I feel like we ask this question a lot and we come up with the answer which is self-hosting but it never really results in anything that truly succeeds. Why do we let all of our private communication flow through corporate services? There was the time when doing internet services was hard but that's not really the case anymore.
It's not just email or chat. It's everything, everything flows through corporate servers. It doesn't make sense to replicate all of the services at this time, but we're also not doing anything to pull ourselves away from all of this, purely for convenience, ease of use. I've seen a few efforts to kind of build entirely grown up ecosystems that separate us away from them, but then the experience is always subpar.
I don't think we'll ever replace what's already there, but if the way in which we consume services changes then maybe we can actually move forward a little bit and take some control back. I've seen things like the light phone so I know we can actually build something from the ground up, but in the case of private software these things seem to not take off.
So my question is what would it take to start to pull away from some of these megacorp services? Like let's say Facebook groups for WhatsApp? Would there be interest in doing some sort of community led effort? Where is not about decentralising the infrastructure but actually managing it as something like a co-op? Where its a community led effort?
Because the alternative will be to maintain private servers for them to flow through, and there aren't that many people interested in going through that hassle.
And, IMO, it's almost unavoidable because whichever way you look at it, those communications will have to go through some corporate-controlled medium before reaching its destination. I don't have my own means of letting you see this message without it first going through my telco.