If you want everything to be decentralized it will always be a pain in the ass and have way more friction compared to a centralized alternative even if it's pretty easy in absolute terms.
The problem is psychological, not technical.
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.
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.
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.
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