Mining is perhaps a misnomer, as this kind of mining will be quite different from mining blocks in a blockchain. I explained the concept in this topic, if you have the time to read it:
As for inflation, Bitcoin has had very high inflation in the past 8 years, it didn’t stop the price from appreciating significantly. The inflation model of Clikes shouldn’t fully offset price increases either.
No worries, everything will become a lot more open soon after the MutableData API implementation and exposure in the SAFE Browser. As David Irvine said in this thread some time ago, we don’t want a false start. Then after implementation of data republishing after network restarts we can start creating our social networks in earnest, since we should be able to retain them between test networks. This is when we can hopefully generate a lot of user feedback to optimise the user experience. Those will be exciting times for sure!