See the excellent post by @arcalinea below that prompted this reflection. The key issue with all previous decentralized technologies is that they didn't have a *decentralized center*, which is what a blockchain is: one API, served by many machines.

Great post by @bluesky lead. Nuanced view on web3. “Architecturally, blockchains can be thought of as just one type of datastore in Web3, useful for some applications and cumbersome in others. But financially and socially, they’ve poured attention and resources into the space.”