alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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> How do you technically prevent a cloud vendor from changing their pricing?
Through regulating markets to ensure fierce competition - including things like portability, standard APIs, banning egress fees and similar lock in techniques, breaking up infrastructure (DCs and networking) from service providers. In cloud we have 3 vertically integrated mega oligopolies. That’s not a healthy market.
> data portability […] probably requires a technical solution
Yes, formats and APIs are needed for technical reasons, but it already exists (or fairly trivial to implement) and is not provided – sometimes actively obstructed – for business reasons. Imo interop is predominantly bottlenecked by social/business concerns.
Listing key management as the thing that makes distributed protocols hard seems like an error. If your stuff is in the cloud, what are you using to access it? Some kind of password, TOTP, etc., which is maybe tied to your email, which itself is tied to some password, TOTP, etc. So what happens if you lose access to your email or whatever they're using for password recovery? You lose all your stuff.
But it's even worse in that case, because that can also happen if they mess something up. Your email account got banned by some capricious bot, or the provider abruptly decided to stop providing the service, and then the service tied to it decided to send you a verification code to the email you don't have access to anymore -- even though you didn't forget your password for either of them. So now you have even more ways to lose all your stuff.
Meanwhile if you were willing to trust some email provider to not screw you and you only needed some way to recover your keys if your computer falls into the sea, you could just email a copy of them to yourself. And then you wouldn't be relying on that provider to have the only means of recovery, because they're still on your device too.