Yeah, I think it's clear that laziness/convenience is the answer.
You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on.
I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure.
Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start
* The software: different open source solutions have very different requirements at a high level: language, platform or even system requirements. Say you want to take messaging off centralized platforms: you need to host something like Matrix, which is very well made and polished but takes a lot of resources to run. Alternatively, you could use Jabber, which scales like no other but is an absolute hell to setup and maintain. Same can be said about music, videos, movies and all other things
* Operations: probably simple if you ask someone on HN, but you still need to understand networking, operating systems and file systems. I started using Linux when I was 11 in the distant 2000, and even now I'm not very enthusiastic if I have to make some changes to my zfs. You also need to consider backups and security and resources. Say you wanna run openstreetmap(which we recently started doing at work). Awesome but that requires an ungodly amount of fiddling in addition to an astonishing amount of time needed to unpack, even on enterprise hardware.
If you are in the tech world, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great place to start. But if you want to make it simpler... Idk... A lot of people would need to put in a lot of effort, as in build a linux distro around this idea, along with "recommended hardware", one click install(a very dumbed down equivalent of portainer), and some backup and alerting mechanisms built into the system. It's a tough question and frankly I don't have the answer.
You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on.
I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure.
Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start