Its admirable what brave is trying to do. Practically speaking, its one of the best chance we have of creating a new internet where the incentives are more privacy focused. Hope they succeed.
Call me crazy, but in no future can I imagine anyone willingly paying their browser vendor for anything. Brave isn't the future, it's yet another cash grab.
The real future is fully-decentralized websites, and it doesn't require new browsers.
Edit: Fixed inaccuracy pointed out by Brave developer
Brave is also built on top of Chromium. What ramifications that might have I'm not sure.
For one thing, the clickthroughs are certainly important, but advertising is also just impressions and brand recognition---even if somehow everyone magically stopped clicking on ads, companies like Coke and Pepsi would still pay top-dollar to remind you you're thirsty for sugar-water right now, and if you're reading websites or watching videos online instead of watching TV or reading a newspaper, that's where they'll do it.
But additionally, a very, very small number of Internet users click on ads. And those clicks float the entire industry. I'm not super-excited about any solution that assumes a tiny minority of people stop doing a thing; statistically, it's unlikely to pan out that way.
Let's say I want to run a forum. Something equivalent to, hmm, https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/
How do I do that as a decentralized website?
But that will have implications for latency of post updates, security, and complexity of maintaining the system.
That was effectively funded by taxpayers by way of universities.
Maybe the answer is public funding for online content, but we should be clear about it. This is an economic problem, not a technical one. Federation might slice the economic problem into smaller pieces, but they still need to be paid for.
The example used (Sufficient Velocity) does not appear to be profit-based either.
Slice it down even further, and it can simply be the cost of entry. In the same fashion that P2P sharing communities usually require that you make X gb of data available before you can join, or closed torrent communities require an even seed/leech ratio, your federated network can require that you allow upload and 10gb of hard drive space to use (or vary based on usage or something)
Distribute the cost to the point that for any given person the cost is negligible is the ideal.
At the very core it comes down to whether or not people will have always-connected device that can do simple tasks for them. Imagine a layered webs-of-trust from Layer 2 up. Person P1 can trust router R1 (the one they use at home) to accept messages for them. They follow P2, P3, P4 on this future Twitter. P2 may entrust their friend's router. To deliver messages from internet piece to internet piece you use the WoT to make sure that the packets you are sending are from trusted computers. Some institutions, like banks, say, may be more forgiving than others because they have a profit incentive, so if your home computer gets hacked they may disallow your packets for a while, but once you get a fixed computer you're off to the races again.
Forums could be done in a multitude of ways, but what you are primarily asking for is for open forums. But it isn't possible to secure an open forum. We see this over and over again as spammers push their garbage down everyones throats or gloss it up by astroturfing. We can have relative anonymity, for example, Person P1 signs trust to Alias A5. We could even use something more complicated like what Monero does, but I worry at some point it will just turn into another form of money and that is antithetical to the whole model which should harshly punish people and devices that supply trust for cash.
Anyway, I know its a bit abstract, but you could have a forum. And it could be more or less realtime (since I'm getting updates pushed to my own device) but you're right, it is way more complicated and wouldn't truly be the same thing.
A blockchain!
Well, depends on what you mean by decentralized and whether you meant distributed instead. If your use case allows centralization that you control, just put it on your always-on home computer and expose it as an onion service over Tor. The more infrastructure requirements you have (e.g. HA, load balancing, backups, etc) the larger the burden of course.
Of course, if it must be distributed/decentralized using others' resources (beyond just disk space), this is not a very mature area and the app has to be written to take advantage of the limited options that do exist.
I like the vision of decentralized computing, but I'm afraid it'll be at minimum very inefficient, and possibly infeasible.
Freenet's FMS allows moderation using a web of trust. You provide trust to users pseudo-anonymous identities. And you can choose to trust who they trust. Trust scores are computed and any identity below a level will not be seen by your identity.
Freenet's Sone has similar functionality using a web of trust plugin (FMS has its own trust implementation) that can be used by other plugins.
Also, consider reading my response to "replacing ads" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972072
If the browser provides a value add through integration and support, then I could completely imagine that.
Brave isn't the future, it's yet another cash grab. The real future is fully-decentralized websites, and it doesn't require new browsers.
If we make it too hard to make a profit while protecting our privacy while it's too easy to make a profit by eliminating privacy, there's only one way that story can end.
So yeah, "That industry makes an awful lot of cash" is useful to factor into one's thought process when one tries to reason through how one could tear it down. If nothing else, it's a first-approximation barometer of how much people will spend to oppose your efforts.