I understand that feeling, but it's too idealistic to be practical right now. We have to accept that convenience has won. These types of social networks depend on a critical mass of users. If the choice is to hold onto principles and lose, or compromise for now closer to the direction we want, then I think we should use Wire. It is the best chance we have for a service that could become popular enough, with people behind it who might embrace it being an open standard. There are no realistic alternatives in this mobile dominated walled-garden world. Most don't even have a desktop client, and require a phone number.
Even if we disregard its flaws, why would the masses migrate to Wire? Or Telegram, or Signal for that matter. I don't deny that it's a lot better than WhatsApp, but it still faces the same problem as any other alternative; the masses aren't using it.
The masses have expectations of free services, and there is no way to monetize privatized data (encrypted data) while providing the service for free. Peer to peer networks will suffer heavily from today's infrastructure due to the cost required to track and process millions of different certificates, as well as symmetric sessions.
There are some creative applications that could be useful, like the models used in East Asia through micro payments. However their culture is conducive to the micropayment model (I.e. emojis, etc) whereas the West is not. A micro payment service on privatized data would be ideal if it could be profitable, yet there is no profitable model to sustain it in the West.
Edit: also, no matter what micro payment model you use, if it is successful or trends, the established free non privatized services will exploit it and provide it for free.
I can see this possibly working doing in enclaves outside the US surveillance apparatus, but directly competing against it by taking on their grandfathered companies is extremely difficult.
We don't need the masses to migrate now, it doesn't need to be either
- "everyone away from Facebook, Whatsapp, Google, everybody use only GPL and nothing for NSA, ФСБ etc to see"
or
- otherwise utter fail.
Getting people to try alternatives goes a long way. We have seen Microsoft changing massively over the last few years after Apple started eating away at the high end prosumer market for phones and laptops.
Facebook just caved after one head of a nation and a couple of newspapers, one of them in a tiny tiny country, stood up and said NO.
I, and many with me, also think the majority of the police force in most western countries is good hardworking people, (I'm personally in no position to judge eastern or African countries and even my opinion on western police is to be taken with a grain of salt) what we object to is just the warrantless dragnets etc.
And the reason why we are objecing them often isn't necessarily because we distrust our police, but as an insurance against future police and politicians, against future hackers who might get access to a raw dump, against unstable neighbouring countries and the occasional bad apple we see. Oh, and as a matter of solidarity to people like the Turkish who now seems to have reason for worry if they ever said or did anything that might have offended their (somewhat easily offended it seems) president:-|
(BTW: If you have spare time and/or cash consider supporting EFF. They seem to be very focused and reasonable to the point where they are taken seriously by politicians.)
Ah I see. Getting people used to a status quo where having multiple chat networks in use is normal is better than a monoculture in the long term. I can agree with that.
