> (giving up user data, DoS threats, general increased infra costs with no real ROI)
I'm starting to think the best way to solve this is to bifurcate it.
Create a P2P system which is free-as-in-beer but is possibly susceptible to DoS attacks etc., then have an option which is more robust than that where you pay Cloudflare or someone to host your data in exchange for money, but it's still part of the same network and interacting with the same people.
That way you can acquire new users without shoving a payment prompt in their face on day one but someone who just wants to hand a fistful of cash to a third party to take care of their problems still has that option.
> This still leaves the issue of "all my users' PII is in 1000 different companies' servers" so maybe the body would have to vet & impose legal data restrictions on companies that want to federate with the incumbents, but that would impose on the goal of allowing new players to enter the market with low friction and further entrench the dominance of these incumbents.
This is the kind of problem that gets solved much better by smart cryptographers than government bureaucrats.
Encrypt the data. Use a kind of cryptosystem where only the people who are supposed to be able to have it (i.e. your friends, not Mark Zuckerberg) can decrypt it.
Now some servers can host it so it's not offline when your phone is, but those servers can't read it, only the intended recipient(s) can.
Obviously this is only even necessary for posts that aren't intended to be completely public.
I'm starting to think the best way to solve this is to bifurcate it.
Create a P2P system which is free-as-in-beer but is possibly susceptible to DoS attacks etc., then have an option which is more robust than that where you pay Cloudflare or someone to host your data in exchange for money, but it's still part of the same network and interacting with the same people.
That way you can acquire new users without shoving a payment prompt in their face on day one but someone who just wants to hand a fistful of cash to a third party to take care of their problems still has that option.
> This still leaves the issue of "all my users' PII is in 1000 different companies' servers" so maybe the body would have to vet & impose legal data restrictions on companies that want to federate with the incumbents, but that would impose on the goal of allowing new players to enter the market with low friction and further entrench the dominance of these incumbents.
This is the kind of problem that gets solved much better by smart cryptographers than government bureaucrats.
Encrypt the data. Use a kind of cryptosystem where only the people who are supposed to be able to have it (i.e. your friends, not Mark Zuckerberg) can decrypt it.
Now some servers can host it so it's not offline when your phone is, but those servers can't read it, only the intended recipient(s) can.
Obviously this is only even necessary for posts that aren't intended to be completely public.