Completely agree with you there. My objection was to the point around convenience & cost of time i think.
Seeing how much we focus on lowering the friction to onboarding, landing pages and just working in software for a while, i think the private solutions have to be every bit as convenient as the commercial option, otherwise they are not viable. That is just table stakes for mass adoption by a broad audience. Technical users may vote with their feet even when its slightly inconvenient, but its not enough to make a dent in the world.
For example, i cannot even imagine how much longer everything would take if every google search i made was replaced with a visit to the library. It would be 5-10x the time, maybe much more. A ton of information would be completely unavailable even given infinite library time. Luckily, I can (and do) just use DuckDuckGo instead.
There's lots of encouraging progress in these kinds of solutions that are both just as convenient AND private - decentralized web, pinephone, linux adoption, end to end encryption on messengers, personal clouds like NextCloud etc.
Seeing how much we focus on lowering the friction to onboarding, landing pages and just working in software for a while, i think the private solutions have to be every bit as convenient as the commercial option, otherwise they are not viable. That is just table stakes for mass adoption by a broad audience. Technical users may vote with their feet even when its slightly inconvenient, but its not enough to make a dent in the world.
For example, i cannot even imagine how much longer everything would take if every google search i made was replaced with a visit to the library. It would be 5-10x the time, maybe much more. A ton of information would be completely unavailable even given infinite library time. Luckily, I can (and do) just use DuckDuckGo instead.
There's lots of encouraging progress in these kinds of solutions that are both just as convenient AND private - decentralized web, pinephone, linux adoption, end to end encryption on messengers, personal clouds like NextCloud etc.