[rslabbert]

The alternate path is one the free software community has been pushing towards for decades. The ability to voluntarily associate (and disassociate) from trusted communities, software and communities that works for users and not the other way around, and autonomy coupled with mutual aid/benefit.

Compare the focus of the GNU, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. projects to blockchain world and the fundamental difference is they're not trying to create a world in which we don't trust anyone except a the idea that human nature runs on greed and can be exploited by making us have to pay (spend tokens) for everything.

[streamofdigits]

> the fundamental difference is they're not trying to create a world in which we don't trust anyone

This. Massive effort and talent seems to be directed towards what is intuitively a dead end: trust is something between people, not something between devices. Any protocol no matter how ingeniously crafted will be subverted when it leaves the silicon layer and hits the human layer (unless you create the ultimate dystopia where people are collared and tracked on permanent basis or something equivalent)

Nevertheless, imho the human-centric vision of computing is misfiring, losing battle after battle (from self-sovereign computing, to social media, to mobile etc) and at some point it will lose the war. Maybe the silver lining of the cryptofunded "web3" marketing onslaught for "alternatives" is to give the real-deal one more window of opportunity...

[maccolgan]

>making us have to pay (spend tokens) for everything.

If you have to pay, or someone else has to pay for something (in FOSS it is just done in a more distributed way), why use a massively corrupt and degenerate currency to do it?