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> And because it is easy to switch, everyone will be using the best

But it's not easy to switch.

E-mail was easy to switch "back then", when you didn't have a bunch of accounts tied to them. IRC was easy to switch, because most of the servers were interconnected into a few large networks, and all the clients used the same protocol.

And now? Your grandma only knows how to use whatsapp? Well, you're not switching away from that, and facebook is getting all your data.

You are not switching away from WhatsApp because that is what everyone is using, not because it would be harder to use Signal.

But it's not 'everyone', it's just grandma. Auntie is using Viber. Grandpa from the other side is using google hangouts (chat? something). And your cousin is using telegram.

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/wor... Just look at the map of most popular messengers worldwide, it's not just one.

For most people it does not matter what people are using at the other end of the world, they will use the locally dominant platform.

Most people don't have friends on other continents. At least for Germany I can confidently say that there is nothing (except rounding error) besides WhatsApp. No matter the demographic.

I have never experienced a debate which messenger to use, and I have joined about twelve study-related group chats over the last two years. Same for personal messages. Some people have Signal or Telegram installed. After two or three messages for the novelty factor, everybody is back on WhatsApp. Because that app is open all the time.

When I was at uni for CompSci we had those discussions. Including the odd ball with sms-only phones. We also had threema and signal, none of which prevailed.

I live in slovenia, and have instagram, whatsapp, viber and telegram for "normal people" who only have one of those (and can't be reached elsewhere), I can't reach some people (besides sms/call),because I don't have facebook (messenger). Also i have a few relatives using skype only, those are a pain, because the client sucks.

My friends used to use a mix of iMessage and Facebook Messenger, while my extended family relied mostly on Facebook Messenger + SMS.

I didn't like this, I didn't have/or want an iPhone, meaning I was excluded from certain iMessage groups and I hated using Facebook so I was implicitly excluded from discussions via Facebook Messenger. Most of my communications were over SMS as a result, so not ideal for my social life.

Seeing this as a problem I researched alternative message apps that had feature parity with iMessage, I figured any attempt to get people to switch would fail if I couldn't get this much. I also decided to bank on the latent frustration people had with Facebook, the company, meaning I had to scratch WhatsApp off the list.

I ended up with Signal vs Telegram. Telegram had the sleekest interface and good feature parity with iMessage. While Signal fell short feature wise, it supported SMS (at the time) and some of my friends were interested in it from a privacy angle.

Ultimately I decided to be realistic, so I scratched off Signal and chose Telegram. The goal was to get everyone to switch not just a few who were "interested", so feature parity had to stay the priority, privacy be damned. My pick was very important because I figured the likelihood of a successful migration would decrease with each attempt I made.

Finally having made my choice, I consulted 1 on 1 with my individual friends and family members who usually organize events, and convinced them to install telegram + join my premade group chats. I then nagged them to notify everyone that all event planning would now be via Telegram and that everyone needed to install it now. I think the Telegram invite link really helped grease the wheels here.

Finally after setting the stage with that, I individually convinced each friend and family member 1 on 1, via a call or in-person, to install Telegram and join the new group chats. I made arguments such as: It would unify our communication under the same platform and make everyone's lives easier, we can use Telegram surveys to more easily schedule stuff, it has all the same features as iMessage + more, I already got X and Y to join so I really don't want you to be left out, I can help you install it, etc. I found it was important to take full initiative during all this.

Finally, in only a few days I got two distinct groups migrated onto Telegram. We have continued to use it for 2-3 years now so it's safe to say the migration stuck. The only one who I couldn't get to join was my cranky uncle who wanted signal instead (first I had heard of this from him), but his wife joined so it didn't really matter anyway, he is simply excluded from discussions now.

So ultimately, you can get people to switch if you put the work in :)

> Finally having made my choice, I consulted 1 on 1 with my individual friends and family members who usually organize events, and convinced them to install telegram + join my premade group chats. I then nagged them to notify everyone that all event planning would now be via Telegram and that everyone needed to install it now.

So nobody but you ever got a say, it was all "me me me". You sound insufferable.

I can assure you, your acquaintances still use whatever they used before, and Telegram is the "weird person messenger" now.

What a really nasty thing to say, I was genuinely offering advice to you on how to negotiate with people you should already be getting along with anyway.

I can assure *you* that my friends, not a "acquaintances", are much happier using Telegram than they were planning everything over a soup of Facebook Messenger and SMS. If I had it my way we would all be using IRC or Signal, but my compromises to ensure feature parity with iMessage was out of an understanding of what everyone desired, which was the core of what I was trying to get at here but I guess you missed that, not that I'm surprised considering your shitty attitude. In truth an insufferable person simply would not be capable of convincing 18 different people to switch to a new messaging app, no matter how badly they nagged them.

Many of my friends have actually thanked me for fixing the situation since it has greatly improved our ability to make plans and hang out together, which is a tricky thing to do in adult life where everyone is on different schedules. But sure I guess my desire to improve how me and my friends communicate makes me selfish huh?

And they clapped when they thanked you. Don't forget the clapping!

I have friends in different continents and the three main messengers I need to communicate are WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat. Then most people also would like to use Instagram Direct Messages but I don't have an account there. People in eastern Europe largely use Telegram and people in China use WeChat. Everyone else mostly WhatsApp. I don't exactly know how it is in the US though, perhaps iMessage is more popular there.

You're an outlier. As I said, most people don't have intercontinental friends. So it doesn't matter that different messengers have "won" in different regions. It's still one main messenger for almost everyone.

Heck, forget about friends, I have actual blood relatives on several continents.

WhatsApp it is in Germany.

Nevertheless, I saw multiple discussions (from non-technical people) about using signal or telegram in the last years.

Email is worse than that, running your own mail server means pleasing Google and Outlook to accept your email. And you may also have to pay to get out of blocklists turned extorsionists.

Actually it examplifies what goes wrong when an infrastructure monopoly is created.

Also IE6.

> pay to get out of blocklists

Only a sucker would do that. Google, Yahoo and Hotmail, the providers of nearly all email addresses, don't rely on public blocklists. Those are very much a noughties thing.

Right so to get users to switch you need to invent a new mode of communication. We have had postal mail, telegraph, telephone, fax, email, and instant messaging. What's next? Find an opportunity for disruptive innovation in communications that isn't already dominated by established competitors.

AI agents doing tasks for you will be huge and a new form of communications.

They don't care when it works. Then they get locked out of their google account and lose a lot of things at once and only have few alternatives to choose from and may return google yet again due to lack of choice.

> You can maybe argue that everyone has their preferences wrong and they are hurting themselves in the long run, but good luck fighting that battle.

That battle has been won many times. We don't let people run blind into open knives in many contexts.

I mean there is of course a way to fight and win that battle and it is regulation, write things like interoperability and data portability into law and enforce it. I was more thinking of things that can be done without enforcement in the initial comment.

>write things like interoperability and data portability into law

This would be nice for sure, but I think the solution could be even simpler than that. The only successful way these centalized service platforms have managed to monetize is by gross privacy violations in support of pervasive advertising. Strong privacy laws would essentially outlaw their business models and leave a hole that a network of decentralized hobbyist services would fill.

I do agree that 99% of users don't want to run infrastructure.

I think there's a difference between Fediverse-style federation/decentralisation and true P2P/BitTorrent-esque dectralisation. BitTorrent, in its current iteration, does have many semi-technical users, but perhaps your grandparents would struggle to use it. I think a much more friendly UX could be built; maintaining its decentralised properties would be more difficult but not inconceivably so.

I actually think transparent decentralisation is possible but the current policy settings (copyright, surveillance and advertising) somewhat disincentivise people from working on it, to the extent that most of the current projects are hobbies, crowdsourced or funded by research grants.

While we are so damn real, it is the same with climate change. 99% of people dont care if the product they buy have bad CO2 emission stats or not. All they care about is the product, the price, and the use they want to put it to. Nobody really cares about the rest. If you can buy it in a store, people will do so.

I'll go a step further: any theoretical benefit that decentralization has (except ownership) can be emulated by a centralized architecture.

That said, I'm looking forward to reading this RFC when I get a chance. I hope there's some good ideas in it.

I think we're heading for a two-tier internet, though, in many ways. Look at the post yesterday about a facebook drenched in AI-generated dog sculptures.

This has never proven true in practice. There is so much people are not willing to communicate when third parties are present. This is why the behaviors and availability of features are wildly different on closed networks versus the web.

> any theoretical benefit that decentralization has (except ownership) can be emulated by a centralized architecture.

One thing decentralised designs are much better at is: turning a blind eye to stigmatised and illegal activities.

Such as pornography, piracy, reproductive rights, gun rights, criticism of the Chinese government, and so on.

I think that's a second order effect of ownership.

You'll bring the same heat down on yourself (eventually) if you use a distributed protocol but rent your server from Amazon. Therefore I think it's ownership of the hardware that is the defence against censorship, not the protocol you use.

Few people seem to care about the environment either, or the exploited foreign worker class despite their impact on humanity, and besides it would be really hard to fight that battle, so we should just be apathetic and carry on with business as usual.

No, but those are battles that require political solutions, nothing you can realistically hope to address with recommendations.

I feel the 99% part is important to repeat regularly among tech savvy groups: we are the fleetingly small exception. Most users don’t know and don’t care when it comes to the technical merits of implementation.

> chat, write mails, watch videos, have a website, buy stuff, sell stuff

Why can't every computer do this without servers? It sounds like a ridiculous idea but it can't be impossible to achieve. My 24 core laptop has more power than my 4 core server.

If everyone runs their computer 24/7 or if you are willing to live with the limitation that somebody can only write you an email when your computer is turned on, then you can do that.

And of course if everyone runs their computer 24/7 and exposes it to the internet, then we are back where we started, everyone runs, maintains, patches, and secures their own servers. Which nobody wants to do even if they were capable to do so, which they are not.

Email already supports delivery to destinations which are intermittently connected. The legacy MTA behavior is to retry automatically every few hours for several days, with failure resulting in a notification to the sender. Operators have adjusted the behavior over the years to support grey-listing so the retry period and interval are both shorter -- but still in use!

While communication between two hosts which are rarely simultaneously connected is best facilitated by a third party, some tweaks to your MTA's the delivery retry interval and period could enable reliable communications between email users who are connected simultaneously on a regular basis.

Decentralization is about enabling builders - users get the indirect benefits which follow.

What you have done is justified 'everything under the sun' so long as it technically operates in a free market. But the ability for users to switch does not guarantee that the incentives to compete are at all healthy or robust.

You are correct when you say centralization affects users indirectly and they will simply use services which are most immediately convenient. But competition is not giving users much benefit because every centralized service has a monopoly on their instantiation - it's not like you can make a few tweaks and give everyone a moderately better experience - you have to start from scratch and make yet another siloed and extractive platform for any and every improvement. And then if you do they can easily copy you back before you build a fraction of their momentum.

X isn't going to let you improve the experience and just take users; they're going to say: "Have fun building up user trust and security infrastructure - also you're never getting our users." That's the difference between a protocol and a platform. The reason companies build platforms is because they need to fund infrastructure and opsec at scale so they effectively need to build monopoly protocols i.e. 'platforms.'

So "switching is easy" is meaningless. Building successful competing platforms is, by design, very difficult; it takes large investments and huge risks and a lot of rebuilding what's already been done just for the sake of catching up to platforms who have obvious incentives and built-in methods to discourage competition via their tight, centralized structure. Even if the platform is better, it will probably fail relative to its predecessor.

Decentralization most directly helps builders. If the basic requirements of a service are sufficiently decentralized security, networking, front-ends, then a builder who wants to compete via small (or any sized) improvements *does not need to rebuild the entire service.* Small builders who would otherwise not have access to startup capital, risk tolerance, or excessive build-hours would be equally able to compete because their decentralized access to the basic requirements cannot be locked behind an extractive economic scheme.

Imagine every talented programmer making open source software could leverage it atop secure, robust and interoperable networks. And they could earn money from it.

There is a massive difference between being a passive proponent of the free market and a maximalist for market competition. Your justification for the state of the field is a passive retreat to free-market capitalism. Users certainly have the ability to choose, but there are all sorts of schemes and situations in a free market where competition is choked. Honest proponents of decentralization are maximizers of opportunities for competition - they recognize that the free market is a gradient and not some binary quality which automatically imbues every operation inside it with good accountability.