Indeed people have been saying this since AOL. This is a tired argument. Nobody is forced to use anything and you can still buy a domain and run your own Wordpress in like 15 min. Hell you can set up your own social network on Wordpress on your own domain in like 15 min.

Many computer users can do this, but most computer users can't. So most users don't have that choice.

Saying they don't have a choice is sorta disingenuous. Almost everyone was born with the required organs. Most of the tech has free alternatives and instruction exists in numerous freely accessible and easily digestible blog posts and YouTube videos. Saying the users have no choice in this matter is like saying a lot of users can't choose to vote because they're not registered and they don't know where the polls are.

Well, I certainly disagree. Technically you are correct. In a vacuum any person, even my own mother, could endeavor to learn these things and do them.

But when you put a person's life in to context, how do you expect a working mother of three to just learn the tools? What if she has the remotest of computer literacy? That is, she could operate Facebook but no more? Then is it reasonable to expect her to learn how to administer her own server? Can she choose to spend hours a week learning for months while her children need food to be prepared for them, clothes to be washed, and beds to be made? In a practical, not theoretical sense, does she really have that choice?

The example with voting feels disingenuous because voting is specifically designed to be accessible to every person. Learning bash and administering your own web server is absolutely not the same.

> What if she has the remotest of computer literacy? That is, she could operate Facebook but no more? Then is it reasonable to expect her to learn how to administer her own server?

She wouldn't have to, it's all about the money and the wish to be dependent or independent. There are web hosting as well as consulting companies that can setup private social network for one time fee, with automated backups and all.

To me, when I hear that some "computer illiterate" person "learns to use facebok" it kinda sounds reminiscent of hearing that someone learns to make crack from cocaine. Is it useful - maybe, is it good for society - eh I don't think so. I rather see them "learn" how to use sandstorm...

It requires time to even learn about how to search for a web hosting company.

Just the words "web hosting" are not in most peoples' vocabulary.

You are right that it's good to teach people computer literacy. But your belief that people can somehow spontaneously learn about web hosting is unrealistic.

People first need to experience something, then get some language for what it is and how it works, and only then can they begin to seek out education about how to learn how to reconstruct it for themselves.

Providing turnkey decentralized application hosting is a way to allow people to first experience what it's like to deploy an application. By having that experience and doing it over and over they can start to have shared experiences around it, from which they will learn language about what it is. Only at that point can they start to learn how it actually works and what it might be like to do it in a different way.

If anything I see the public and businesses going the other way toward the cloud to avoid the hassle of IT. For the average person a PC is a broken piece of time consuming junk that accumulates malware.

Edit: There's another comment in this thread where someone brings up the hassle of IT as a major centralizing force. Best comment so far in this thread.

I see it in some places. For example, my sister now avoids facebook and instagram because she doesn't want pictures of her kids on those services. Unfortunately, none of the decentralized and distributed services are easy enough for her and the rest of the family to use without help.

And just because it's decentralized may not necessarily solve the problem of pictures of kids on those services. That problem could still be solved with a centralized photo sharing platform.