A major difficulty of dweb technology is answering "what's the point of it all" in a self-interested sense. For centralized, it's easy to motivate a Facebook because of the assumptions of user data and attention being valuable commodities. Doing this involves competition, so the platforms are also reasonably competitive in their "home turf" and boast high usage figures, even if they ineptly overreach into other markets.
But decentralized has to embrace a kind of indifference to its users that makes it more like a natural force. Having more users is mostly a pain and lacks direct profit incentives, since, by definition, the gates are lowered and there is no tax to collect. That makes the self-interest more of a principled do-gooder fanaticism which operates outside the benchmarks of market success, and as such there's a heavy influence from anti-capitalist ideology in a lot of dweb projects.
Of course, one form of reconciliation has come through the idea of re-injecting the market dynamic through cryptocurrency. This mode of incentive-setting can produce some tremendously ugly results, but looking at the projects out there(I am using Brave right now), neither does it seem to have failed outright either.
But decentralized has to embrace a kind of indifference to its users that makes it more like a natural force. Having more users is mostly a pain and lacks direct profit incentives, since, by definition, the gates are lowered and there is no tax to collect. That makes the self-interest more of a principled do-gooder fanaticism which operates outside the benchmarks of market success, and as such there's a heavy influence from anti-capitalist ideology in a lot of dweb projects.
Of course, one form of reconciliation has come through the idea of re-injecting the market dynamic through cryptocurrency. This mode of incentive-setting can produce some tremendously ugly results, but looking at the projects out there(I am using Brave right now), neither does it seem to have failed outright either.