A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more “companies that will grow” not “companies that are doing something cool”. But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.

Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:

• Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
• Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
• Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven’t done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they’re going to crash hard
• Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last “innovation” they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
• Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was “the metaverse”, an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
• Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don’t care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they’re part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they’ll keep making money. I can’t remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They’re also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
• Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they’re getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don’t see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
• Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they’re not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won’t crash too hard in the future either, although they’re a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they’ll take some damage too.

It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn’t in the first 10 links, it probably didn’t exist on the Internet… Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn’t crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple’s iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn’t seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they’re trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I’m forgetting, I hope!

I’m excited for peer to peer technology, because it brings us closer to what the internet was originally supposed to be like.

I’ve recommended Keet (chat app) a bunch of times on lemmy earlier, which works really well and that is cool, but that is just a showcase of what’s possible with p2p.

Streaming media, sharing files, communication, browsing wikipedia, etc etc - this can be done without spying middlemen or data centres in between. Some cool demos here 09:45 youtube.com/watch?v=BTCsSwCpGP8&t=776

Same!! P2p and self hosting is getting better and better!

I’ve been searching for an alternative chat platform for a while now and I’m yet to find anything I think I can use with friends and Grandma alike, ya know? 😅 so hearing about this p2p keet app got me really excited!

Sadly, after a bit of reading and such, I’m not so sure… 😕

• play-store or github seem to be the only install methods
• the github is release-delivery only; source code doesn’t appear to be public?
• Keet uses Holepunch’s (the company behind keet) “HyperDHT”, a distributed hash table, to connect peers. So it seems that, while the comms themselves might be p2p, the app still relies on some server(s) to facilitate their initial connection.
• good news (kinda) though! You can self host a ‘p2p server’! But the phrasing on that doc page reinforces that the network itself isn’t fully p2p= "Creates a new server for accepting incoming encrypted P2P connections"
• Installed it anyway just to see. Immediately prompted to enable Google’s push notifications via MicroG 😭
• the splash page of the app proudly announces “no servers!” - documentation says otherwise 😕
• creation of a username first checks whether the username is available… Where is that being checked? No servers, right? 🤔

I want this to be cool, but no source code and foggy talk about servers has my sus-dar goin off a little 🤔 if anyone knows more I’d love to be persuaded!! The app itself is definitely very beautiful and responsive 🙂

You raise a lot of points here, I recommend you join the community room in the app, you’ll get every detail from the developers there.

they haven’t opensourced it yet, but they say they will do so, and they have done so with all the components that keet is built on top of. So given that track record, I think it’s just a matter of when.

I asked a developer about the dht, in this context a “server” is just a dht node that you can connect to with its public key (but agree it’s confusing they use the same word). the wording might be confusing, but its definitively not what anyone understands as a server in a centralized network en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

as i’ve understood, all push notifications on android has to pass through googles servers (but they are encrypted)

and they don’t need a server to check for duplicates in usernames

so I recommend you continue to explore and ask around in the chat rooms, figure out if this is for you!