RE: My brother joined steemit. :)
Having a bunch of family members and friends here would be awesome. Well, I'm just three weeks or so into my journey here, so I imagine I'll make new friends here. But it would be cool to have some offline friends want to join. Oh well, I guess it will allow me to say "I told you so" in the future. Especially to the ones I talked into buying bitcoin, but haven't been able to get on Steemit.
I'm not worried about Facebook at all. It's a completely different kind of platform, and to be honest we wouldn't want all the nonsense posts here that end up there. I don't know how they could make decentralization work anyway - as you said they need to censor, and they are beholden to their shareholders as a publicly traded company. Not to mention the drain on the rewards pool by scammers and even just the constant nonsense posts over there. I still use it to keep in touch with friends I made while living in Thailand, but for the most part Facebook has become useless. Even their "discovery" engine or whatever you want to call it - the thing that decides what I see in my feed - is completely wonky.