This is true for businesses that can justify the cost of self hosting for a variety of business reasons.
This isn't true for most end-users, who just want reliable services. Hence, Wordpress.com vs. self-hosted Wordpress.
I don't want to be personally responsible for my data; I want a professional organization to make sure it is safe.
For example, my parents are never going to self host their own photos unless they're confident that it is safe and reliable, and takes almost no effort on their part. They don't want that responsibility, and frankly, there's no need.
OSS can be built around businesses that take responsibility and host for others. Part of why so many of these platforms fail to gain mainstream support, is that they're not built to support a solid business case, and instead somehow expect everyday people to learn far more than is realistic, just to replace a service that is free and easy.
That doesn't have to be true. Wordpress, as mentioned above, is a very good example, as it provides both options. (Self hosting, vs. paying someone else to take that responsibility.)
So if the actual complaint is "stop supporting for-profit companies," sure (but then we have to ask why - there are reasons to expect that a for-profit company is likely to be more stable long-term, more likely to be secure, etc.). If the complaint is "GitHub / Microsoft in particular is bad, and chatons in particular is good," sure (but then, what about for-profit competitors like GitLab?).
But that's unrelated to the original complaint. As you say, chatons is maintaining OSS services for you to interact with.
Anyway, I am for actually discussing substance so here it is:
With Facebook, you only have one possible landlord - a monopoly. With Wordpress, you have a choice of many landlords who compete on price, location, and so forth, knowing that you can take your business elsewhere.
In short it is like going from digital Feudalism to Capitalism. See this for much more info:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
That is why I started Qbix 10 years ago. But there is something even better than capitalism and privately owned hosting companies: autonomous, self-balancing networks where dumb pipes carry encrypted messages. Blockchains are just the beginning. That’s why I started Intercoin.org but some projects like MaidSAFE and Matrix.org are ahead of us in many respects (for storage).
I completely understand that the scale and scope of abuse in tech can be much higher than with other services due to automation, but I don't see how its reasonable to question whether my stuff is still my stuff because I've entrusted it to a third party.
Yes.
> Is it really yours?
Yes, though obviously it depends on the service, and my agreement with them. Most of my photos, for example, are backed up in OneDrive, which works quite well for my purposes.
> What if your professional organization says "we've installed some big data analytics", or "whoops we lost all your data"?
Good question! My photos, for example, exist on my local computer, Microsoft OneDrive, and on Google Photos. The odds of losing them are, frankly, as non-existent as possible. Multiple storage locations, IMO, are a good way to mitigate the relatively low risk of losing cloud data. Also, almost no effort on my part is required.
(and I think that's a problem, OSS softwares today are ~reliable enough for end users, but not really for companies)
Look them up.
Like we have an entire cloud "revolution" (note the mocking quotes) because of a bullshit accounting rule!
We'll see if that catches on and makes a difference. Accountants, like software engineers and every other profession, tend to follow trends.
For blogs there's Wordpress. For stores there's Magento. For files there's OwnCloud. Sadly, for communities and collaboration (Web 2.0) there isn't that much. Matrix, Mastodon? They are nowhere near the functionality of Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn et al.
I spent 10 years reinvesting all our profits into building an open-source competitor to those centralized services, and it still needs some work to rival them: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
But I'll tell you something. Having your OWN servers and data is very attractive. That's why everyone moved away from America Online "keyword NYTimes" and towards hosting a web site on nytimes.com using the open HTTP protocol. Today, Facebook's "NYTimes" page is analogous to AOL Keyword NYTimes, Mark Z is analogous to Steve Case, and notifications are analogous to "You've Got Mail!" Nothing new under the sun... now we just need something like the Web to come along and disrupt them by letting everyone self-host their own stuff on a service that's almost as good. The Web Browser in the beginning only had Bold, Italic, etc. but publishers switched in droves, and users followed.