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zahlman 9 hours ago

> the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

Calling it a "mild effort" assumes skills that older generations took for granted but many young people seem to have been actively trained out of. We're past the era where I take for granted that aspiring programmers need to have the basics of a terminal or shell explained to them, into one where they might need an explanation for the basics of a file system and paths. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that hardly any of them could touch-type, either. (I wonder what the speed record is for cell phone text input...)

Yes, they can query a search engine (kind of) or, I guess nowadays, ask ChatGPT. But there's going to be more to setting up an alternative than that. And they need to have the idea that an alternative might exist. (After all, they're asking ChatGPT, not some alternative offering from a company that provides alternatives to Google services....)

nine_k 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's beyond their comprehension to ask: "how can I have a chat system that I personally control?" The rest will be taken care of.

Look at the Amnezia VPN. It's an app that helps you buy a VPS from a range of cloud provides, then sets it up, completely from the phone, as an exit node under user control.

I don't see why a chat server cannot be set up and managed this way. It only takes one dedicated developer to produce.

sli 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even considering that one can personally control their own chat service is already a pretty big leap in technical knowledge. Many, many average users don't even know that's an option, nevermind how it's even done.

johnnyanmac 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>The rest will be taken care of.

by a system with a incentive to keep them in centralized black boxes, yes.

>The rest will be taken care of.

It's never the tech hat's hard, but the networks. If people were able to just jump on a whim a lot of dynamics of modern corruption would fall apart.

nine_k 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Now we're having an event when networks would be shedding kids en masse, all at approximately the same time. It the best possible time for switching, when clinging to the old discord / snapchat / other centralized blackbox becomes hard or impossible.