@dwr

“Real decentralization has never been tried.” This argument is mostly about semantics and a bit of “No true Scotsman”. If you pitch most people on the best version of why decentralized social media would be better, it clicks. I’ve done this thousands of times in 5 years in a variety of contexts. Ultimately, sticking it to big tech feels good. But the reality in 2025 is most people are not willing to stick around and use apps built on decentralized social networks. Some people will! But not most people. Why won’t they stick around if they like the idea? Because people use public social networks for a few reasons: 1. Entertainment — does scrolling the feed do a good job of fufilling my “scroll some feed” job to be done. Since most people don’t post, this is the primary job. And ultimately this is about how much relevant content is on the network / app. Information / learning is a form of entertainment for those purpose. 2. Status — if I post here, I will build an audience that will be valuable to for fame, potential distribution of future things I create, monetization, etc. The thing to solve for here is size of audience and growth rate of audience. If you can’t grow the network fast enough to keep the status oriented players motivated, you can’t get enough content to grow the entertainment. So how do other networks grow? 1. Lightning in a bottle moment with an already solved retention loop. Because even if you generate a lot of interest, if your d30 retention is bad it all goes away. 2. A lot of other networks grew when social networking / media were less mature, ie greenfield. Growing in 2025 has the time spent / status competition of existing networks. Saying that if you do decentralization better you’ll actually break out is leaving out that the break out requires solving (at least for public social networks) the entertainment / status puzzle in a repeatable, sustainable way. For what it’s worth, I think the come for the tool, stay for the network approach we’re taking with the wallet strategy might unlock a sustainable growth mechanic for the protocol. It’s much easier to acquire users if you’re offering a tool (vs. a multiplayer game). (I’m a big fan of @vgr and he’s a rare S tier Twitter refugee who walks the walk in terms of committing to using decentralized stuff.)

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