| >Then when we've all sunk into all these convenient cloud services and "easy to use" disposable devices, we'll have lost all of our privacy and power. Convenience can be engineered into P2P, too. With Bitcoin, people definitely get the convenience of unregulated speculative asset they wanted (presumably because real estate is even more obtuse than bitcoin). With Bittorrent, people definitely get the convenience of having access to obscure content (though netflix is great counterexample to it). > And yet we'll have people argue that these open source and federated/distributed systems are "too confusing" and "not practical" and that we shouldn't even try to avoid this future. I think best route would be that of Linux vs Android. Which has already happened to a certain degree with Mastodon for instance - someone "privatizes" the underlying open fabric and puts a nice "convenience trap" on top of it to "attract adoption". The issue here is mostly that investors in such an endeavor are seeking total control of the userbase, an engineered artificial "inconvenience of switching platform". Internet behemoths should not be called out on "dangers of getting regulated and handing control to the government" (frankly, anything can happen, not just that), but on keeping their platforms un-interoperable on purpose in a bid to attain a monopoly through networking effects, burdening the entrapped users with "inconvenience of limited frontend choice". They should be called out the same way we called out Microsoft back then, or say, Comcast now. |