The thing about e-mail, for instance, is that it was and is terrifically flawed. And those flaws have been exacerbated by two things: 1) Hostile use of e-mail

The thing about e-mail, for instance, is that it was and is terrifically flawed. And those flaws have been exacerbated by two things: 1) Hostile use of e-mail has increased at a rate higher than exponential, to the point where spam prevention is an incredible chore, and the things that make it to your spam folder on Gmail isn't the whole of it, particularly if you aren't cautious in how your e-mail address is used. 2) People no longer have just one computer. They have a work computer, a home computer, a smartphone... and they routinely change those devices. Gmail solves those problems. Gmail takes care of all kinds of spam prevention and other infrastructure tasks. You can access it from almost any computing device you have. And it does so nearly painlessly. You don't have to delete e-mails on your remote server because you're running out of space. You don't have to sync anything. There's no configuration. There's no cost. Can you get most of the way to a solution as nice as Gmail on your own? Yeah. But it's not as low-effort or low-cost, and I think people underestimate the expense, difficulty, or shortfalls of the best non-Gmail options for personal use, especially for people who are not either professionals or hobbyists when it comes to using computers. The general masses didn't sleepwalk into corporate data silos. They went there because the open Internet is a shitshow. It is filled with incredibly dedicated and hostile people who want to run scams, spread malware, do DoSes and all sorts of intentionally hostile things. It is also filled with a lot of more innocent hostility -- nominally compatible software that in practice has weird corner cases, bad documentation, bugs, and so on and so forth. And decentralization is a real hard problem in software. Look at Aphyr and Jepsen. Look at IRC and its interminable netsplits. What you call "corporate data silos" are things that managed to solve problems people really have. Those solutions, yes, have other harms. But people didn't make bad choices or wrong choices, they made entirely sensible choices based on a different set of wants, resources and priorities than the typical commenter at Hacker News. That doesn't make them dumb or "sleepwalking," and condescending about real people with real needs is not going to solve anyone's problems.