Haven’t read everything, apologies if I missed this point.
I see the danger @andyypants highlights but I don’t think it’s as significant as we might think in terms of discouraging participation.
The reason is because SAFE is a brand to us because we’re geeks who are here because we see particular characteristics. But we over focus on those.
To most people SAFE won’t be what they encounter because it is like the internet, a platform. Most people think the web is the internet, or even Facebook, or that Google is, because that’s what they use every day when they go online.
People don’t say, I’m not touching the web, internet, Facebook, Google because they host criminals, terrorists, or child porn, although all do have all of these in various measures.
The dark web is so labelled, because it really only offers one thing, a place to do stuff that most people don’t need and are probably uncomfortable with, and is often illegal. Since that’s all it offers, that’s pretty much what the name means. It isn’t really a thing either, but a collective term for anything that is primarily for that kind of activity. SAFE won’t be only for that, or even mainly for that, though like other ‘platforms’ some ‘dark’ stuff will go on.
The fear is that it will be dominated by such users but I doubt that.
IMO most people won’t come to SAFE Network for what we call the fundamentals, but for the services that are enabled by them. I think they will come for a range of services everyone can understand as valuable regardless of the fundamentals.
Take Syncer as an example, since I’ve just been working on it. Install it and you would have a local drive that is automatically backed up to the web, works as fast as your hard drive but is unlimited in size, and from which you can retrieve every version of every file you’ve ever saved to it. (David has envisioned this for a long time BTW, Syncer just looks like it might be a way to get a pretty impressive implementation of this kind of thing going quickly).
There will be many ‘ordinary’ apps of this kind. Irresistible features for everyday use that are nothing to do with uncomfortable stuff. So I think most people won’t even think of that as SAFE Network, but another thing they get by going online.