> Centralised always wins
My dream isn’t necessarily to win in a financial/monopolistic sense, but rather to build a compelling enough alternative to the centralised systems that have lost their way thanks to incentives that aren’t aligned with the community.
Facebook, reddit, disqus all started out with good intentions to connect people, but have been slowly eroded by incentives to suck user attention.
So it may not the best business strategy, but I think such software should live or die on whether the community enjoys using it and is willing to (financially) support the continued existence, rather than how much attention can be siphoned into ads.
In other words, small niche communities where a few members don’t mind contributing financially rather than huge communities that rely on network effects and centralisation.
Ok, so. The problem you're trying to solve is "build a community that is prepared to contribute financially to the running of the site" (correct me if I'm wrong).
Distributed is one possible solution to this problem. You're in love with that solution and its time to murder your darlings. Sit down, brainstorm five other possible solutions, and honestly assess which one solves your problem best.
I think you'll have a hard time beating a subscription model.
Sooooo..... StackOverflow solved it by starting with a vertical the founders had a lot of social juice in, and spreading in to other verticals. Possibly also by focusing very tightly on "questions and answers".
So my suggestion is "overfocus". If the big platforms have a weakness, it's that they're generic one-size-fits-all solutions. Solve one problem (Q&A, show off my project, discussion, news aggregator) for one vertical really well, then expand. An example off the top of my head might be collaborative note-taking for a class. 6510's "write a book in public" platform is also a fantastic idea at first glance.
(But skip the distributed bit - customers don't care about your architecture, and whatever USP a distributed platform has can be emulated by a centralised platform. Centralised always wins).