The walled gardens are using polished UIs and free hosting to win over open alternatives, and both of these costs money. From users' perspective, it's free and convenient.
To break these, we need technology and infrastructure that enables distributed decentralised hosting, and that decouples UIs from servers. But UI developers still need to be rewarded, and hosting needs to be profitable, otherwise they won't be competitive.
It would involve some form of micropayments system, cryptographic identities, and so on. If these things had been in place 20 years ago, IRC would be what whatsapp is today.
The matrix project sounds promising, but I'm guessing it underestimates what is actually needed to replace walled gardens.
Most people have multiple devices that can act as hosts for content, and if their friends and the people who view it also serve it, that should scale pretty cleanly.
It's possible to make it work, you just need a little incentivisation. Private trackers are extremely durable and performant, and their secret sauce is just giving users a reputation to uphold.
Bake a certain amount of seeding into the contract to access the content, then enforce that with a browser plugin I suppose. Doesn't seem like it'd be too hard, aside from convincing users to install a browser plugin to access content. If it were just integrated in to the browser, OTOH...
> UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like
How would that work? The closest example I can think of is the web before CSS, when there was only html for semantic markup, and the browsers would display it however they wished, with content creators having very little say over what exactly their users would see on the screen.
To break these, we need technology and infrastructure that enables distributed decentralised hosting, and that decouples UIs from servers. But UI developers still need to be rewarded, and hosting needs to be profitable, otherwise they won't be competitive.
It would involve some form of micropayments system, cryptographic identities, and so on. If these things had been in place 20 years ago, IRC would be what whatsapp is today.
The matrix project sounds promising, but I'm guessing it underestimates what is actually needed to replace walled gardens.