This is going to involve money changing hands. Users are going to have to pay enough that the people running the system get comfortable professional salaries - not unicorn money and not in SV, but it has to be competitive. Relying for the long term on altruism will only take you so far.
In return, the users should get a genuine say in the policies of the system. This involves building not just a system but a community.
Perhaps the closest to this model that's currently successful is Mastodon.
everything should be 'disruptive', earn a shitload of cash in short time.. but why? why is disruption always good. after all.. it disrupts!
i would be perfectly happy creating non-disruptive products and earn a perfectly modest salary from it :)
you can find them in community startups that use decentralized technologies and semantic content to empower individuals to cooperate directly, create initiatives between parties without central authorities in control.
the technologies just need to mature further, gain more traction.. and applications need to be created outside of the academic sphere (especially true for semantic web apps).
i'd like to see true decentralized application frameworks that are semantic and truly decentralized.
solid (https://github.com/solid/solid ) is a great project for the semantic web, and so is http://ld-r.org/
then you also have ipfs.org, datproject.org, scuttlebot.io, mastodon social
but the semantic web projects are too content-oriented and the others are either file-exchange or (limited) social web interpretations.
afaik no truly decentralized messaging / application framework exists yet (though i have to investigate solid more thoroughly still)
do you have some good pointers?
The biggest challenge isn't the technical plumbing, it's changing how companies operate and changing customers behavior.
What is the business model? Why would the next unicorn give up this advantage?
Business want data lock-in. They try to create "data moats" to protect their castles.
No product will win on security and privacy features alone. They are critical for a small segment of adoption, but sadly haven't been a factor for mass adoption.