I would argue that computing has never been more personal if you’re willing to put in a little effort. The advent of containerization, miniaturization of PC’s, and overall drop in cost of technology has allowed anyone to run there own personal intranet, homelab, whatever.
If you want to run your own little silo completely disconnected from your fellow human beings then it has never been easier. But that was never really all difficult in the first place. I don't think it's truly the problem that needs to be solved.
Buy-in from the community is indeed the hard part but I have friends running irc and phpbb we hang out in, and matrix is more or less viable to self host for a group chat, it’s just that 100x more people are using Discord and Signal because of network effects, your one account can give you access to a million communities.
I guess activitypub and matrix are meant to be similar in that regard but for whatever reason the learning curve is just a little steeper, so you have to be motivated by ideology to put up with the gaps in usability
Yeah, that network effect is always the hard part once you want/need to reach out past your personal circle. Even with a personal circle it can ha hard to make people use a better but smaller service.
Your definition of "anyone" is pretty skewed toward the tech-savvy.
Spend some time in the tech support desk of a mobile phone store to get an idea of the general level of technical sophistication of the average person. Average folks are not running containers. They're not installing... anything... except maybe an app from an App Store. Half of them aren't sure what a file is.
But the hardware availability and affordability gives them the opportunity to learn and experiment if they want to.
Even tech-savvy people couldn't do that a decade or 2 ago. Not on a budget.
I mean, the building blocks are there, but so much has moved into "the cloud". You can't run Just Photoshop anymore, you can only run CC that sends all your images to them, you can't run Word without running Office 365, you cant run most games without Steam, etc etc. And all of the exciting new software is -As-A-Service
So while there's more options now for homelab things the overall ecosystem has moved strongly away so there's a lot more to avoid
One of the aspects I've wondered about is the software bundled with either the OS or by the device manufacturer. When PCs (broadly, not just IBM compatibles) were penetrating into the home market they would often come with a suite of tools or demos to show what it could do, or let you create things even if they were the basic editions. Before the internet became part of the furniture, if you'd spent several hundreds on some hot technology there was a good chance you'd buy print magazines for it as well, and they would come with cover discs that exposed people to a lot of what was possible with computing.
Without wanting to sound like a stick in the mud, the focus of computing has definitely changed now. I see it as an interesting thought exercise on how to get someone running around with what is usually a marvel of computing in their pocket to try and imagine that is not the apex of computing, whether to explore what other means of computing offer or what comes next besides a slightly better version of what we have now.
> I see it as an interesting thought exercise on how to get someone running around with what is usually a marvel of computing in their pocket to try and imagine that is not the apex of computing, whether to explore what other means of computing offer or what comes next besides a slightly better version of what we have now.
That is a great way of thinking about it and I'm curious what you've come up with. I think it's a pretty hard sell for most people, especially for things like messaging that have become very central to daily life. Also, there's a big difference between convincing someone to try something a bit less mainstream and convincing them to reject the mainstream version. Like, you may be able to get someone to install LibreOffice but it's a lot harder to get them to uninstall Excel.
Anecdotally, I've found that people who have some other kind of retro/niche/subculture interest can be somewhat more receptive to the idea that the newest thing isn't necessarily the greatest. Like someone who's into hunting for vintage clothes, or woodworking, or whatever. Ironically such people are on average more tech-averse than a typical "normie", but they often understand the concept that it can be useful to actually put effort into getting something that's not just whatever's handed to you. In a way the insidious aspect of recent tech is the way it's conditioned people to expect that they shouldn't have to think much about how to do things, and to just want "smart" technology that reduces decisions.
My $dayjob involves lots of officework as in paperwork.
You bet your fucking ass I'm using Microsoft Office and reliant on it to a bloody fault. I literally and sincerely can't rely on LibreOffice to open and save documents in ways that everyone else would. If I use LibreOffice then at best I'll embarass myself, at worst I'll waste someone's time and either way I risk losing business for no good reason.
A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre. Nobody understands nor gives a damn about Libre in the real, professional world because the lingua franca is Industry aka Microsoft Office.
Yup, anyone who suggests LibreOffice (or some other alternative suite) as a sufficient substitute for MS Office is someone who's never actually done real-world work with external stakeholders. Practically everyone else uses MS Office, which means you must too.
I learned this first-hand when I was a grad student and had to write a technical report to submit to our government funders (using their required MS Office templates and all). I used LibreOffice and saved it as DOCX and everything looked great. Then my advisor opened it on his computer running MS Office and asked me WTF was up with all the mangled formatting.
> A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre.
The subscription fee is only part of the cost though. Another cost is that if Office works in a certain way that causes you problems your only choice is to adapt your workflow (or more likely, live with those problems).
But corporate computing is also suffering from the deteriorating user experience.
I have access to large amounts of harware and software through my employer. And while Microsoft Office is unavoidable, I hate it everytime I open Word or Excel (daily), even if it is on my company machine.
The privacy concerns are arguable even more concerning on a company machine. I wish there was a feasible alternative.
> you can only run CC that sends all your images to them
It doesn’t send all your images to Adobe, it only sends the ones you choose to save in the cloud.
If you want to complain about having to subscribe to the software instead of purchasing outright, then do that. Don’t complain about something that isn’t happening.
Aside from the Cloud bullshit, Photoshop's auto-update is a pain. After some regression I disabled updates right after they fixed it. But recently when I open Photoshop, it's started giving me a nagging popup about being out-of-date. It's done more-or-less the same thing for many years, just take my subscription money and leave me alone!
it is all about growing complexities/limitations and convenience.
even at the software level, you are reliant on the os makers allowing certain things to happen. i could not care less about homelab if at the end of the day you need to pay to get syncthing working [1] on your ios device and only sync certain files.
