That's true, but if the NFTs show up on some places and not on others then you could start a "resistance" against the existing market places. Outside of DMCAs and other such legal requirements, an exchange needs to be impartial about the stuff being sold and published on there to remain credible.

The cryptocurrency crowd is usually drawn to the decentralised, unregulated market, and OpenSea has turned out to be the exact thing blockchains are trying to overthrow.

Except that OpenSea is successful.

So it shows that people don't really care about (a) decentralisation or (b) manipulation of the true blockchain output.

>Except that OpenSea is successful.

thanks to VC money looking to centralize the web3 economy.

But that's the point. So many people hyping web3 like it's going to be fundamentally different which is why it's worth all these resources (both people and energy), when it appears already heading down the same path as web2. Consolidated companies growing very large and getting a bunch of already known VCs even richer.

It's like a populist movement whose goal is to enrich the existing rich.

In theory you should be able to build a new NFT marketplace and airdrop the shit out of it to replace OpenSea.

And in theory I can build a social network and become bigger than Facebook.

The reality however is that market dynamics, acquisition costs, network effects etc prevent this from happening. And these aren't things that crypto can really solve.

No you can't - the social graph is private.

Why would that stop you?

The social graph is 90% of the value of a social network and the hardest resource to build. Without it an exact copy of Facebook built by someone else is useless.

It's only useless if your goal is to have an archival copy of the entire social network. That isn't the goal for most social networks. The build around communities and grow/evolve over time.

This is the premise [1] of $SOS token - though I haven't seen anything substantial, just what's on their website and in a few articles [2].

[1] https://www.theopendao.com/ [2] https://decrypt.co/89325/sos-token-aidrop-opendao-opensea-wh...