[xatan_dank]

I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture and many of the "free" social networks are not profitable at all. Very few of them are actually succeeding.

Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument you make here is self-contradictory.

I really just don't think your comment holds any water at all.

[simplehuman]

> I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture

Huh? Just see all the gmail ids. Just ask any company as to how many email ids are gmail and prepared to be stunned. Same goes for GitHub, medium. Even so called "decentralized" projects are happily hosting code on github and blogging on medium. (I am not judging the users here by any means. I am just saying they are "happy").

> Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people.

Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.

[api]

A major factor is the unbelievable pain of doing one's own IT work.

Even hosting a blog with Wordpress or Ghost can be a pain, let alone hosting your own git infrastructure. Then you have the whole sign-on / password / account management nightmare. Nobody wants to (sigh, grumble) create yet another (grumble, grumble) account on yet another site.

If there were some kind of open SSO standard that actually worked and was actually low-friction for users, that would go a long way.

That being said I don't have a problem with it. We (ZeroTier) are kind of a decentralization effort, and we use GitHub and Slack because they work and they save time. Use the present to build the future.

[xatan_dank]

>Huh? Just see all the gmail ids.

That doesn't mean people are happy with the situation nor the product. In many situations, as I already mentioned, it doesn't even mean the product is successful. I'm well aware of all these near-monopolies and how many users they have- Gmail's monopoly over email, Google's monopoly over search, YouTube's monopoly over video, etc. Plenty of users are extremely dissatisfied with these services. Furthermore, your point doesn't address the "mono-culture", which is a separate issue from some specific corporations maintaining very high userbases.

>Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.

This doesn't respond to what I said at all. I'm saying there is no evidence that software provided without a direct cost inevitably has an impact in deterring activism.

I worry that you don't understand what "free software" is. Facebook is free as in free beer, not as in freedom. There is a huge difference. You should read up on the definitions of free and proprietary software.