Most people probably think that they have interesting ideas or at least something interesting to tell. I also might just be projecting with that claim, but I’ve had ideas for some things that I would like to write down and put together into a book at some point. The problem is that I’m neither a good writer nor very motivated to actually write the things down. So while this might never actually turn into a book I’ve decided I could at least write down the different things in chunks whenever I remember them. Most of these ideas fall unter what a potential book would be titled, harmful convenience. When things are easy and straightforward it’s always nice, but that convenience often also comes at a cost, a price we’re all paying more and more.
Privacy
I recently read a post by someone that said it’s strange how it became the norm to not care about privacy and if you do you have to explain yourself and it attracts suspicion. I didn’t reply to it, but the obvious answer as to why most people don’t care about privacy anymore boils down to at least two points. The first one is that most people feel pretty helpless when it comes to this. And admitting that is also something that most would probably not want to think about for too long. It has become increasingly difficult and at times even near impossible to limit the amount of data that is collected about you. People that do care about that can confirm that it takes a certain amount of knowledge that the average person just doesn’t have. That point immediately ties in with the other reason, which is convenience. When the one side requires you to put time and effort into finding alternatives, convincing others to also use said alternatives and learning a bunch of new stuff, the other choice, which is to not care about privacy, quickly becomes a lot more attractive.
I feel like that already covers most of this problem. The topic of privacy has become so complex and convoluted that the average person has no clue about the majority of it. Clicking “no” when asked to accept cookies is about as far as the average user is willing to go and considering how deep the rabbit hole goes you can’t really blame them. Caring about privacy and the data that is collected about yourself has basically become an uphill battle and requires time that people would probably like to spend in other ways. So while caring about privacy is now the pass time of very few the other side is backed by almost the entire tech industry to the point where there’s now another industry whose sole purpose is to sell you services that might or might not protect your privacy. So to summarize this, using Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube etc. is convenient. They’re all “free” and basically have a monopoly on the service that they offer. There’s no other platform that offers the same amount of images, videos, search results or other services like these do. This isn’t a surprise as these services have been developed for years by gigantic corporations, who have huge budgets. And while a lot of people like me could probably rant about how these sites have been continually getting worse, the average user mostly doesn’t really notice a difference. Sure some redesigns might be a bit annoying but ultimately they still get what they came for. A normal user doesn’t require advanced features, APIs and alternative front-ends or - god forbid - access to the source code and normal users is ultimately who these services cater to. Meanwhile alternatives to these sites suffer from many issues. They are developed by small teams often without any real funding. Their focus is on different aspects and the user experience is completely different. For example if you want to use PeerTube to host some videos you might be able to set up an instance and be happy with it, but the average user will not like the experience, he won’t care about the fact that each channel has an RSS feed and that you can comment with your account on a fediverse instance. At the same time they will care a lot about whether a video buffers even for one second.
At this point I’m also convinced that even a perfect alternative to any popular service is doomed to fail just for the sole fact that it is not the original service. The hassle of typing in a different domain, creating a new account or setting things up again is already too much. The only good way of switching to self-hosted and/or decentralized services and software is to not switch at all and rather use it from the beginning. Most of the people I know use Instagram or similar services and I’d rate my chances very low of them ever using anything else unless they absolutely have to. Convincing them to try something else also always comes with the risk of having to deal with any potential issues. And there will be issues. You can try your best to fix them but any problems that arise just confirm people’s precognition that caring about privacy is stupid, difficult and a waste of time. When I tried to use Jitsi or Nextcloud for online group calls with screen sharing we always had issues with either audio or screen sharing and people didn’t really seem eager to try and work around the issues instead of just going back to the usual services. Meanwhile I frequently use Mumble with some friends and it works without issue, but they also don’t use Discord so falling back to what “just works” doesn’t even come up when minor issues occur. At the same time nobody is missing any features and we’re completely content with Mumble. If you try to get people to switch away from a service on the other hand, they will most definitely get annoyed when even small features are missing.
I might be a bit to pessimistic and I have to admit that I’ve only tried to introduce people I know to self-hosted software a few times, so other people might have more positive experience. One factor in how successful alternatives can be is obviously the situation they’re being suggested and used in. Using HedgeDoc or similar to quickly write down some text collaboratively will most likely work just fine and no one will complain. Trying to establish XMPP, Matrix or similar as the new messenger on the other hand will probably be harder. It’ll require a new account and every time someone wants to message you he’d have to switch to a different app. Meanwhile everyone else would still be using WhatsApp or some other service. So to replace something like a messenger or a social media platform you’d not only have to get one person to switch, you’d have to get everyone he or she knows to also switch, which is basically impossible. Another problem of that is also that all of this would be done without any visible improvement. They’d go through all that trouble and gain virtually nothing in their opinion. The user experience would most likely be worse and the fact that their personal information might now be safe wouldn’t be much of a condolence.
That’s mostly it. I’m not trying to deter anyone from trying to care about privacy and educating others on that issue. I’m just noticing how this is one of multiple issues where convenience or laziness is resulting in things getting worse. Ultimately this isn’t really surprising. There’s always a trade-off, you trade in your privacy and control over your data for a “free” service that for the most part will just work. On the other hand you can trade in time and effort to get an alternative that respects your rights, even if that alternative might lack some functionality. One thing that I learned when looking for alternatives is that you should not try to find a perfect replacement as it doesn’t exist. Projects like Nextcloud and Matrix try their best to be a complete alternative to Google services and Discord, but as I’ve said before this only works so well. Don’t get me wrong Nextcloud is great and I use it myself, but it can’t do it all, for example I had issues with screen sharing when using. Matrix is getting a lot better, but their server is extremely resource intensive and therefore not something I’d host myself. So instead of trying to use Nextcloud for group calls I’d probably just use Mumble for voice chat and if I need to share my screen I’d use something like screego. So that way you could use one program for one specific need instead of trying to get a solution that covers all problems and perfectly replaces an existing proprietary service. Since these projects are more focused on one problem there’s a higher chance of them working out of the box without any major issues.