Ask HN: Do you think web3 is a hype or a real thing about to happen?

These days I keep reading about web3 and how it means the next iteration (revolution ??) of the web and how it will protect free speech (?) and some other advantages.

I liked a lot the period of mid to late 1990 until mid 2000s where I was mostly communicated with strangers over internet and focused on learning things. I installed my first linux version those days, setup a mail server and then later a http server, played with Netscape and Mozaic. Remember using Pine to read emails and I remember how many nights I spent downloading resources from mailing lists as the internet was cheap during the night.

What a wonderful time going from linux to window 3.1 to windows 95 back to Fedora and Redhat and waiting hours with enthusiasm to install a new OS and playing with what it had to offer, discovering almost every default installed program, tweaking and sharing and learning.

Do you think that web3 will really work? My scepticism is related to users hosting content for other users. I don't see yet how this will truly work at a massive scale. But of course I did not read everything about this subject so I am sure there are things that I miss, maybe trends that I am not aware of.