> Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with strong economic incentives to get it working.

And it turns out that system (for all of its problems) is working better than blockchain for shipping actual decentralized software that ordinary people can use.

> Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd say they are still far from being mainstream.

And again, "far from being mainstream" is still miles ahead of any blockchain social network.

> When we start having companies using their own instance instead of Twitter/FB to promote their content

We do have this, Trump's recent venture into the social media space was built off of a Mastodon fork. It wasn't built off of blockchain.

> Mozilla can have all the wishy-washy nice words about how they are protecting the web, but it doesn't take much to realize that they can not bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the browser and its search system will be a way for them to fight Google at their core.

Brave is literally built on top of Chromium, it's literally Google's tech stack with some extra stuff pasted on top.

It makes sense why not needing to take money from Google would matter, but in practice, Firefox still ends up having better privacy controls and more power to oppose certain web standards purely because it has a different engine than Chrome. It turns out that in practice, architectural independence matters more.

This is another good example of the finances ending up mattering less than people think they do. Mozilla has money, that's how it's able to fund projects like Servo/WASM/Stylo, projects that Brave (for all its financial independence) doesn't have the developer resources or the architectural independence needed to helm. And the trajectory of those projects is worth its own conversation, but I don't think dependence on Google's money is the reason Mozilla had to eventually drop Servo, and I don't think that Brave is in a position to pick a project like that up.

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You don't really have to convince me about an idea, you don't have to argue theory to me. The theory of financial independence is fine, I don't have a problem with that, I just don't see the theory playing out in practice. The blockchain doesn't need a theory for why it matters, all the blockchain needs to do is to launch projects that are better than the alternatives. So far it hasn't, which is a really low bar to clear. You're attacking Mastodon, how embarrassing is it then that there isn't a blockchain-based Twitter alternative that's bigger than Mastodon?

If you're right, and if a blockchain social network springs up that out-competes the other projects on the metrics that actually matter (not just money), then I'll start taking the space more seriously. But so far it just hasn't happened; and a lot of the promising projects that are closest-related to blockchain (even the really promising projects like IPFS, or the poster-child for this stuff, Handshake) have ultimately ended up being a lot more disappointing than the projects that have taken root in other spaces.