So I recently got an excuse rant about my opinions on federated tech. I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for in terms of liberating tech, with very few niches where fully distributed tech is preferable.
Needing a server places users under the power of the server administrator. Why do we bother? "No gods, no masters, no admins!' I hear you shout. Well, there's a couple reasons...
Maybe using software is just an intrinsically centralized activity. One or a few people design and code it, and an unlimited number of people can digitally replicate and use it. Sure, it may be free software that everyone can inspect and modify... but how many people will really bother? (Nevermind that most people don't even have the skills necessary.)
Okay, so we always kind of rely on a central-ish dev team when we use tech. Why rely on admins on top of that? I believe the vast vast majority of people doesn't have the skills and time to operate a truly independent node of a fully distributed tech. Let's take Jami as an example:
"With the default name server (ns.jami.net), the usernames are registered on an Ethereum blockchain."
So a feature of Jami is (for most users) implemented as a centralized service. Yikes. You could build and run your own name server (with less embarrassing tech choices hopefully), but who will really bother?
But say you bothered, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could use that name server too, and gain a little independence? That sounds a lot like decentralized/federated tech.
Keeping a decent service online is a pain in the butt. Installing SW updates, managing backups, paying for hardware and name services... nevermind just the general bothering to understand all that mess. And moderation, don't forget moderation. I'm saying it's not for everyone (and we should appreciate the fuck out of [local admin]).
I believe that servers and admins are our best bet for actual non-centralized tech. A tech-literate person tending a service for a small- to medium-size community is much more feasible than every person running their independent node (which will probably still depend on something centralized).
And maybe that's just the way we bring good ol' division of labour to the Internet. You have your shoemaker, your baker, your social media admin. A respectable and useful position in society. And they lived happily ever after.
I think it's worth emphasizing that the biggest change between that idealized Internet and today's adware hell wasn't any technological change but a massive shift in who was using the internet, how, and why. The technological changes that led off of that were largely attempts to meet the needs of this new audience, and they largely did not have the technical skills to do their own administrative work and didn't have any interest in doing so anyways. That user base effectively requires some level of centralization, and since those centralized entities are explicitly about offloading the technical work of being online they are (in our current economic system) going to end up being primarily profit-driven as a way of ensuring the people who do that work are compensated. From there the advertising model of monetization has the distinct advantage of not making those users pay you anything because even though they're the product rather than the buyer it's really easy to sell something that's free. Social media completes the loop by giving those users tools not just to consume information without having to think about how it's done to letting them create their own online spaces and share their own work with each other, meaning that you no longer need to know even HTML or what a "server" is in order to fully take advantage of the internet.
Google and Facebook aren't the product of a sinister conspiracy trying to control the internet in order to push a woke ideology down the throats of an unwilling populace. Instead, they created services that streamline and moderate user's access to online information and nobody appears to have realized how much actual power that gave them over people's access to information (and by information I increasingly mean "the whole world") until they had already become economically dependent on selling that influence machine to the highest bidder in the form of advertising. All the technologies that enable the modern intermet and the associated problems and centralization on problematic platforms and companies were created in an attempt to meet the needs of users without any consideration for the kinds of social and economic structures that were embedded in those technological structures.
Zuckerberg and friends aren't evil geniuses who need to be stopped by a plucky band of good guys, they're a bunch of amoral idiots who have gained incredible personal wealth by stepping into a powerful role that was made systemically necessary without any consideration for who was going to fill it, and now we need to solve the problems of both how that power should be used by who and of how that power can be wrested from the hands of the people who have proven themselves categorically incapable or unwilling to use it responsibly but are making too much money to let go voluntarily.