I'm not so sure about that. Many products and services existed and can exist on smaller scale, and maybe that is the way things should stay. "The cloud" and all

I'm not so sure about that. Many products and services existed and can exist on smaller scale, and maybe that is the way things should stay. "The cloud" and all its numerous and vast expenses has inserted itself in our culture as "indispensable", but for many things operational costs can be dramatically lower if the user can be trusted to self-host and self-operate, as things once were. Yes the world would look dramatically different, it'd be more IRC/P2P than Slack/Youtube. But it would be a much better world where users are in control, and can do advanced things after skilling up in the appropriate area. I think that what is happening with Mastodon is a good example of what happens when the mainstream gets its hands on something that maybe it should learn about first. And the thing is, anyone can become technical. They just need to cross that knowledge barrier to entry. But our society, in all its dysfunctional ineptitude, has decided that this is "inaccessible," and that is evil because everyone should be able to fuck up everything at every time. Yet somehow the guilds of doctors and lawyers and engineers (and drivers of cars!) carry on.