All users should have seen this coming, for years they poured their life inside those free digital platforms, made a digital life with digital friends, and feel all cozy inside because of their digital followers.
At the time of Usenet, things where different. Those who remember brought many lessons from those times, but something to consider is that the vast majority of the user-base of nowadays' services never had to deal with a fax modem, P2P connections, and nothing out of the 'really basic'. A lot of the same people who are now calling to 'decentralize' things uses a proprietary OS on their phone that probably listen to them and they do not care about it. They do care about their life online, about the void it would left in their lives if it was all over. Those users want comfort, babysitting, somebody to take care of spam and bad people from their line of sight.
Decentralized services will not work for the masses anymore simple because they learned to be in the comfort, and they will always prefer the service who offer the most of it. I really wish to be wrong, but i do not see this being possible on such decentralized services where people have to take care of themselves and actually learn a bit to use some services.
The solution for this issue is very complex, and would require a complete reeducation of those users for a new way of interacting online, in my opinion, or else it would be for nothing. The mess has been made already, backup everything and let it die. New services should still be created, but to cater to new users and people who actually knows the importance of this move, trying to recreate what already exists is a waste of time.
At the time of Usenet, things where different. Those who remember brought many lessons from those times, but something to consider is that the vast majority of the user-base of nowadays' services never had to deal with a fax modem, P2P connections, and nothing out of the 'really basic'. A lot of the same people who are now calling to 'decentralize' things uses a proprietary OS on their phone that probably listen to them and they do not care about it. They do care about their life online, about the void it would left in their lives if it was all over. Those users want comfort, babysitting, somebody to take care of spam and bad people from their line of sight.
Decentralized services will not work for the masses anymore simple because they learned to be in the comfort, and they will always prefer the service who offer the most of it. I really wish to be wrong, but i do not see this being possible on such decentralized services where people have to take care of themselves and actually learn a bit to use some services.
The solution for this issue is very complex, and would require a complete reeducation of those users for a new way of interacting online, in my opinion, or else it would be for nothing. The mess has been made already, backup everything and let it die. New services should still be created, but to cater to new users and people who actually knows the importance of this move, trying to recreate what already exists is a waste of time.