alt Hacker News> This is trying to solve a business problem (I can't trust cloud-providers) with a technical trade-off (avoid centralized architecture).
Whenever it's possible to solve a business problem or political problem with a technical solution, that's usually a strong approach, because those problems are caused by an adversarial entity and the technical solution is to eliminate the adversarial entity's ability to defect.
Encryption is a great example of this if you are going to use a cloud service. Trying to protect your data with privacy policies and bureaucratic rules is a fool's errand because there are too many perverse incentives. The data is valuable, neither the customer nor the government can easily tell if the company is selling it behind their backs, it's also hard to tell if he provider has cheaped out on security until it's too late, etc.
But if it's encrypted on the client device and you can prove with math that the server has no access to the plaintext, you don't have to worry about any of that.
The trouble is sometimes you want the server to process the data and not just store it, and then the technical solution becomes, use your own servers.
I 100% agree, actually. If there were a technical solution, then that's usually a better approach.
For something like data portability--being able to take my data to a different provider--that probably requires a technical solution.
But other problems, like enshittification, can't be solved technically. How do you technically prevent a cloud vendor from changing their pricing?
And you're right that the solution space is constrained by technical limits. If you want to share data with another user, you either need to trust a central authority or use a distributed protocol like blockchain. The former means you need to trust the central provider; the latter means you have to do your own key-management (how much money has been lost by people forgetting the keys to their wallet?)
There is no technical solution that gets you all the benefits of central plus all the benefits of local-first. There will always be trade-offs.