Comment by evv

Thanks for spawning many interesting topics. A dose of cynicism is great, in moderation!

> P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)

Yes, most people will rely on servers because phones are terrible p2p nodes. When identity is properly owned by the end users, the servers have nearly zero lock-in, unlike traditional hosting providers. A community's server can go down for some reason and the community can easily transition to other server(s), keeping their conversations and knowledge intact. Sadly this is not the case with Mastodon or even Bluesky.

> _Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC

This is probably the single biggest problem we are facing, because it impacts UX. There are several tools available to mitigate this issue, but I don't believe there is a perfect solution. Keys can be linked across devices with cross-signing, there are mechanisms that can enable key rotation: DNS, social media connections, and social/manual rotation in the worst case. The plan is to leverage existing tools that are used to keep secrets safe for regular people: system keychains, password managers, passkeys, smartphone "wallets".

> Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.

People become very comfortable in their virtual prisons, and most people won't change unless they have a reason to. Maybe they have legitimate work or content that is stigmatized and censored by other platforms. Maybe they live under an autocratic regime. But I think most people want better control over their content moderation and feed algorithm.

> People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today.

I'm not laughing at your exaggerated use of "no one". Decentralized and censorship-resistant technology is society's fail-safe. Maybe your social media oligarch isn't abusing their power too much today. Maybe your government actually supports free speech today. What about tomorrow, the next decade, and the next century?