> There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures
There's the other kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over their customers at a later date.
It just all seems irrelevant to fly.io. I can host stuff on there for money, which is all I want from a service provider. Electricity and storage and network and compute and infrastructure engineers cost money, and I'm happy to give them money. How does web3 get these things paid for?
It’s not irrelevant to the parent and grandparent comment, which (having experienced the recent buyouts at Reddit and others) are rightly wary of a similar outcome, and regard the mere fact of being funded by VCs as a ticking time bomb. So what is the alternative?
Don’t build your app on someone else’s platform. Whether it’s Twitter and Periscope, or Apple vs mamy developers (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...) … build on a permissionless platform that isn’t owned by any gatekeepers. Like the Web. Or Ethereum. Or Polygon.
Utility tokens and micropayments via trustlines are exactly done for that purpose.
I’m not sure I follow. It seems like a strawman question of some kind.
Well, fly.io is not the Web, but also it’s not the point
The closest I can get to what your questions is to say, it’s under the control of a for-profit company financing itself with shareholders who want to see profits? That’s true of many companies, the sentiment in the GP comments applies to the general pattern of becoming enshittified after a large investment / sale, not specifically fly.io
But it exposes things on the Web. And if you don't like them you can move somewhere else?
And more generally: people do things for money. Companies wanting a profit is not a bad thing. That urge can go wrong, but that risk is mitigated, in fly.io's case better than most, by the lack of lock-in technology choices.
For example, if you want to, for some insane reason, build an application that uses Microsoft's CosmosDB, then your data is stuck in Azure forever. Fly.io doesn't have that problem, as they use things you can run elsewhere.
So: what is the problem, as pertaining to the topic of this comment page: fly.io?
Why is it that any time VC financing comes up in any fashion we end up with some unrelated pseudo-meme walloftext nonsense bouncing back and forth between a treatise on the structural inefficiencies of capitalism and tech fundraising from 30 years ago? All with some tenuous barely coherent tie back to blockchain, or NFTs, or web3, or whatever The Next Bitcoin™ du jour is.
Because open source software is the only alternative we know to the problem that was described, that has consistently liberated people everywhere it was introduced. And utility tokens are a great way that was invented several years ago to monetize open source and turn it into a free market instead of only a gift economy.
Blockchain is the most widespread and proven way thus far to eliminate the middleman, and it’s there right now, you can deploy a token in a few minutes if you wanted. Many people here seem to keep repeating the mantra that “Web3 has no good applications” but here is one that literally solves the societal problem you are complaining about and has done so with IPFS, Ethereum, Polygon and many other permissionless networks.
It’s a wall of text because there are literally so many detailed examples, that I chose to engage in a few. I like to back up what I’m saying so people don’t think I’m just talking out of my ass. Now the ball is in your court to explain why you disagree anyway.
I don't even know that I do disagree with you. I just don't think Venture Capital is some sort of existential threat, or by definition a problem (some specific applications of it, sure), so I don't think the blockchain solves any real problem out of the box. It's an interesting thing from a technical standpoint, and some interesting things have been built on top of it, and I made some money on BTC back before it was 5 figures.
But you're not going to convince anyone to swap out VC funding for utility tokens by talking about Napster and FogBugz.
I think you could just say: "Instead of relying on the concentrated capital of VC firms, we should rely more on individuals investing smaller amounts in companies they want to use. The individuals collective stake in the company can help protect them from the company going against their interests."
That's just the main point right? Everything becomes essentially Kickstarter/Patreon subscriptions, and maybe you pay a little more fees to exchange your money to tokens?
Its surely an appropriate argument to make I guess, just falls a little flat to me personally. Like I just want to use a service and not get ripped off, I don't want to enter into and have stake in some distinct governance structure for every service I want use.
Well yes, and now you can do it using open protocols, without relying on centralized platforms for the money part.
Utility tokens need a decentralized network so there is no single point of failure. Just like the Web itself (1.0) disrupted gatekeepers at newspapers, TV and Radio stations, etc. that you used to have to pay (“payola”) to get the word out. VOIP lowered the cost of long distance phonecalls to pretty much zero by eliminating middlemen, too. The infrastructure providers shouldn’t ALSO control your app layer, that’s the point!
> There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures
There's the other kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over their customers at a later date.