The way you typically sell people on decentralized tech—on social media, blogging, and other community websites that are based on, as calls it, "protocols, not platforms"—is by telling them what it prevents.

And decentralization prevents a lot. The idea is that because you control and own your own data, and because the entire network isn't owned by a single person or company, you have long-term freedom that can't get taken away by the whims of the company behind whatever platform you're using.

On a centralized and closed platform, if ownership shuts it down or changes it in ways you find intolerable, you've got two options: stick it out and suffer or leave and lose all your friends. On a decentralized and open network, if the particular piece of it you're on (the server, the app) shuts it down or changes it in ways you find intolerable, you've got a third option: head somewhere else, but keep your connections to all your friends.

So decentralization gives you a way to protect yourself from significant loss in the event of a bad situation. Decentralization is, in other words, insurance.

And that's why it's such a hard sell.

People are generally bad at assessing risk. They tend to believe whatever's happening now will continue, and if bad things happen in the past, well, they're not happening now, and whatever's happening now will continue. This is why you get people thinking, "I've never been sick, not really, and so why do I need insurance?" Or, "My house hasn't burned down yet, so who wants to pay a premium each month in case it does?" Etc.

To get people to buy insurance, in any widespread way, you basically have to give them little choice. Land a job, and your employer opts you into health insurance. Or there's always Medicaid. Or Medicare. Or, if you're young but old enough that you can't stay on your parents', your parents will make it pretty clear you need to buy your own health insurance. And that doing so matters. Or, if you want to drive, you need to have auto insurance. If you want to own a home, your mortgage lender's going to tell you to get an adequate policy.

Whatever it is, it's not that people have carefully assessed their personal risk and decided that paying for insurance makes financial sense. Or at least not everyone.

The trouble with decentralization is, even though it is insurance, and pretty good insurance, against the loss of your network if your centralized platform goes south, you don't have laws or employers or lenders making people get it or strongly encouraging them to. Instead, you have all of us, the people who love this stuff, talking about how cool it is.

And it is cool. Very. But when it comes to online networks, people care less about cool, and less about risk, and more about, "All my friends are here." Or, "All the celebrities are here." Or, "I get a lot more reach here." And because all those "heres," whether X or TikTok or something from Meta, are going just fine, right now, or aren't going too bad that it's a problem, they assume it'll always be that way, that things will stay fine, and so why buy insurance?

Further, the cost of switching, right now, to a decentralized network, is the same cost as they'd pay if their current platform of choice went south: they lose their friends. You’re asking them to bear the cost of forcing the fruition of that risk upon themselves, voluntarily, versus hanging tight and risking that it might inflict them, but not now, and maybe not ever.

So I don't know that selling decentralization as insurance works. Not to get mass numbers on board. Even though having that insurance really matters, and it's better to take on the cost now and have it done with than to just cycle through platforms going bad, over and over again, forever. You have to instead give people a good and compelling reason to jump to the open network, to bear that one-time cost, because they're getting something super cool out of it that isn't (just) "You won't have to switch again, but if you do, you won't lose anything when it happens."

That makes the pitch harder. But it's also the only pitch that'll work.