Sometimes when these discussions appear, people talk of alternatives like "personal clouds" or "peer to peer photo sharing and blogging".
I know of at least Diaspora but there is at least one other i can't remember the name of, that you can install on your own server but i doubt that these projects in their current form will ever take off and be of any competition to the Facebook/Instagram models, because the technical aspect is just too complicated to the average user (assuming it to be a kind of user that has no existing or minimal skills to install Wordpress on a shared hosting).
Was just wondering about this on my way here to the "office" and a solution for this mess regarding user content ownership, privacy and companies "slipping the rug" under the user's feet could be the separation of service provider, the software itself and hosting (where the content is) ?
Basically something along the lines of:
* the user signing up for the hosting part on his prefered provider (Amazon Cloud, Rackspace, Linode, Google appengine, etc)
* the user signing up for his favourite social software provider, let's say as example, software companies that provided on-demand installed software distributions that provided services similar to Facebook, Instagram, Posterous, etc ... including personal e-mail services. Could be addons on a base system or a full distribution per se, rolled on subdomains (photos.bilbobaggins.com, blog.bilbobaggins.com, ... )
* the software provider would be given access (through OAuth or whatever credential system) to roll their software on the hosting provided by the user)
* discoverability (ask aggregated public timelines and the sorts) could work based on a system akin to DNS for humans/peer to peer.
* a form of standard for interoperability between service/software providers would have to bee in place for the users to be able to switch between them and allow competition.
This would mean that:
* users would retain ownership of their content since they control the hosting, meaning they could pull the plug on a service provider or switch to the competition.
* since much of this can be abstracted from the user as automated devops keep getting better, the technical barrier would be lower.
* most of the hosting and networking costs would be shared between the users, so the software providers could focus more on business models relating to a better service/software, much like app stores work these days i guess?