[anonzzzies]

There are no incentives until you get screwed over yourself. As an entrepreneur and long term (almost 40 years) owner of running businesses, I have been screwed over by anything from banks to insurers to couriers to, let's just name names, Google, Paypal, Stripe etc. Without recourse. But PERSONALLY, I have also been screwed by the same services, without recourse. And for that reason, I (try to) use services that I can visit and sue which means they need to be inside country where I live aka sovereign. I know I can sue Google theoretically but if it's not about 10m euros+, the Dutch lawyers/courts are going to tell me not to do it as it's not possible to even get a 'sorry' from American companies. While if it's a Dutch company, I just walk into their office and the CEO is going to explain to me why they did what they did. And because they know this, I have had my accounts reinstated when blocked, always can pick up the phone to 'my' account manager and IF they screw me, I know my rights and I will get a 'sorry' + money back without laywers. The actual 'I'll be at your office in 30 minutes' is usually enough to make anything happen.

(also, sitting with the owner / ceo very often results in them learning about something they actually did not know; a few months ago I went with bol.com managers through some process on their site which they didn't know was completely broken because of 'anti-fraud AI' and they kept blaming me (not only me, just 'dumb users'), so seeing them trying themselves and failing was hilarious)

[noirscape]

Cory Doctorow has a good term for what those big American tech companies do; rather than too big to fail, they're too big to care[0]. Because they've muscled all their meaningful competition out of the way (or at least think they do), they instead start ignoring support requests and increasingly alienating customers.

You'd think that eventually market forces would try to correct this, but in practice that doesn't happen because big companies can just buy out any entity that's an actual threat to them/cover so many areas that getting rid of them is nigh impossible. (There's some attempts to limit this from the EU and before 2025, the US as well, but a major part of the beef the US has with the EU is that they're trying to force these major tech companies to care again.)

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...

[aetherspawn]

Completely agree about working with companies in the same country so you actually get support, I learnt the hard way and now try and avoid overseas companies for this reason.

Calling out one company in-particular that we just got over an absolute nightmare of a messy divorce with, Freshworks. They are Indian-based, and their support in India treated us like we didn’t have any consumer rights at all after signing their SaaS contract (you know, one of those 1000 page things you have to sign when starting any random SaaS) and starting sending us random ludicrous invoices and refusing to ie downgrade the number of subscription seats or switch from annual to monthly billing, claiming that because we didn’t give them 60 days notice of reduction in seats we had to pay a whole year for the extra users blah blah blah, which might be legal in India, but is completely illegal in Australia.

[anonzzzies]

Ah yes, Freshworks... I could write a book about them :( Stay well away.

[swader999]

Is this same as freshdesk?

[anonzzzies]

Freshdesk is one of their products.

[xp84]

> There are no incentives until you get screwed over yourself.

In B2B you have a point. In the consumer space this doesn’t happen though. I know several people who have had big snafus with their data with Google, Apple, etc. but none of them moved to self hosting. I agree with the people who have said elsewhere that that’s mainly a user experience problem that could be solved - but I also agree the companies like Google and Apple will not provide any support to any standards which have the potential to commoditize or replace their strings-attached and corporate-controlled services. Meaning self hosting and avoiding those big companies’ stuff will continue to be rather lonely and isolating.

[anonzzzies]

Well.. It depends what they are. Social networks, obviously are an issue. But for personal email, photos, vids, content etc, that's not isolating; the self hosted versions have the same sharing / coop features as the google/ms ones for most / all personal needs. And setting up is just not very hard. It is a niche, I agree, but at least where I live, people are getting increasingly angry with the big corps and are asking how to avoid them. It won't make a dent in google revenue, but I won't have the frustrating experience myself or being asked to fix the frustrating experience for someone else.

[brewdad]

Until you can give consumers an AppleTV type box that they can buy at Walmart, plug in and maybe spend 5 minutes setting up, then never have to think about again, you simply aren't going to get 90% of the population to self-host anything. Most don't have the knowledge to make it happen and won't be able to understand the documentation needed to acquire that knowledge. The rest simply can't be bothered with it.

[xp84]

> personal email

no, it is isolating because self-hosting personal email you may as well just pipe your messages straight to /dev/null. Google and Microsoft will straight up blackhole messages coming from a random IP, let alone a residential one.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of selfhosting and play around with it myself, but at no point in the next 10 years will it be ready for average people to "plug and play" and for that reason it will be limited to tech enthusiasts like us.

[crinkly]

Yeah been screwed here a couple of times. You have to treat all these companies as disposable. Use them until they piss you off. Do not build your entire universe on someone else's turf.

It's cheaper and more convenient to fuck something off quickly than sue them.