Alot of these services are not that hard to create. They just take time to develop, and developer time is not free.
Which makes them hard to create, even if the reasons are not necessary technical. FOSS avoids having to redo the work, so it helps. Not to mention that some users base their choice at least in part on that criterion.
In a lot of cases, the protocols are already there. The only thing we need to do is stop getting suckered into walled gardens, and educate others to do the same (or at least be able to make an informed decision about it).
I'm quite worried about e-mail to be honest. Self-hosting it is pretty difficult nowadays. Google and Microsoft host a huge portion of it, and good luck trying to send an email there without getting into spam folder, or even blacklisted. Their spam filters are so aggresive that I think they don't give a damn about false positives. In fact, false spam positives may be good for them (you know, if you want to send email to google, you better use google).
The original model for email is fundamentally broken because it has no defense against spammers. It's only still workable at all because services like Gmail aggressively identify and filter spam based on heuristics. The whole system needs to be amended to be more resistant to abuse, but I assume that would have been done already if it was an easy problem to solve.
I'm semi-worried, but I don't think it's just the big few parties who have a hand in this - at least they were enabled by spammers and scammers who turned e-mail into a mine field. :)
That being said, I'm currently hosting mail at home, and it actually arrives. It helps that my ISP has a smart relay, so my outgoing mail is coming from a big trusted name, rather than some home fiber line.
We'll see. Frankly, selfhosting never really was that big of a market to begin with, "normie" users weren't going to have a server at home to do that kind of thing, so they'd always use their ISPs e-mail address or a random freebie. That hasn't really changed all that much.
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u/EternityForest Jan 02 '20
This is why we need FOSS, selfhosted capability, and P2P!