Interesting point - but why wouldn't the business model that worked for Facebook - ads - work on a decentralised web? Instead of posting content to FB alongside

Interesting point - but why wouldn't the business model that worked for Facebook - ads - work on a decentralised web? Instead of posting content to FB alongside which they run ads and generate revenue, individual publishers could keep the ad revenue themselves, perhaps with a brokerage / commission model like Google operate. Seems to work OK for blogs, which are quite decentralised. Why shouldn't it work for status feeds? In terms of targeting, once you're dealing with "small data" instead of centralised "big data" you need a lot less algorithms to figure out what ads might work. A FB neural net probably does a lot of deep learning to guess that a bunch of mountain-biking friends might be interested in saddles. Decentralised operators could probably figure that out themselves.