[lifty]

I guess that settles it. Everybody should just forget about distributed social networks and get on with their lives. In all seriousness, he did sum up some of the challenges distributed social networks face, but they are just that, challenges.

I think the most important point is that social problems are harder then technical ones. You will never get traction if the adoption barrier is higher then on other social networks(be them centralized or distributed). Unfortunately, in most cases, people take decisions based on their immediate interest and comfort without quantifying the whole chain of indirect impact it might have. One easy example would be the decision to buy a particular product, based solely on the price and characteristics of that product, without taking into account where it has been produced and the implications that come with that.

So, making your product easy to use and attractive goes a long way.