[bccdee]

Exactly! This is my big critique about Web 3 — what can it actually do that we couldn't do already?

The new things people propose as Web 3 use cases, e.g. interoperable game items, simply aren't practical. That's why they don't exist already — not because they require blockchain to build.

I've heard people argue that big tech social media silos will be replaced by decentralized Web 3 social media, but why would they be? We already have decentralized social media. The reason Mastodon can't compete with Twitter isn't because it needs blockchain; it's because Twitter has all the users and all the money, and that's because centralization is just more profitable. It boils down to economics, not technology.

[roywiggins]

And we briefly had interoperable text chat with XMPP until the big players dropped support for it. The protocol already existed, it worked for a while, and then companies decided it wasn't in their interests to stick with it and the interoperable textaverse collapsed back into silos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments