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> if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive The problem is that when you start mea

> if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive The problem is that when you start measuring on "reaching more than a few thousand people" instead of "is creating a lot of economic incentive", cryptocurrency experiments around building communities also start to look pretty bad in practice. I have yet to see any general-user social platform built on top of cryptocurrency amass the same amount of mainstream success as Mastodon. And Mastodon is comparatively tiny when stacked up against Twitter/Facebook, it should be the low-hanging fruit. But at least Mastodon is a platform that seems to have somewhat evolved past the initial "the only people using this are the people who built it or who are invested in it" phase. On the protocol level, look at stuff like Matrix; it's got very little incentive built in to get you to run your own platform, and yet... it still kinda looks like it's beating blockchain networks at being actually useful. A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. So sure, crypto has an interesting approach to incentivizing economic investment, but at a certain point I start to question whether those incentives actually result in generalized, successful platforms that tons of everyday people are using. It unfortunately is starting to seem like the incentive structures attract a lot of capital and a lot of eyes that are either hostile to the overall goals of decentralization, or at least that the attention doesn't seem to be providing the kind of value/structure required to get non-invested, non-capital-focused general users to join in.

rglullis 5y ago
Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with strong economic incentives to get it working. Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd say they are still far from being mainstream. When we start having companies using their own instance instead of Twitter/FB to promote their content and when we start having youtubers leaving Google to broadcast their content from their own branded Peertube, then I'd say it has hit mainstream. > A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. That comes with the territory in any hot market, and crypto is no exception to Sturgeon's Law. The main point that I would argue though is that is not just about the "money", but rather if these new systems can be sustainable and if they can create new alternatives to the status quo. The best example that I can think of is Brave and BAT. The BAT "economy" is still ridiculously small, but on a bet about the longevity of Brave vs Mozilla, my money is (literally) on Brave. Mozilla can have all the wishy-washy nice words about how they are protecting the web, but it doesn't take much to realize that they can not bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the browser and its search system will be a way for them to fight Google at their core. You will have soon lots of people making coordinated efforts to get more people off Google and into an alternative where they can benefit.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with strong economic incentives to get it working. And it turns out that system (for all of its problems) is working better than blockchain for shipping actual decentralized software that ordinary people can use. > Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd say they are still far from being mainstream. And again, "far from being mainstream" is still miles ahead of any blockchain social network. > When we start having companies using their own instance instead of Twitter/FB to promote their content We do have this, Trump's recent venture into the social media space was built off of a Mastodon fork. It wasn't built off of blockchain. > Mozilla can have all the wishy-washy nice words about how they are protecting the web, but it doesn't take much to realize that they can not bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the browser and its search system will be a way for them to fight Google at their core. Brave is literally built on top of Chromium, it's literally Google's tech stack with some extra stuff pasted on top. It makes sense why not needing to take money from Google would matter, but in practice, Firefox still ends up having better privacy controls and more power to oppose certain web standards purely because it has a different engine than Chrome. It turns out that in practice, architectural independence matters more. This is another good example of the finances ending up mattering less than people think they do. Mozilla has money, that's how it's able to fund projects like Servo/WASM/Stylo, projects that Brave (for all its financial independence) doesn't have the developer resources or the architectural independence needed to helm. And the trajectory of those projects is worth its own conversation, but I don't think dependence on Google's money is the reason Mozilla had to eventually drop Servo, and I don't think that Brave is in a position to pick a project like that up. ---- You don't really have to convince me about an idea, you don't have to argue theory to me. The theory of financial independence is fine, I don't have a problem with that, I just don't see the theory playing out in practice. The blockchain doesn't need a theory for why it matters, all the blockchain needs to do is to launch projects that are better than the alternatives. So far it hasn't, which is a really low bar to clear. You're attacking Mastodon, how embarrassing is it then that there isn't a blockchain-based Twitter alternative that's bigger than Mastodon? If you're right, and if a blockchain social network springs up that out-competes the other projects on the metrics that actually matter (not just money), then I'll start taking the space more seriously. But so far it just hasn't happened; and a lot of the promising projects that are closest-related to blockchain (even the really promising projects like IPFS, or the poster-child for this stuff, Handshake) have ultimately ended up being a lot more disappointing than the projects that have taken root in other spaces.

rglullis 5y ago

Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with strong economic incentives to get it working. Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd say they are still far from being mainstream. When we start having companies using their own instance instead of Twitter/FB to promote their content and when we start having youtubers leaving Google to broadcast their content from their own branded Peertube, then I'd say it has hit mainstream. > A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. That comes with the territory in any hot market, and crypto is no exception to Sturgeon's Law. The main point that I would argue though is that is not just about the "money", but rather if these new systems can be sustainable and if they can create new alternatives to the status quo. The best example that I can think of is Brave and BAT. The BAT "economy" is still ridiculously small, but on a bet about the longevity of Brave vs Mozilla, my money is (literally) on Brave. Mozilla can have all the wishy-washy nice words about how they are protecting the web, but it doesn't take much to realize that they can not bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the browser and its search system will be a way for them to fight Google at their core. You will have soon lots of people making coordinated efforts to get more people off Google and into an alternative where they can benefit.

danShumway 5y ago
> Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with strong economic incentives to get it working. And it turns out that system (for all of its problems) is working better than blockchain for shipping actual decentralized software that ordinary people can use. > Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd say they are still far from being mainstream. And again, "far from being mainstream" is still miles ahead of any blockchain social network. > When we start having companies using their own instance instead of Twitter/FB to promote their content We do have this, Trump's recent venture into the social media space was built off of a Mastodon fork. It wasn't built off of blockchain. > Mozilla can have all the wishy-washy nice words about how they are protecting the web, but it doesn't take much to realize that they can not bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the browser and its search system will be a way for them to fight Google at their core. Brave is literally built on top of Chromium, it's literally Google's tech stack with some extra stuff pasted on top. It makes sense why not needing to take money from Google would matter, but in practice, Firefox still ends up having better privacy controls and more power to oppose certain web standards purely because it has a different engine than Chrome. It turns out that in practice, architectural independence matters more. This is another good example of the finances ending up mattering less than people think they do. Mozilla has money, that's how it's able to fund projects like Servo/WASM/Stylo, projects that Brave (for all its financial independence) doesn't have the developer resources or the architectural independence needed to helm. And the trajectory of those projects is worth its own conversation, but I don't think dependence on Google's money is the reason Mozilla had to eventually drop Servo, and I don't think that Brave is in a position to pick a project like that up. ---- You don't really have to convince me about an idea, you don't have to argue theory to me. The theory of financial independence is fine, I don't have a problem with that, I just don't see the theory playing out in practice. The blockchain doesn't need a theory for why it matters, all the blockchain needs to do is to launch projects that are better than the alternatives. So far it hasn't, which is a really low bar to clear. You're attacking Mastodon, how embarrassing is it then that there isn't a blockchain-based Twitter alternative that's bigger than Mastodon? If you're right, and if a blockchain social network springs up that out-competes the other projects on the metrics that actually matter (not just money), then I'll start taking the space more seriously. But so far it just hasn't happened; and a lot of the promising projects that are closest-related to blockchain (even the really promising projects like IPFS, or the poster-child for this stuff, Handshake) have ultimately ended up being a lot more disappointing than the projects that have taken root in other spaces.