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Comment by qqn | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest misconceptions I had about the federated/decentralized web getting into it a decade ago was this customer v. service provider model we're so used to everywhere else. These free[0], decentralized services rarely prioritize building a big user base. Their goal is to liberate the web, most often for their own use, and so the approach is generally "do-ocratic": something bugs you, you fix it, or you wait for someone else to come by and try. The beauty of this approach is it weeds out the impatient, "I want this now, do it for me" types, leading to more intelligent, polite interactions on the service.

[0] Both as in free beer and as in freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...

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Don't get me wrong, I am very much in that camp too and spend a lot of my time contributing to F/OSS projects. Having the freedom to tweak, debug and improve software is awesome.
My main objection here is that there are a lot of intelligent and polite people that are not developers and being left out in the cold. We need another option where users can rent out a server (from a multitude of providers) and install webapps as easily as installing phone apps. We are slowly getting there with Docker images but it's still very technical to do so.
EDIT: there is also https://sandstorm.io/ that tries to tackle this problem but isn't very popular yet

I'm not sure if the time for this is now but it certainly feels closer to "now" than ever before. The recent corporate censorship I believe has ignited a lot of interest in various segments of the "non-hacker" world. I think to harness this interest there needs to be a relatively user-friendly product that solves their problems.

Hey, good for you, thank you for your work : ). Agreed on that point. And it's happening! I remember WordPress in the early days (yikes) and now my senior-citizen father is running his own blog without a hitch. Myself I first got into the decentralized space via Diaspora and the UI/UX development that project has seen over the last few years is just astounding.
EDIT: I'm so excited about these projects I started making a "decentralized social network scorecard": https://gitlab.com/qqn/dctrl (still in its very early stages, but constructive tips and -- even better -- collaboration always welcome!)

There is also cloudron similar to sandstorm

So only programmers can be "intelligent, polite" users, in your view?
Of course you have to "do it for" the user. That's why you are the programmer and they are the user. If you're making something half-finished for other programmers to contribute to, that's very different from making a social network.

>So only programmers can be "intelligent, polite" users, in your view?
You are making an incorrect leap in logic. The commenter certainly didn't say that. Their statement is that ONLY patient people will get through a more technically challenging process. That is not the same as saying ALL patient people will get through the process which would be necessary for your conclusion.

There are good people outside programming, lol. For example: me. I couldn't code if my life depended on it but I sure as heck contribute in other ways.[0] I get the gripe with unpolished projects though. Still, this comment continues the "they build it for us" trend that is quickly disappearing in the decentralized space (in my circles at least). More and more "noncoders" are "coding" and "nonhackers" "hacking" to customize their experience online : )
*[0] See the bit about "fanatics": https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

"Liberating" the web doesn't seem that liberating when you need to know how to code in order to use it. Don't you know that 99.9% of the people in the world have no idea how to use these federated things?

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