You're right, and I think a lot of these projects hit the same problem: "what can this offer me that centralized platforms can't?"

Take the Gemini protocol: if someone invents a "Gemini killer app" it can be replicated over the web because the web's features are a superset of Gemini's features. Medium is the centralized equivalent of traditional blogging. Spotify is eating podcasting. The whole indie web could be emulated by Meta (it's not currently big enough for them to care). Much like capitalism eating subcultures, the existing LCD internet will consume, commoditize and re-sell all alternatives.

The only exceptions I can think of are decentralization itself (centralization can only offer an emulation of decentralization) and freedom from corporate censorship, and not enough people care about them to make the switch.

I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them, because I don't like this conclusion.

I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.

What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.

The project would have had to cover its costs, so the idea went to the great backlog in the sky.

I see Leopoldsburg had a large military camp nearby. Same story?

(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")

(In the age of AI it's better to DIY it, IMO, because it's one less bit of self-updating code you've downloaded from a stranger).

Plus stored power, plus biomass, plus nuclear, plus gas.

90% renewables is better than 80% renewables. Throwing up our hands and saying "we'll never reach 100%, lets pack the whole thing in" isn't a sensible approach.

(And it looks like she was right: https://researchportal.ukhsa.gov.uk/en/publications/the-micr...)

You know, this is probably why I never got slushies, either.