Good article but Web3 is still early. Author misses that there are decentralized servers projects and ever other part of the stack popping up. Peer to peer is not a great way to define it since you can not explicitly trust peer to peer where as block chain gives you the trust mechanism and the protection against manipulation.

He makes some good points about P2P and Web3 being difficult. Maybe the mass audiences will never use them, but we still urgently need them. While various groups battle over controlling what we are able to say on social networks smaller, independent sites like Poal are the escape hatch where the truth can still get out.

You can think of small forums sites as federated. They all use HTTP. All I need is a web browser to use them. Hopefully they will never go away, but true peer to peer messaging and forums would be a game changer. Modern liberals would whine about all the things people are able to say freely, but our governments would have to lock down the internet like China to control one of these networks.

So, essentially, the P2P community established something like a tiny, lightweight communist bubble, to the benefits of everyone. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, if someone could install the software and keep it running.

The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized.

This is an oversimplification and he's basing much of his opinion on the error of that oversimplification. The hobbyists running their own P2P nodes could manage the operational costs themselves because they were small and it was part of the hobby. Those services are not as highly available as Web3 precisely because they the incentive to keep them up is tied to the incentive to continue the hobby. Web3 fills in this gap by providing the very incentive needed take P2P to a serious level: People can run a Web3 node because it's a hobby, or because it pays, or both.

On the consumer side, that glowy whine "heavyweight libertarian path" borders on being ignorant. Someone has to pay the operational costs of keeping the service up, whether it be centralized, federated, or decentralized. Advertising or direct pay, consumers pay for it somehow. The fact that older P2P hobbyists paid for it on our behalf doesn't belittle Web3's chance of survival.

What the author is really complaining about is the shock that most people face when entering the decentralized world: With the freedom comes responsibility, even if you're just a consumer. As this landscape is carved out more every day, Web3 is really more like a spectrum of centralized and decentralized services. Hardcore Web3 advocates are willing to accept the responsibility of running their own node, securing their own wallet, writing their own contracts and reviewing others. Newbies are willing to trust a centralized gateway to do all of that for them so they don't have to, and we're all free to choose where we want to be on spectrum, between those two extremes (or not get involved at all).