> The economics of startups->dragons is such that it's near impossible for certain mass-market services exist even thought they are useful and economically viab

> The economics of startups->dragons is such that it's near impossible for certain mass-market services exist even thought they are useful and economically viable. That's the impression I got too, with so many good things bought by huge companies (e.g. Google) and then shut down. I believe it might be possible to address this problem. E.g. suppose it is possible to: 1. host the service in a decentralized way such that it is spread between multiple independent hosting providers so that no single hosting company has influence over it. 2. users can pay directly for hosting. it might cost as little as $1 per year, and perhaps only for 'premium' features, but users do not want to pay then somebody else will be in control. 3. the development can be crowdfunded, e.g. say users will pay $2 per year, $1 goes to hosting, $1 goes to fund development. My company have been working on the tech side of it, specifically we made a decentralized replicated relational database, which can also host business logic and queries; and we are now working on a infrastructure which manages hosting in a decentralized way, e.g. when users send funds to application's account, the system will automatically find a providers and pay them. So it all can function without an "owner". I'm not sure about organizational side, though -- most quality services were made by passionate founders, it's not clear if that's going to work for a service owned by users. More thoughts about it here: https://blog.chromia.com/towards-publicly-hosted-applications/ https://blog.chromia.com/towards-publicly-hosted-application...