And it's not just privacy on the internet, but in meatspace too. Thankfully I'm still from a part of the world that hasn't gone completely digital, but there are annoying advances like absolutely needing a phone to have a bank account. Or having my face scanned for certain things.
You don't. What I mean is that problems like privacy, censorship, centralized control etc, can all be solved with technology. And although you can't get everyone to care enough to switch to a facebook alternative, you can get everyone to "switch" to something completely new that makes facebook irrelevant, that breakthrough concept in combination with decentralization and privacy built in from the start means there is no "switch" to a competitor, it's just a "new thing".
It's all a bit vauge, but if it wasn't, it would already exist... and maybe there is no better alternative to social networks, perhaps this is it, and perhaps it's just a phase that society has to push through. But I have hope that there are better things, more fucking exciting things than scrolling through pictures of other peoples food and holidays that we have yet to dream of that will simultaneously make facebook as irrelevant as chemistry made alchemy.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise, decentralised or federated versions of all kinds of things on the web exist, and work, today... Just no one uses them of course.
The problem is none of these ideas seem to be able to obtain dominance, because that's not in their nature, that is in the nature of capitalism at the deep end, and it already has a grasp on the things that most decentralised tech is trying to replace.
The exceptions are decentralised tech that has no corporate competition, e.g bittorrent. I think that's a very useful observation, it's a classic "make a better horse" scenario, it's difficult to see the future when you are focused on present technology - I think the way to make the centralised web obsolete is not to merely decentralise the existing manifestation of it, but to make something entirely, fundamentally different, because corporations don't innovate in that dimension, so they can't compete, and can't dominate early enough to monopolize it.