Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

Just your existence itself already create a lot of data ;)

It wasn’t the companies but the users that found it easier. There’s a reason why everyone’s on Facebook, instagram, and gmail instead of running their own hosts—because it’s vastly easier for the majority of people to do so, and because everyone else is there.

We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.

For those of us who've been around for some time and still value privacy, this sort of paradigm is obvious.

The trouble isn't a lack of the right technologies - I'd argue it's a problem in the go-to-market strategy of those building these products/technologies.

Ideas flow along lines carved out by power/influence. Facebook's early strategy was to start with restricting its usage to people at Harvard University - arguably a highly influential institution - and then expand outwards to other highly influential institutions. Only once the "who's who" from those institutions were already onboard did they let down the walls to allow us plebs in, and we all rushed in head-first.

X's current strategy leverages Musk's visibility and influence (for better or worse).

Get the most prominent influencers onboard with your decentralized social network, and others will follow (dramatically easier said than done, of course). But without a significant contingent of influencers/powerful people, your network's DoA.

At this point distributed protocols are getting good enough that for a large class of social applications, network effects are the only thing keeping the incumbents in place.

The irony of ad supported free services is that if you just let the advertisers pay you directly for eyeball time then paid for your services, it'd be better for you financially while keeping the web pure outside of the "paid to consume ads" app.

What's impractical about everyone having a domain name? It surely isn't due to lack of domain names, because foo.bar.baz.bim.bim.bap.com is a valid domain name.

It is true that full data sovereignty isn't something most people are interested in, but this is more about a cooperative model for data ownership and access. Having your data identifier be JackDaniels@yahoo.com isn't particularly different from it being jackdaniels.is.technically.bourbon.com. In both cases another organization owns some of the path to your identifier and could potentially lock you out of it. In both cases, verizon is near the top of that list (.com).

As far as the domain name system being centralized, I'm not sure I agree. DNS is like a feudal system with hundreds of kings (top level domains) who all work together with one pope (ICANN), and various lords and ladies occupying positions under those kings. If ICANN goes completely bonkers the kings can get a new pope, some of them are literally sovereign because they are nation states. Just for fun, some of those states are ruled by literal kings, too. There are experiments to run a TLD by Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), but I think for the most part nobody really cares because the current system happens to work pretty OK. If you have an idea for a more decentralized way to organize a namespace that doesn't involve your grandmother typing in a massive UUID or onion address, and doesn't result in someone being able to domain squat literally everything; I would love to hear about it.