Comment by johnnyanmac
Comment by johnnyanmac 4 hours ago
It's unfortunate, and I don't necessarily want to say decentralization isn't viable at all. But I only see decentralization at best address the issue of scraping. It's solving different problems without necessarily addressing the core ones needed to make sure a new community is functional. But I think both kinds of tech can execute on addressing these issues.
I'm not against subscriptions per se, but I do think a one time entry cost is really all that's needed to achieve many of the desired effects. I'm probably in the minority as someone who'd rather pay $10 one time to enter a community once than $1-2/month to maintain my participation, though. I'm just personally tired of feeling like I'm paying a tax to construct something that may one day be good, rather than buying into a decently polished product upfront.
For the record, people working on decentralization should not stop working on it. For myself, I have moved on to other approaches with different goals, but it's a worthwhile endeavor and if anyone ever cracks it, it'll change the damn world. And the people working on it understand exactly how difficult it is, so nothing I say is news to them. But everyone should be clear-eyed about it. It's not a panacea, it's complicated on much more than a technical level and it's already incredibly complicated on a technical level.
And even if it works, there will still be carry-over of many of the problems we've seen with centralized social networks.