CAPTCHA is a big problem but not impossible to overcome. It's an arms race.
That said, CAPTCHA can be defeated by changing the landscape of incentives in favor of giving the consumers what they want.
The consumers will use these user agents when they get so good that they're better than the alternative and/or it's easy enough to "dual boot".
Once one of the above happens, then there is a greater incentive for everyone to make their content available e.g. by uploading to public Google Drive folders.
What I'm trying to get at is that the dream of decentralization can happen perhaps sooner if we focus on building the client side of it as a layer over the existing structure, instead of trying to supplant the current server side structure.
That said, CAPTCHA can be defeated by changing the landscape of incentives in favor of giving the consumers what they want.
The consumers will use these user agents when they get so good that they're better than the alternative and/or it's easy enough to "dual boot".
Once one of the above happens, then there is a greater incentive for everyone to make their content available e.g. by uploading to public Google Drive folders.
What I'm trying to get at is that the dream of decentralization can happen perhaps sooner if we focus on building the client side of it as a layer over the existing structure, instead of trying to supplant the current server side structure.