It's almost as if there's only the bare minimum decentralization needed to avoid regulation and taxation and the rest is good old fashioned centralized web apps.

So "decentralized" doesn't necessarily mean "no servers" it means "the servers don't matter". If Infura went down tomorrow, nothing would be lost, because Infura was just hosting something anyone could have hosted. You want to be the next Infura? You just download the same code they did and run it: Infura isn't holding any state. If Facebook goes down tomorrow, everyone's accounts and all of their data is destroyed.

> If Facebook goes down tomorrow, everyone's accounts and all of their data is destroyed.

Facebook stores data with replication. I’m not sure which scenario involves FB being wiped off the face of the earth, while retaining blockchains.

Regardless, your comparison makes no sense. It’s like comparing a recursive and authoritative DNS server.

“Goes down” could be substituted for a lot of things, for example, “becomes evil”, “disables API access”, “arbitrarily bans you”.

Lots of developers including myself have had things break when Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs. There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my app at.

> “Goes down” could be substituted for a lot of things

For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.

> Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs

I just don’t understand the comparison between Twitter/FB to a blockchain.

Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are only about the database itself and access to it?

> There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my app at.

The article already has a great example about this not working as intended - opensea removing his NFT from their API despite it existing on-chain. And every NFT viewer using the opensea view of things than the chain’s view.

> For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.

I don’t think I am; all these fall under GP’s first sentence; I took “goes down” in the next sentence as one example, WLOG.

> Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are only about the database itself and access to it?

I can’t speak for crypto maximalists (I’m probably as skeptical of this stuff as you are), but I think the best argument is that the existence of a viable off-ramp forces the centralized player to be a good actor. Similar to how many open source projects are very centralized, but the possibility of a fork (like mariadb) is enough of an incentive that it’s rare for a project to screw up so badly that a fork can gain steam.

FWIW, you aren't (arguing a tangential point to me): I didn't say "one of Facebook's servers goes down", I said "Facebook goes down". Companies go out of business or simply get tired of operating product lines constantly. I can sort of appreciate the idea "well maybe by goes down I just meant temporarily", but then I think one needs apply that to the entire sentence: if it goes down permanently, the accounts are no longer usable permanently (aka, "destroyed"); and, if it goes down temporarily, the accounts and data are no longer usable temporarily.