To create these apps, someone has to write the code. One can imagine that volunteers will write open source, but there’s lots of experience with that — in short, for every successful open-source project, there are 9 that failed. Now, FB and google have thousands of brilliant engineers who are highly paid, highly motivated; how can you compete against that without moving around similar quantities of money?

Unrelated comment: blockchain is NOT inherently anonymous. For example, bitcoin is, but git is not. There’s no technical reason to make blockchains anonymous; back in the day, paranoia ran rampant, and anonymity was deemed desirable for bitcoin, but that was a social decision, not a technical limitation. I recently stumbled over a list of 20+ different identity services for blockchain! These are services which verify and guarantee your identity. Some of these verify your identity but keep you “anonymous”, others intentionally reveal your profile, or portions of your profile. At first blush, they seem like perfectly fine ways to manage identity for grown-ups; they’re not technologies for goths and misfits. They’re technical building blocks that provide … identity and profile services.

Undeveloped in your article is how communities might actually work. Do the village-elders (curators) have the power to reveal parts of your profile that you’d normally keep private? Can they federate with other villages after a majority vote? A super-majority? Is there a do-not-track feature that a user can request, as they move from community to community? What prevents nefarious entities from tracking you anyway, and building up a psychological profile of you, against your wishes?

Can anyone be a curator, like wikipedia? Are there ranks of higher and lower authority (like wikipedia)? What motivates people to seek high rank? Money? Fame? Wikipedia is crawling with high-rank jerks, dishonest players, malicious actors with the power to ban, harass, abuse lowly users; as a community, they have not yet figured out how to prevent abuse by the high-ups. And a wikipedia user, once banned, has this badge of shame, forever, whether or not they were actually guilty of anything, whether or not the accusation was false or malignant. There’s no recourse.

So there are really three problems: (1) how do you fund the creation of these apps? (2) How does identity masking and revealing actually work? (3) How does the structure encourage good behavior in those ranks that have power?