A simple reflection: why?

Why some think that today tech is good tech and "self-hosting" it is a way to be free? Web tech have some reasonably good foundations but that's all, the rest is a colorful, animated bloatload mess. Modern web is needed not by us Citizens but by IT giants to rule the tech and indirectly the society, since information and communication are core elements of a society to exists.

Do we need Webmails? NO. We do need mails though, locally indexed with GMail-like powerful search (and we have them, see notmuch/mu maildir indexers based on solr), we need a modern MUA, that's for sure but why tie it to a modern WebVM a monster so big that only few giants can keep one up and no one can really know it even if FLOSS just for mere codebase size? We need mails on many devices, but that does not demand a central point.

We need notes, documents etc but definitively not a copy of Google Drive suite.

What we need are classic desktops a bit updated for modern users. Those really classic ones like Xerox Office System or more modern LispM and Plan 9 are far more advanced in tech terms than actual OSes and web-stuff. We miss the hw layer and they need a bit of changes for modern world but we can study them and we can run in that direction, a so powerful direction that no IT giants can compete.

Did you remember Popcorn Time? Why we need Youtube or Peertube when we can have a distributed app that's far superior by nature? Do you remember usenet? Yes, it base is old and crappy but it's a decentralized free place we desperately need and even if their base are crappy even today it's popular again for mostly illegal stuff (see Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr etc) to a point that for some is superior to bittorrent. I can keep going for long. It's sure that creating for instance Retroshare or Jami seems not much useful because until enough users adopt it there is essentially nothing to share, no one to talk to etc, but that's the way in all cases.

We can't build a self-hosted better-them-{Zoom,Meet,Teams}, we can build a far superior local app connected to a decentralized network though, and while giants can easily fight back or buy with big money something web-based they can't really do nothing with such application.

It's not easy: modern GUI libraries are almost abandonware, some are active but definitively derailed, desktops is in a deeply sorry state etc BUT we still have some good environments with a good language portable enough, there it common lisp, go, python, ... with their ecosystem. They all have issues BUT issues that can be compensated by a new FLOSS community to a point of re-creating the old classic: the desktop have an OS, a single application, fully integrated, with a relevant programming language where anything is at users hands. For those who never used classic system or modern Emacs it's really hard to understand why that's extremely superior but just try to invest seriously in Emacs and you'll discover why that "alien and strange" way it's the way to go and the modern way is actually a crappy absurd idea.

Long story short: we can't compete with giants creating personal web ecosystems, we can compete on desktops, and that's why all giants do their best, and fail to completely succeed, pushing desktops to the oblivion. No one can win a stronger, resourceful enemy at it's own game, to win a different strategy, not a copycat, is mandatory.