Precisely.

The worst part is that anything decentralized gets coopted by crypto bros. For example, I want to make a lemmy-compatible, distributed service, as in instead of federated instances, you’d donate some of your storage to use the service and a few people would set up gateways to connect people. But pretty much every time I try to look up documentation, it’s all about cryptocurrencies. What I want is:

• Blockchain for user accounts
• distributed hash tables for all the data
• p2p networking for update notifications (i.e. the ActivityPub protocol)

I think it’s completely feasible, but I got tired of sifting through all the cryptocurrency nonsense. There are plenty of hard problems to solve (i.e. what does moderation look like if everything is immutable? What about illegal content?), but the easy stuff is unnecessarily difficult because of the weird association it all has to cryptocurrencies.

This is why we can’t have nice things…