That's what peeked my interest in crypto in the first place, and is also the reason I am no longer on that bandwagon. Because you don't really own it in web3

That's what peeked my interest in crypto in the first place, and is also the reason I am no longer on that bandwagon. Because you don't really own it in web3 either. Until normal people get comfortable with self hosting their own stuff there will always be gate keepers and places where governments can apply pressure. You don't really own your crypto coins unless you have your own wallet on your own hardware (with proper backups as well). And for most normal people even just that is too much. And we are rapidly approaching a point where we don't really even own our hardware any more. And everything else, that is build on top of that needs to run on top of some machine somewhere and unless you own it, you can't really rely on it. It's all encrypted so they can't steel from you (unless bugs), but they can also shut it down. Sure there are plenty(and jet still not enough) of nodes on ipfs system now. But many someone's need to run them and it's always possible that people will loose interest or economies will change and number of nodes goes down enough that it becomes practically unusable. Same problem is with much of the other web3 stack. With few companies controlling much of the developers/stack and infrastructure needed. Sure it's all open source and distributed, but even nowadays in early stages, before the masses come in, we are talking about lot of infrastructure needed to run everything. And right now there are VC's putting billions in investments in this space, so having lots of infrastructure for "free" seems like it works. But sooner or later this people will want their money back, with interest, and regular people will be even more screwed, because this is completely unregulated (which is why VC's love it so much ) as a design principle. On the other hand if you are technical enough to be able to self host your own stuff, boring old federated systems, like smtp, jabber , matrix, ... are a lot easier, cheaper, with a lot less moving part - easier to administer etc. I am all for federated content and people owning their own digital features in their own hands and I think crypto chains are a distraction/overcomplication at best and could possibly be a trap for ultimate corporate walled gardens. So my focus is on boring old self hosted federated services.