Years ago, when I started building a decentralized discord clone, people asked me why. I wanted a communication tool that was truly decentralized, in a way that no state actor was able to gain control over.

Signal's design wasn't capable of group chats beyond a certain size. The features only went so far. And it has failure points such that countries block them by firewall and have to rely on the good graces of others to run proxies, which ultimately get shut down or blocked too.

App stores do not share in this ideal — their concern is profit, and will bend backwards when forced to by regulatory bodies.

Amazon and others are complicit in helping state actors maintain their control of the web, and are profiting handsomely from the arrangement.

None of this happened by accident. And I only saw it getting worse. I realized what I was building in this chat application went beyond just chat, and how pressing it was to make this general purpose.