[marcjuul]

The author seems to be making an assumption that the average person cares as little about preventing centralization of power and having any semblance of online privacy as they do about the speed of their dishwasher and that the projects that focus on improving these things fail to gain a large user base because users don't care.

That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.

The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.

There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.

Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.

*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes

[eternityforest]

I'm not sure anyone truly is attempting that kind of tech. Making a private communication platform that people would actually use goes against the hacker mindset. People who care about privacy like simplicity.

Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature.

The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance.

Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns.

That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them.

Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't.

It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street.

It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication.

There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break. .

Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it.

I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts.

I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it.