I think you and I would have a very interesting conversation.

I agree with a lot of your points, but not your conclusions.

> We always need some form of collective control over what's going on. We need moderation tools

I agree with this, and also think it is possible in peer-to-peer systems. Ideally the collective is self-governed. Particularly, when it comes to moderation, the closer the moderation controls are to being under the control of the user consuming the content, the more just the system.

> , we need to me able to make errors and fix them, etc.

Yes, 100%. Equity < Cryptography. It's far more important that your equity be rock solid than it is for your cryptography to be rock solid. If someone steals your property in a cryptographically sound way, equity should always trump cryptography. It's far more important that you have the title to your vehicle than it is that you have the keys to your vehicle.

I feel like many p2p systems have gotten this one backwards.

> There are middle grounds: federated systems for example, like Mastodon or emails, actually work.

I consider these centralized systems, just N copies of the same problem. I don't feel like the power imbalance between the users and the system administrators are addressed in a sufficient way on the fediverse as it is currently implemented.

These systems have a classist, hierarchical, system where system administrators belong to a privileged class while users are second class citizens on the web.

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I feel one of the issues in the current centralized architectures is equity. When you go about moving through the world, you generate a large volume of valuable property (your data). But, today, you give away nearly all equity in that data. Centralized providers accumulate equity in their user's data, and that equity is how they pay the bills.

I do believe that, in a very meaningful way, equity and privacy are nearly synonymous when it comes to corporations respecting the privacy of their users. Just because Netflix delivers a video to your smartphone doesn't mean you can turn around and sell that video to your friend. You have been granted access to the video, but it is not your property. The inverse needs to be true too. Just because you share your viewing habits with Netflix doesn't mean they can sell that data to Warner Brothers, that's not their property (I mean, today it is, but it shouldn't be). If users had equity in their data, the data broker market as it exists today would be piracy.

P2P systems have failed to create a world where humans, their content, and their devices are meaningfully addressable for the web in a way that expresses equity as a first class citizen.

A decentralized world is possible, it's just not possible on the internet. The internet, as it exists, is insufficient for expressing the concepts of the modern web in a way that is possible without centralized servers.

We don't need web3, we need internet2.

> That is not to say that all p2p software is bad, especially since we call p2p a lot of things that are not entirely p2p. For example, BitTorrent is a p2p software, but its actual usage by humans relies on multiple more-or-less centralized point, trackers and torrent search engine.

libp2p and scuttlebutt are pretty cool too. Both with their problems, but those problems seems solvable. Both seem more like internet2 than web3.

p2p needs a new overlay network on top of the internet, just like the internet started as an overlay network on top of the telephony system.