That is only because those technologies predate those companies. Normal people don't care that you can't DM a Reddit user on Twitter or that your Instagram posts don't automatically show up on your Facebook page. People are generally fine with centralized corporate platforms as long as it isn't a restriction of a previously free technology and the network effect has done its thing to attract enough people to the platform.

I think decentralisation is not a selling point to most people. It's an implementation detail that they're happy to go along with but it's a negative if it make the experience worse, makes everything more complicated, if they can't talk to the people they know IRL, etc.

I’ve tried pointing those out as bluntly as possible as an experiment. As in “well, surprise, locked-in crap with impenetrable failure modes locks you in and is impenetrable when it fails, you signed up for that”.

People didn’t appreciate it, as I expected, but they did seem to recognize the truth of it. That is, the response was along the lines of being forced to use the thing to communicate with some person or institution, not of liking it or thinking it’s not at fault.

I don’t know how one would use this to organize an IM revolt (Riot? sorry), but there does seem to be at least some fuel for it even among people who are not outright IT professionals.

> RCS messaging is a great example which I think most people would use over alternatives like WhatsApp and iMessage [...].

RCS might make a slight amount of sense in a culture that still uses SMS / texts in non-negligible amounts, but that’s basically North America and Japan AFAIU? And I prefer that territory shrink, not grow, as I’m very much not thrilled by the idea of handing back over detailed control over IM—even just billing, not content—to phone carriers. Whatever the country, they have extensive history proving they can and will screw you for decades unless you can leave, and it will take everybody leaving for them to stop.

not really. nothing at all is stopping one from starting a new social network that's federated. the issue is users have no reason to move.

it's more a question of incentives, and there's basically none to use something that you're not already using unless it's better, heavily advertised or you're simply paid to.