No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass.
I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.
I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.
The problem is psychological, not technical.
While US has a plethora of laundromats and buildings get dedicated laundry rooms, in Europe (at least), even the tiniest apartments in apartment buildings have their own washing machine.
While there is some overhead (if it breaks, you have to find someone to fix it; you need to clean that filter...), people have happily accepted the decentralization since the benefits outweigh the overhead.
Same can be done with any other tech if we focus on streamlining it.
The tech and it's benefits don't mean anything if there is too much friction before the user realizes the benefits, and it doesn't take much friction to dissuade people.
See these tweets from a founder who built a social app startup and sold it to Facebook for 8 figures:
- https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1273437328866832384
- https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1339278829571854336
- https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1324354709201711104
Consumers won't adopt a decentralized solution because there is way too much friction. The only reason people use crypto is because there is a monetary incentive, and even then it's pretty damn fringe.
This comment explains it beautifully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709446.
I don't see why any of that should be impossible, it's just that most of decentralized stuff is free software that was never focused on the starting-up flow and UX.
People in the US don't use communal laundry because they want to, they use it because they (most likely) have to because they are in a large urban center or can't afford the appliance.
This is basically the reverse of the internet centralization/decentralization example, where centralized services on the internet are much easier to use than their decentralized counterparts.
From a user point of view, RSS readers are easy to come by.
From a server point of view, I think a raspberry pi build that scripted most of the setup, is an achievable goal. Not an easy one, but doable.
Sadly, even if you made it super easy, most folks would stick with the big names. Still, it could be nice to start a little community of self hosted sites...
Yes! I'm thinking something like standardizing Docker deployments with nginx-proxy[0] (which takes care of automatic Let's Encrypt certificates, it Just Works™[1]). If everyone shipped a docker-compose.yml tailored to nginx-proxy this would make it very easy for anyone to deploy stuff on their home server.
Then you'd need a standardized interactive install script that asks for things like hostname, email details, whatever else needed in .env (or whatever config). Perhaps a good ol' Makefile?
make setup # interactive install
make up # run docker-compose up -d
make down # run docker-compose down
make uninstall # uninstall, plus clean up volumes and images
[0] https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy
[1] This is how I deploy all my Docker stuff, it usually takes from 1-5 minutes to modify docker-compose.yml to fit
Happy maybe, but large no.
But solutions do exist: open-source focusing on UI, standardisation, free static IPs, more open operating systems, etc
Why would people ever want to manage all of those things? A large part of the value proposition of Gmail and Facebook is that they are easy to use.
Also, this: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1369098642171162625
Consumers don't want to do it. They're tired. They want to sleep. They want to watch TV or Netflix or TikTok or YouTube or listen to Spotify. They want to turn off their brains in most cases. Maybe spend time with their kids. Or go to the grocery store, or football practice, or holiday shopping, or browse Amazon or eBay, or fret about bills, or prepare their taxes, or fix the sink, or mow the lawn, or play with the dog.
They want someone else to be responsible for the thing. They want a central entity to blame, or complain to, and to pay to take it all off their plate. They just want to send Netflix $14 / month and click a button and never have to think about running their own systems. That's what they want. That's what they will always want, so long as the price is even slightly reasonable.
No amount of wishing by techies is going to change that reality.
Nothing you mentioned alters the fundamental problem: consumers don't want to do it, they're never going to want to do it. They're also not going to suddenly want to do all of their computing by bash. They're not all going to run out and teach themselves JavaScript. They don't want to run their own email servers. They don't want to run their own media servers. They don't want to take total control of their privacy and run their own decentralized social software. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, and that's all there will ever be, slivers of exceptions.
They want to be able to walk away from Facebook or Instagram or YouTube for three weeks or three months and not worry about whether the server ate itself, or needs updates, or a new power supply, or has a critical security vulnerability - those things all become the consumer's responsibility. If they use Facebook they can shake their fist at Zuckerberg on the rare occasion the service is down; he's to blame for X Y Z; and it costs them nothing whether they use it once per day or once per year (yeah but privacy, they're the product; right, well, step into the average consumer's mindset and out of your mindset).
The majority of consumers could change their own oil too. They don't want to because it's a big hassle to them. They don't even want to sew their own clothes, imagine. Bring back decentralized clothing.
I'm endlessly baffled by the inability of most techies to put themselves into the shoes of the average consumer and just get it, get their point of view, grasp their mindset. It's extraordinarily easy to do. Just try it sometime, with practice it gets easy, I promise. No matter how many decades go by, none of this changes, and yet the techies persist with the decentralized fantasies. One day human nature will change, just you wait!