Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything.

I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora, Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies).

In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up.

Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement. Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious, production-quality systems based on dweb techs.

When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why". What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them.

As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.