Pardon the paraphrase, Mr. Lewis, but "when Meta comes to the fediverse, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

> Still, no one has yet built a profitable, global-scale decentralized network.

Maybe this is the wrong angle, but I sure feel like I'm spiritually profiting from the Fediverse.

Right but the specific context is financially sustainable profitability. It is probably best that the fediverse hasn't and won't create the next "unicorn" (e.g. Facebook, Google, Amazon) but we do have a problem with getting money to make it properly self sustaining. It is isn't just from a development perspective, where today almost all development is done for free by volunteers, or hosting, where most servers cost tens to hundreds of dollars a month out of pocket for people to run. It is also how to help with content creators to monetize the platform too. Even if we had perfect tech stacks there is no way for people to make a few bucks or even a career out of being a PeerTube content producer like they can on YT or Substack. These are problems we should address but that takes financial resources which we haven't been able to figure out because we have rightly and intentionally hamstrung ourselves from following the only play in town for financing these models: surveillance capitalism.

LBRY has shown a great example of how you can incentivize content creators without ads.

While I agree that micropayments are the way unfortunately LBRY was all blockchain/web3 based and the network built from it, Odysee, is a video content *chan-like cesspool. 🙁

I'm not sure how you mean a cesspool but I meant only the payment part of it is good. I think blockchain is a good technology for decentralized payments but I don't like LBRY's torrent like protocol for the videos. It's very slow inefficient if you watch it from another 'instance' than Odysee and I think that's why there aren't really others hosting a LBRY instance. There are a few but watching videos from there is very slow because first they have to get it from Odysee before it's served to the user.

I have lots of problems with blockchains but at least if it is built on Ethereum they took care of the grotesque energy inefficiency aspect of it. Others still remain though. The cesspool comment was with respect to the content being served on Odysee not the LBRY technology itself.

The thing with Proof of work blockchains is that they are very energy inefficient on a small scale but if you compare on a large scale in comparison with the banking system with the same amount of transactions then it could be more effecient than all the Visa, MasterCard servers at each and every bank etc. But of course it depends on how many miners who would join the network if that was the case which is hard to predict. Most blockchains nowadays are anyways proof of stake or a variant of it.

Yes indeed. It's too centered.

I don't want to get too deep into this discussion again but it is a fallacious comparison since those systems are processing billions of transactions a day and even more queries per day compared to Bitcoin or any of the other systems. The energy inefficiency isn't my only problem with blockchains/crypto/web3 stuff though.

@Hank G ☑️
Alright. No problem 😀