You are missing a major issue here: spam. E-mail and phone calls are riddled with spam precisely because these are at least somewhat open systems.
E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.
Phone calls are in some ways even worse. I no longer answer unidentified calls, period, and I keep my phone on vibrate at all times. Any important calls must be scheduled. I get 2-4 robocalls per day. I'm tempted to change my number but I've heard it doesn't matter.
Spam is a huge reason walled gardens win. Anything open gets abused to death.
Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?
For someone who can't imagine that email may sometimes come from people who doesn't have their best interest at heart, sure.
Me, I receive 5-15 spam emails a day, which are filtered only by my local mail client, with some false negative, and extremely rare false positives (I spotted one in several years, and I always look through my spam folder).
Despite my lack of Google grade filters, I can use email just fine.
Windows is a minefield to download for.
Linux is a yum or apt away.
And iOS is antiowner garbage.
MacOS is targeted a bit less than Windows because its user base is smaller, tends to be a bit more technical, and running arbitrary apps while allowed requires magic incantations like right click open (twice) the first time or opening a terminal.
Every non technical person I know loves iOS because it just works and doesn't rot from malware or badly written apps that trash the system.
Never ever underestimate what people will do for even mediocre amounts of money. Look into the enormous ecosystem (bordering on a subculture) that exists around click fraud and other forms of ad network abuse, or try to search for some Windows software and look at how many fake sites you get. It's unreal. There's money to be grabbed, so it gets grabbed.
or even just for thrills or for nefarious purposes!
Reminds of me of that backdoor in Notepad++[1], an app many developers I've worked with used.
[1]https://www.hackread.com/wikileaks-vault7-cia-docs-notepad-p...
Surely we ought to be able to recognize this claim as culturally dependent. While the Western tradition has been deeply concerned with the concept of freedom since the Greeks, that does not hold for other cultures which are currently ascendant. If anything, they might see an unfree state as the natural order of things, and "striving for freedom" as a source of social instability which is a net negative.
You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…
If by the end of the day you feel accomplished and happy about what you have achieved then I would count that as a win.
Does your girlfriend know how to make website without your help?
Nearly every online community I've seen recently has a discord server. And the range is wide and far. Minecraft, piracy, Linux, fashion, literally anything you can think of. And I think their market share is only going to go up. Their numbers pale in comparison to facebook, but their audience is young and trusting. Ask literally anyone below 20, and they will have a discord account.
What's the conscious effort to stay on email? It seems like most people use email because everybody else uses email, not because it's federated.
That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons.
A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that.
So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.