There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product
There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.
Some more valid reasons in my opinion:
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Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)
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Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.
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US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.
On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.
There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.
Good point… I found that apart from technical interoperability it often works pretty well if you explain to your friends that your alternative (signal,Matrix, whatever…) is just that. An alternative which is always good to have just in case. Don’t try to force them to uninstall WhatsApp, even if this would obviously be the best choice. Instead encourage them to try the alternative and keep WhatsApp in case they don’t like it. Test it with them. In practice this often means they find out that it works just as well and does not hurt to have on the device. Even if they don’t use it actively yet, the next time someone asks them if they have Signal (or whatever) they will be happy to say that they already have it. Patience is key.