"And it's not like it's an unsolvable problem" No, it is not. But it is not a solved problem either. Self-publishing content has been tried. For years. And the

"And it's not like it's an unsolvable problem" No, it is not. But it is not a solved problem either. Self-publishing content has been tried. For years. And the reason we are where we are is not because hosting your own content is hard or expensive, it is because it has unsolved problems that social networks solve. How to consume content you want to consume? How to share your content with people you want to share with? How to build and manage an online community? You might say that aggregators solve the first problem and blogs solve the second one and forums solve the third, but all of these things existed before Facebook and other social networks. Having a unified platform for sharing content with people you choose and consuming content from creators you choose won the market against multiple single purpose services like blogs, forums, news aggregators etc. And Facebook wasn't the first, the "original" social network LiveJournal started out as a sort of a blog hosting service, yet simply by adding an ability to have "friends" and read a selective news feed from people you "friended" it became more popular than any other blog service of its time. Facebook and other social networks are doing exactly the same and they are successful because they provide functionality that does not exist otherwise. Could this problem be solved? Could we have a decentralized content hosting, yet keep all the benefits of a centralized service like Facebook? Most likely. But it is not a problem that already has a solution.