Fediverse

Yeah.

Although there were already discussions about it as early as 2005 (and earlier), Loic and company had been hosting a Web3 conference in France ("Le Web3") for a few years back then. (The real Web3, not the crypto-Web3. < this is why many, if not most, Fediverse devs don't like crypto, the crypto enthusiasts stole "Web3")

The discussions revolved around: #LinkedData #SemanticWeb #SocialWeb and Federation. It was how Web2 was actually envisioned by Tim, father of WWW, to be a federated social network but big corps took over and Web2 became closed social networks.

Lastly, the first approaches were through tech that existing networks were encouraged to implement. For example, few people remember the "Open Social" set of technologies. The SNS platforms who applied Open Social were Hi5 and Google+ to mention two.

In addition, before the #Bluesky "Open Social"—to promote #ATproto —there already was an #OpenSocial. Before the current Social Web came to be, the label was already being used in the early 2000s for similar purposes but larger and more inclusive.

(Note: trying to remember things from back then)

UPDATE from @[email protected]

Although there were already discussions about it as early as 2005 (and earlier), Loic and company had been hosting a Web3 conference in France (“Le Web3”) for a few years back then. (The real Web3, not the crypto-Web3. < this is why many, if not most, Fediverse devs don’t like crypto, the crypto enthusiasts stole “Web3”)

I think you've retconned a little bit here. LeWeb3 was named as a sequel to the previous conference which was called LeBlogs2. Remember, at that time Web 2.0 hadn't really taken off yet - browsers had only just implemented the XMLHTTPRequest API - so it wouldn't have made sense to already be talking about Web 3.0.

Here is an original document containing some history of LeWeb3: https://web.archive.org/web/20070704054929/http://www.loiclemeur.com/LeWeb3executivesummaryv1.pdf