technical person, they will tell you a non technical user, which is the primary user base of the internet, they're not ever going to.

Believe in or understand the importance of owning their data and being responsible for their data. So they'll tell me this will never happen, right? You're being completely naive. The general end user will never want this version of the world where they actually have control and therefore responsibility over data.

My response to them is if you get if you [00:24:00] went back even seven or eight years and you said to anybody who was even remotely Technically under, literate at that point, that we would take from at that point. I best estimates that I can get is that were there was less than 1% of the world at that point was using what we now call two factor authentication, meaning that they were using some other form of proving their identity and their authentication on the general open web and in software, they were using something else besides a password.

That number was way less than 1% 5, 10 years ago. And that number is now, by the estimates that I can see, well over 30 or 40% of the people that are connected to the internet are using some form of two factor authentication. They may be crappy ones like SMS, but they're using something. If you went back 10 years and you said, we will, in 10 years, train over a billion people in this world, That they have to [00:25:00] own more responsibility over proving who they are and their identity.

And that will be more inconvenient and it will take a few extra steps. But we will convince a billion people on this planet to change their behaviors around passwords so that they own more responsibility. If you told a person that ten years ago, they'd laugh at you and say, that'll never happen. We'll never get a billion people to change their behavior.

And yet, it has happened. So my response is, just like we educated the world, little by little and as painfully as possible, that it was an important responsibility that they own the way that they prove and control who they are, their identity. The same thing can happen and must happen for our data. We have to make it easy for them or tractable.

Manageable for them to do so. And that's part of what I believe my company is doing is we're creating the raw bits of software that people will build these experiences to make it so that I can legitimately own my data on my device, but make sure that it is [00:26:00] seamlessly and transparently synchronizing and backing itself up in places that I know I can trust.

And I know I will always have access to, we can do that. And we are doing that. And if we do that, and if people start creating experiences where we put that forefront, and we say, as a business, the reason why you should choose us over our competitor is not because we have cheaper prices, but because we are being a better steward of your data.

You don't have to trust some legalese privacy document that we promise we're not doing anything with your data. The way we've built ourselves is it's Data first for you, you own your data, and we don't do stuff with your data because we don't have your data, right? That's what companies can do to start convincing users that ownership and responsibility over their data is just as important, if not more important than ownership and responsibility around our identities.

And so. I think your point is very well taken about education. We need to convince the world that they need to do this and that will be a hard task and it will not happen overnight. It will [00:27:00] take years, but we will make strides in that in the same way that we have done with authentic, with two factor authentication, there's precedent for this.

And I think it's even more important that we do this than when we had the stakes around, passwords and the insecurities that passwords bring.

If we're talking socket supply at your company, Kyle. What are some of the things that you think people successfully are able to target quickly? That help move in that direction like that. I think the poster child for me is like airdrop I've been on a mountain and wanted to share a photo and you can do that kind of p2p That's just sharing a photo.

I wonder are there simple things like that people really blow people's minds or blow teams minds when they're like, wait, this is something that we can do with this layer of abstraction.

Yeah. And it's, what's important is to point out you did that. Not just because you had the [00:28:00] two devices locally proximate to each other, but because you were in a place where neither of those devices had a connection to a cloud,

That's right.

And that's the real critical component that we have to point out to people is that you should have that freedom no matter what your internet connectivity is.

That's a detail that. Often is glossed over, but that's the real key here. Everybody knows how to share photos between their devices. Nobody knows how to do that. Relatively. Nobody knows how to do that. When there's no cloud connection, when you're on an airplane, when you're on the top of a mountain, when you're on a bus or a train or something like that.

So I just want to reinforce the point that you're making is valid, but we have to enforce all parts of it. It's not just that my two devices could talk to each other. Cause that's been around for a long time, but we. Most of those technologies still seem to rely, like if you have an iPhone and an iWatch, yeah, they have a Bluetooth, but they don't transfer data over Bluetooth.

They connect through Apple's Cloud. Your watch downloads the photo from Apple Cloud [00:29:00] after your phone pushed it up, or vice versa. So even when you have something where it's clearly obvious that my phone and my watch ought to talk directly to each other, they still involve the cloud because people that run clouds.

Stand to benefit more from pulling your data up into the cloud than making it direct. And that's, a particularly egregious case. Like why does my watch and my phone need a cloud to talk to each other anyway? So yes, absolutely. There's a whole class of applications that I believe needs to come more to the forefront.

These are applications where. First and foremost, the thing that I'm doing is creating my own kinds of data. I'm talking about things like fitness trackers, health trackers, habit trackers, to do lists, things like that. I'm creating data that I own and that I'm the only person on the planet who actually really intrinsically needs to have access to that data.

There's nobody else that. Definitely needs that. There might be people that I might benefit from if it was a health tracker and I'm tracking like something with my heart, maybe I might want to choose to selectively share that [00:30:00] information with a health provider, but it should not be automatically assumed that for me to track private medical data, that needs to be going up into the cloud somewhere.

That should be staying on my device and again, devices because I own multiple devices and I would like to have access to that on my computer and my watch and my phone and all of these other things, right? I'd like that. So I coined this phrase a little while back Most of your listeners are probably not old enough to remember this, but there's a phrase called web rings from very early days of the internet, which is where blogs basically just linked to each other in these giant rings.

So you could discover other cool blogs by just following the links in the footer or whatever. And those were called web rings. So I repurposed that term to refer to this. I call these local rings of my devices that know about each other and can seamlessly and transparently talk to each other through a variety of.

Internet and non internet based technologies, Bluetooth, NFC, whatever. They can talk to each other and keep each other in sync, and they should. And there's some apps where [00:31:00] that's the only communication that you ever need. We need to be bringing those kinds of apps to the forefront and showing people, Hey, what if we built an app like that?

Here in the U S we had last year, the Supreme court ruling on the abortion access, hot button topic, listeners probably have very different opinions on this on both sides, right? I think one thing that most everybody can agree on, regardless of your political. Affiliations is that it's bad that big tech has so much of that kind of private information that kind of private information like tracking a woman's, a menstrual cycle or something like that.

That's not something that big tech or governments should have. That should be very local. But the only way we have that right now is we have to trust a privacy policy on some app maker because they're still slurping all that data up and putting it in the cloud. Those are the kinds of apps that if we start building them and pushing them out there and saying this is how it could be if your data was always [00:32:00] yours and always available and you always had control over it.

When we make those apps, then it's not too big of a leap to say, now here's an app which can also communicate and collaborate your data with others, like social media apps, like e commerce apps, etc. When I've already built an assumption that the data is mine and that it's always there available to me, and then you add on the extra capability for me to communicate and collaborate with others, it's easier To reframe that is I'm still in control rather than right now, which is I'm trained as a user of the Internet to believe that I'm not in control.

So we have to first reset. That's what I'm saying. And that's what I'm most excited about is that socket makes this very easy to build these like in a couple of lines of code. You have everything that you need. You have full file system access. You have capabilities like Bluetooth and NFC so you can synchronize and we have it.

In a couple of tons of lines of code, you can have these two things communicating to each other and sinking themselves. So in a [00:33:00] weekend, somebody could build one of these apps. It's not months and huge teams of developers and tens of thousands of dollars of cloud costs. You just build this, pay 100 to Apple so you have the privilege of sticking it in their app store, and then you're done.

And that app can run forever for free and everybody gets to own their own. And so what I want to see is more people building those apps first. I, we call them local first apps. I call them essentially local only apps. They're apps that are, that default to the local mode and maybe never communicate beyond your local range. It's an easier way to graduate from that. into what I'm talking about than to go the other way. It's like putting the genie back in the bottle or squeezing the toothpaste back in the tube. It doesn't go that direction. So we've got to do some reset here. And I hope more and more people will take this technology that we've provided at Socket.

It's free open source. We're not like some middleman that you got to pay us for. It's a free open source tool. [00:34:00] Make this and build your apps with this, please. I'm begging you create apps this way so that we can start the, to your point, the edu the reeducation process to convince people that's the way it always should have been.

That's the relationship that we should have had to our data is that we should have always owned it.

So how could people get started with socket today? What is a good hello world sort of program in your mind?

Yeah, so again, it's these kinds of local only things like you might think, Hey, I would love to keep my grocery list and keep it in sync between me and my wife's devices or, my spouse's device or whatever. I'd like to have myself a little grocery list. You might just go to the app store and see that and find that you can pay 2 a month to have grocery lists syncing between your devices or whatever, but you could just build that in a day's worth of effort.

Like probably less. If you're even modestly experienced with web development, a framework like react, you could lay out a grocery list, [00:35:00] sync synchronization type of app, build this thing and react, package it inside of a socket app, install it on both of your devices and be done with it, right?

That those kinds of things really do not take a lot of software development expertise. If you wanted to build it. A full scale social network on a peer to peer network. It's going to take a significant more investment in engineering, right? That's a lot more work. So I'm not claiming that every single thing is this magical silver bullet, but there's a whole bunch of apps that can be built in days of time at most that are.

This kind of local first or local primary type of mentality and. You get all of that for free and a free open source runtime. You don't have to invent any of that stuff. And I hope that more hobbyists will build that. I hope that they're there, but businesses, if you're listening and you work for a business and you're like, man, we pay 10, 000 a month for our [00:36:00] cloud services.

You could be asking how much of that legitimately needs to be in the cloud. Maybe some of it still needs to be there. Large file backups and maybe that, maybe you need a cloud, but maybe you could take your 10, 000. Monthly cost and gradually reduce that down to 1, 000 a month. How big of a difference would that mean for most businesses if they could reduce 90% of their overhead by distributing the logic and the data across their user devices, everybody wins there except for the cloud provider.

And I'm sorry, I'm just not going to shed any tears. If the big trillion dollar companies lose a little bit of revenue.

I feel like you have a lot of people on your side with that one. Kyle, my last question is it is maybe not related, but I'm curious if you see the crypto space, the blockchain space utilizing this, or are they already utilizing it?

Yeah, it's a great question. So I describe what we're building and what I'm trying to push this local first, or [00:37:00] really, I guess the best term is this peer first web this cloud optional peer first web, that web that I'm pushing, I refer to it as web 2. 5, instead of referring to it as web three. And I want to provide a little bit of context.

So I prior to joining socket, which I did back earlier this year I spent several months working for a Web3 company, a company in the crypto space. Great company, nothing wrong with them at all. There are legitimate, actual, real good things happening in the Web3 world, despite what you've been told, that it's all terrible.

I think most of it is terrible. But there are some actual good, legitimate things. And the company I was working for is a hero that makes the stacks blockchain for smart contracts in the Bitcoin space. I think that's legitimate and useful stuff. I think they're too early. Honestly, I think web three is way too big a jump from what we currently do.

And I think they're missing a whole bunch of pieces and there may be hoping that [00:38:00] somebody is going to come along and do that. So when I left there to come work at socket, I. immediately started positioning this as we got to go build web 2. 5 before there's ever even a hope that a web 3 is going to happen and it's not going to be like tomorrow like it's going to take a while it's going to these evolutionary processes take years and decades not months and i don't think this this typical attitude in the Web 3 space of believe hard enough and it will come into existence.

That's what I encountered a lot in the Web 3 space in my time there. And I don't think that's going to work. You're going to need some people really digging in. So when I came to Socket, I decided I'm going to help Socket build Web 2. 5. Someday. I do legitimately hope that Web 3 adopts and builds upon the work that we do in Web 2.

5. But just to be very clear even if they are compatible ideas for the future, We are not a web [00:39:00] three company in any way, shape or form. We don't use any blockchain or cryptology, cryptography or any of that other stuff that is inherent to the web three space. We're not a cryptocurrency or anything like that.

I would just describe us as the necessary steps that the web needs to evolve through. Before a possible Web3 future is ever actually going to happen.

Kyle, thank you so much for your time coming on and having this conversation. I feel like. This is a nebulous topic, but it's one that is, like you keep saying, it's very important for us to reframe our minds with. If people wanted to follow up with this conversation, do you recommend a particular book you came out with that maybe lends itself better to what we're talking about?

Do you have blog posts? Perfect.

Best, best ways to keep up with this are a couple of things. Number one, if you're listening, please go [00:40:00] download the free open source framework from SocketSupply's GitHub account. Which if you don't find that when you Google for it, you can just find SocketSupply. It's SocketSupply. co is our web address and we link to our GitHub.

Go get the runtime, download it, and in... Less than five minutes. You will have built yourself a native app that runs on Android, iPhone, Windows, Linux, Chrome. Windows, Mac, Linux and also Chrome OS. We target all of those and you can build one of those apps in less than five minutes with a little bit of web tech.

Go try that and convince yourself that this is not actually matrix level science fiction. That maybe happens someday out. It's happening right now. People can and are doing it. So that's the first thing I'd encourage people to do in five minutes with that. I think you'll be pleasantly pretty surprised at how easy that is.

Number two, we have a vibrant discord channel. We've got several dozen people that are actively building apps. Using socket technology, come and join our free discord channel and ask us [00:41:00] questions and tell us what you're up to. And we'd love to be part of that. Me personally, I'm most active on LinkedIn. So find me search for get a fi on LinkedIn, G E T I F Y.

Find me on LinkedIn and listen to what I'm talking about, because this is what I'm passionate about. So you're likely to see me posting an awful lot about that. So there's the best first tips that I can recommend to people to get connected in this space. We've got tons of docs out there on our site.

So if you have questions, you can ask us and you can also check the doc.

Kyle, thank you again for your time and hope to have you again on in the future.

I'd love to be in here. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.