alt Hacker News> no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them.
I hear this every time anyone brings up a federated chat/social media/anything service, and I just don't get it. If you don't want to host it, don't. There are plenty of servers out there, and a lot of them are free. Yeah, you have to trust the person hosting it, but why is that only a problem for federated services?
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There are two things: trusting the person's intentions and trusting the person's competence. Federation makes both problems worse, because you need to trust an unbounded number of organizations rather than a single organization. Even if you take it for granted that I trust all of those orgs intentions, there's no way they are as competent as the multimillion and multibillion dollar organizations running the big names.
My wild guess is that "big corp"
- are willing mostly to harvest data at scale, mostly for ad target or whatever political agenda owner that can pay bills
- will make big breaking changes only if more money is expected in a some quarters
The local/small benevolent geeks:
- aren’t entangled into micro-management policies and might just be logging everything to target individual as seen relevant by someone that could be whatever evil profile one can think of
- are possibly going to do their best for free, but could well end the experiment tomorrow without prior warning as they burn out into a growing discontent user base despite best efforts (and few to no recognition for that), or simply because they found a new hobby to spend attention to
And of course hosting all at home is taking the burden on one self. For people in IT, that might be something affordable, but otherwise this is like baking your own bread, sewing your own garment, producing and storing your own electricity, cultivate your own garden. Yes all of them are doable by an individual, especially those already proficient in the field. But obviously, this is not going to scale easily, and it’s not the general tendency of most contemporary societies. Doing otherwise would require humankind to make a giant leap in civilization tendencies.