[andrewwharton]

No one said anything about hosting your own email or making your own website.

eg. My wife has a small business with an online store hosted on Shopify and her email provider is Gmail. But her website is www.her_domain.com and her email address is @her_domain.com.

She can easily switch out her providers and her contact addresses don't change. No real tech knowledge needed except for how to register a domain name and follow some how-to docs from Shopify and Gmail.

[nitemice]

I think this is the right attitude to take. It strikes the perfect balance between offloading your problems to the big guys, and keeping control if they decide to screw you over, or run off into the wild yonder.

That doesn't mean they couldn't still mess you up pretty bad. You'd want a pretty solid backup scheme, and you'll still have to accept the loss of some levels of privacy etc. but that might be worth it to you to subsidise cheap services, while still having an escape plan.

[fivestar]

They're already screwing us over--they took sides in the election and modified/molded content and search results in an attempt to push their agenda. That was evil.

[sumeno]

Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.

[piaste]

Is it more complicated than buying and owning a car? A house? More complicated than filing your taxes, managing retirement savings, having a wedding, choosing insurance?

Learning the basics of something new, enough to get by, is part of being an adult, even if you won't ever be and have no interest in being an expert.

[sumeno]

Given the number of bad financial decisions people make because they don't really understand those things I'm not sure that those comparisons are helping your case, but even so, for a lot of people it IS more complicated than those things because they are afraid of technology in a way that they aren't afraid of tangible things.

Solving 99% of technical problems requires nothing more than Google and following instructions in the first result, but people still can't handle it. Most people haven't given running a website enough thought that they would even know what to look for. A good portion don't even really understand URLs enough to type facebook.com into the address bar instead of Googling Facebook and clicking the first result.

[thatwebdude]

I'm not sure those people are so willing to brand themselves online. If they are, they already have the capital to have someone else do it for them.

[Spivak]

The process of registering the domain behind the scenes might be a bit magic but buying one and pointing it at a hosting provider certainly isn't.

[mcbits]

You're ignoring (or overestimating) the enormous segment of the population who wouldn't even have an Internet presence if it didn't come with the phone, and getting the phone was already the one of the most mentally challenging things they've done in years.

[ajb]

Not really. I know people with zero tech knowledge who have done it. Anyone able to register a trademark. Art director, actors etc.

[mixmastamyk]

Right, and it's not like you couldn't ask a technical friend to get it done.

[sumeno]

I'm not an advocate for anything that results in even more people bugging me to do "computer stuff" for them

[kakarot]

I've read all of your comments in my subthread and I agree with everything you've said. Especially this! It was immediately what came to mind but I hit my post count.

This problem of getting people to care about alternatives to Facebook seems to be something you've given a lot of thought as well. Mind if I ask what field you work in?

[sumeno]

I work at Google (with the standard disclaimer that my opinions are my own), with a history in the financial and defense industries. Nothing particularly related to Facebook, but I'm sympathetic to the concerns around Facebook. I just think HN tends to miss the forest for the trees when discussing alternatives

[eeZah7Ux]

The are being paid to do so. Also they see it as part of the job.

[mondoshawan]

So what can we do to make this simpler? Make the technology easier to understand?

[sumeno]

You could provide a one stop shop for sharing information with the people you care about that is easy enough to use that even people who are afraid of technology can handle it... also everyone they know needs to already be on it... but then you just created Facebook.

The ease of use is only one part of the problem, the other part is that you are trying to solve a problem that a lot of people who use Facebook just don't care about. Facebook fills their need and they really don't care about walled gardens or open internet or whatever else the HN crowd views as a dire issue.

[MiddleEndian]

I do this as well for my personal email. It's good to decouple your front end from your back end.

The main concern I still have is that I'd lose gchat if I swapped out my email host from Google apps.