Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the Web

It seems to me this will face the exact same challenges that any competitor to established companies does: user aqcsition in a market that has already been “won”. Whether or not your application is built on this framework, you still have to convince ordinary users who generally do know know, care or understand the implications of privacy and security, who don’t understand the concept of “decentralized” web vs non decentralized, to use your product in place of the things they already use. Gmail, Facebook, Instagram et al are established products with billions of users and millions of hours of ux refinement. Although I applaud this, I don’t understand how they expect to supplant the established players because their “killer feature” is something that ordinary users won’t understand or be motivated by. If the ux if 0.1% worse, 99.9% of people will not be willing to sacrifice that in order to gain something they don’t understand, know about or care about.

The only way this can work is to get laypeople on board. I wish him luck but I don’t see any path to success. Someone please convince me otherwise!

Solid sounds great, but I am wondering if peoplein countries with authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, or China will be able to use it.