There are decentralized alternatives to any of the services and platforms above. Self-hosted, open source solutions. But hardly anybody uses them. They will forever rot in the forgotten world of nerd tools on SourceForge, BitBucket or GitHub. A few idealists may try to give them a chance and probably will give up sooner or later, realizing that it’s all about global adoption.
But does this really mean that a more open, decentralized approach to a social web and all these tools we use will always be doomed to fail? I don’t think so. It’s up to us. We have the chance to make a big impact on the future of the web.
I just recently played around a bit with app.net, and i loved the decentralized idea behind tent.io when i read about it. But many of those tools are too complicated and too geeky for normal users to use today.
Bastian Allgeier did a very good job in not only pointing out problems we have today but also a solution which might not be a reality in a few weeks or months, but could definitely be possible. I would love to see something like this becoming a reality. And i’m sure it will, in some form or another!