To me, self-hosted and federated (so you can self-host and others can self-host and it seamlessly works across instances) is the way of the future. There might be criticisms of xmpp or matrix, but to me the moment you’re no longer looking at a single point of failure like with big tech services (or aspiring big tech services like this) you’re much more secure because your data isn’t in one centralized spot with everyone else’s data to get picked up in one big hack.
I mean, there are standardized tools. X has been around since 1984, and alsa has been around since 1998, pulseaudio since 2004.
“but I don’t like those tools, I want to use these other ones instead!” – Exactly. The point of the bazaar is to pick and choose what tools to use, and the may the best one win until it dies or we find something better.
Does that make things more complicated? Well, it can. OTOH, I’ve got a pretty complicated multi-server setup running right now, and a shocking number of problems are solved by going “$Problem on Ubuntu 20.04”, whereupon someone has already laid out the exact commands to run to solve your problem.
It isn’t like windows is standardized. To set the IP address properly, I can’t use the settings app because it’s been broken for years. I instead need to go to the windows 2000 version of the network adapter settings using a constantly changing maze of button clicks.
I think the famous phrase “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” applies.
I’ve been using linux since the 90s. Over the decades, the distribution people generally use has changed, as well as the specific tools within each distribution.
If open source was a cathedral like closed source, the market dynamic would be gone. Nobody would have moved from redhat to mandrake, from mandrake to ubuntu, from ubuntu to the latest distributions. Nobody would move between different desktop environments or window managers. Nobody would choose between different APIs to select the best ones for them.
The thing is, that cathedral often leads to stagnation. Sure, there’s only one choice so it’s straightforward, but there’s only one choice so if they don’t do the things you want or try new things then you’re stuck with what they gave you. That’s the Internet Explorer 6 problem.
I think that federation is the answer, it’s just an answer over a long time rather than an immediate catastrophic paradigm shift.
It might not have taken off yet for message boards, but it’s the only way to allow diversity and self-reliance while also allowing a common community and an aggregated large user base.
That’s the USP of big tech: Go on facebook or reddit and you can join multiple different communities from one place, whereas it’s a unique commitment to be on even a few standalone forums since you routinely have to go to each one. Federate and suddenly you can be in multiple communities that have nothing to do with each other from whichever site you like the design of.
I guess you technically don’t have to, but to me part of the point of using an open source tool is you can host it yourself and you don’t need to ask permission or apologize for using the service in a way the operator didn’t intend.
At this point, I host most of my own services. Especially if they’re federated.
When two people from two instances running two different pieces of software reply on a completely different node. That’s federation working. :)