[Nextgrid]

> the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them.

The problems are clear but the solutions need to be clear too. So far many of the alternatives tend to focus more on the tech (decentralized protocols, this or that programming language, etc) than solving the problem. Even worse, sometimes the nature of the tech makes solving the problem more difficult or impossible (decentralized protocols brings a lot of challenges by themselves for example).

I made a comment back in the day about my thoughts on Mastodon and similar alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513

[nine_k]

Back in the day @moxie wrote a good text explaining why UX of a centralized solution will always be as good or better than UX of a decentralized solution. Most users crave pleasant UX, and easily discard applications and services that have annoying UX, as long as there is a sleeker alternative.

I'd add that a centralized solution can be run by a big corporation extracting significant profits, and thus investing significant resources into it. Investing into a decentralized solution gives a much vaguer idea of ROI. Look at email, the long-standing champion of federated protocols. Most investment went into Gmail and Outlook, proprietary solutions that happen to interoperate with the rest of email universe, but which use proprietary ways to communicate to centralized infrastructure as their strong suit. They are wildly popular.

I posit that for normal users a decentralized solution only makes sense when a centralized solution is impossible and / or illegal. See p2p music-sharing networks of 2000s, or modern bittorent. For bittorent though, centralized catalogs like TPB or rutracker are the norm, unlike the p2p search in Gnutella or DC++ of old. Even though incentives of those running TPB are better aligned with the interests of its users than e.g. in the cases of FB or Reddit, TPB is not a non-profit, AFIACT.

So, for decentralized web of 1995 to return, a lot of people must have it very bad using the centralized web. Even though ad networks actively work in the direction of making the experience of web browsing insufferable, it appears that relatively simple tools like uBlock Origin, or paying a small subscription fee, make the experience okay again.

So, YouTube + $5/mo, or even YouTube played via NewPipe, again trump the experience of using PeerTube, etc.

BTW even if the internet becomes a mesh network on transport / connectivity level, it won't change much in these dynamics. Instant gratification + not needing to pay money are winning, and will win, the majority of the audience, by default.