[lorean_victor]

thats an interesting perspective. I am personally much in favour of reducing unnecessary interdependence in society, specifically to big corps: google can really screw me up just because they provide an email service for me. questions that come to mind though:

- why would someone do that? its not hard, it can be made easier, but what would be the tangible, low-level gain for people to do that? I can think of examples like safe storage of photos and documents (my old dad already does that, he buys hard disks and stores stuff), easy and safe sharing of stuff in the home (airdrop does this tbh), and secure smart home controls. but I can't generalise the pattern to properly understand the underlying benefit here.

- in communications, there is an issue of trust. like how can I trust email coming form a new personal server, to not spam or scam me? I think that can be solved separately though, just can't formulate the solution clearly in my mind atm.

[kkfx]

IMVHO because of material and monetary interests: so far Google have not let down too many, but horror stories of people screwed by a Google ban are more and more common, "the cloud" start to be expensive not only for companies but also for individuals and for companies horror story about "economical dDOS" start to be real, Netlify have just paid 104.000 USD for a spike demand for a single mp3 file for instance, once such things became spread enough and that will happen soon, people start to look for alternatives. So far they feel to have no choice, but if the FLOSS world will came to rescue the choice would be there.

About emails, the shot is far longer: we start to have digital IDs, after decades finally the idea of a digital signature usable with a smart-card start to be the norm, at least in EU (eIDAS) but I think in the USA things are not much different, at maximum few years behind. With "family domain names" we start to "know each other" enough to filter safely our contacts and bayesian spam filters, mail aliases wisely used are more then sufficient for the 99% of usages.

Another VERY important thing such model can offer is automation, a thing 99% of users miss simply because there are no solutions designed for them. Now imaging a world with OFX/OpenBank mandatory available to all customers of any bank/financial institution, imaging a set of FLOSS clients to import all their feeds from different banks, cards, ... in a single place and auto-categorization of most transactions. This alone is a thing most users today do not ask for because they do not even know that's perfectly possible today. But with a resurgent desktop model such things would easily became common and at that point the big corp model would fail crushing on it's own technical limits.

To me the only point is "where to start", the classic answer was from universities labs where students start outlining and implementing their own world, due to the sorry state of unis these days that's can't happen, but in the FLOSS world it can. If enough "seasoned enough" devs start to say "dammit, I'm tired of the actual crap, instead of trying mimicking big corps platforms let's made something the classic desktop way" in few years such ideas and simple software would spread and following the same FLOSS spread "digital sustainability" where nowadays most devs works on *nix FLOSS environments even if many inside some proprietary walled gardens such comfy and simple solution would grow enough to be unstoppable. The only point so is having a not-so-small set of devs who want to start such change, the rest is already there...