| I'm not sure anyone truly is attempting that kind of tech. Making a private communication platform that people would actually use goes against the hacker mindset. People who care about privacy like simplicity. Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature. The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance. Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns. That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them. Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't. It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street. It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication. There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break.
. Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it. I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts. I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it. |