I think partially yes. This was my mention of Signal and WhatsApp. If I've learned anything it is that UI/UX matters just as much as the backend. Which kinda sucks, but also at least helps us know how to make better adoption of better things and allows us to compete with existing objectively worse products. I hope that UI/UX doesn't matter
more, but it is a fear I have because I think most people just don't get it and these things are too abstract because our world is so complex that specialization is a necessity but we still delude ourselves on believing our knowledge has wide coverage. This is how I really think about interdisciplinary collaboration and diversity of thought.
On the no side, there are literal dollar costs to decentralization in that you have to host the server and pay for that bandwidth. I'm conflicted about this because the cost is always being paid somewhere. Like there's examples of how people will not buy a product if shipping is not free even if the total price is less than the price of the version with free shipping. So if you see your internet bill go up you might ignore how other bills might go down (things like healthcare might be a good real life example of this complexity in evaluation?). I mean isn't Microsoft distributing windows updates through P2P now? Shifting bandwidth costs to users? Are streaming services getting in on this?
> Anyway, I think the bigger issue here is most users simply don't have the need to. I was big into this whole "lets decentralize the internet, screw these big corps". I setup a lemmy instance, then just forgot about it entirely. What the hell am I going to do with it?
And I think this is actually coupled. There is the problem that anything with a network effect naturally shifts towards centralization and thus monopolization. Because the utility of the product is the centralization even if by centralization we mean "people are here." I think this makes a great case for why we would want decentralized services, because it enables more competition as we allow the switching of platforms to not cause such disruptions. But I think this part can't happen until it is essentially trivial to do the setup part, and until there is enough critical mass of existing servers. Maybe we could force running servers or default to that?
Somewhat connected I was thinking over the weekend about how to actually push technology forward and thinking about how Google constantly kills products far too early. I wonder if the actual best move is to reframe our thinking around what Apple is doing with the Vision Pro. Product isn't great but they push it because they know that people will buy it because of the name brand. They can't fix all the problems with the system until they get enough people using the product, but shipping out samples and trials is too expensive. So do we as consumers (and especially those with disposable incomes and especially those with excessive incomes) rather need to reframe to think that we should be using our purchases in part simply to vote for technological directions and not entirely on utility? Such as if you want to see VR/AR become a reality is it worthwhile to buy a VP even if you never open the box? Because this is the signal that companies are internally using to gauge product viability and that metric is often misaligned due to things like people actually wanting the product but the implementation is just not there yet so they don't buy it?
Sorry if this ended up being ranty, but I think it is potentially relevant here because I think people do want these decentralized services/platforms given how much negative attitudes there are to the centralized versions. Same with privacy and security. But I think a big part of this might be the economics and the path to viable product being difficult playing as big of a role as the literal technology itself. Maybe I'm off base?