I recently installed Matrix. After using it for a while I decided that it wasn't what I was looking for, but I can see where it would be useful for a certain kind of person: the kind of person that wants to participate in discourse on the Internet, but doesn't have the technical chops to set up their own thing.
This is not a new phenomenon, it's been a long September, after all. I'm not going to go into AOL's decision to unleash its users upon Usenet or anything here because I think it was an attempt to allow the general public access to the things that those people 'in the know' already knew about. It gave them a chance to participate in this world-wide network without having to spend all that time doing the boring 'configuring' and 'learning about how TCP/IP works'.
I think about this a lot, probably too much, but I think that the success of things like Twitter and Facebook and Gmail can at least partially attributed to how easily someone can participate in the thing. Back when I got my first dial-up modem (1200 baud!), I played around on some of the local BBS's a lot and I dabbled in browsing the web by using telnet to run lynx on my ISP's server because it was the only way I would get a usable experience. A few upgrades later and I had a full-blown graphical browser, mail reader, and chat client. It was a lot of fun.
I don't remember specifically talking to people about it, but I probably did. I probably talked about some website where I read something interesting or I talked about sitting in a chat channel or something like that. And friends and relatives were probably hearing about this 'Information Superhighway' on the news or in magazines, so it's a natural consequence to me that they would want to participate.
But getting online wasn't easy. It wasn't hard, either, but it wasn't easy. I say it wasn't hard, but I looed it it from the point of view of a kid who had a lot of free time and was motivated to spend it figuring stuff out, so my definition of 'hard' was maybe not the same as everyone else's. Not to mention that the setups were fragile and could break for any number of reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all. It's not surprising to me that those kinds of hurdles kept some people away.
Non-tech users weren't completely helpless, though. ISP's had tech support was a thing and they tried to get people online. Of course they did this over the phone with no remote-access tools and were talking to people who barely knew what a computer was, so my hat's off to them (I'm not wearing a hat).
What I'm getting at is that people who haven't invested the time into understanding how their computer and the Internet works beyond a superficial level shouldn't necessarily be lose out on the benefits that those tools can provide. I don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works to be able to realize the benefits of one of these newfangled horseless carriages.
When I made those first tentative steps onto the Internet, I didn't have to know how things like DNS and routing worked. I started knowing nothing and slowly worked my way to knowing whatever it is I know now (I know enough to know that I don't know nearly enough).
I couldn't have done those things without people who knew more than me helping me out, either by direct (or indirect) instruction, guidance, or just setting up a thing for me to use so I could figure stuff out and figure out how far I wanted to go to learn it.
I had to pay for some of it, like my ISP, with money. I had to pay for some of the other with humility and graciousness (when you're a certain age, asking someone for help with something you don't understand can be almost as tough as admitting you don't understand something enough and need help), and still other things were paid for by someone else (and that 'someone else' was sometimes an ad network, sure, but it oftentimes wasn't).
I'm grateful for everyone that I leaned on to help get me where I am today. I'm also grateful that services (yes, even the ones that I had to pay to use) existed and let me get into the World of Technology™. Those things are necessary to exist so that people can start somewhere and get up to whatever level they're comfortable with.
But that raises an interesting question for me. I can leverage the knowledge and experience that I've gained to further my career (thanks, capitalism), but I can also use that same knowledge and experience to help further people along their paths (i.e. fixing problems for friends and family, but that can sometimes come with its own pitfalls). I could write a blog (ahem), but I could go further. I could install a bulleten board so people would have a place to gather and communicate with each other. I could install some social networking software so people can use it to share pictures of their meals and their pets with each other. I could use what I know to both learn more and to help others learn more. Or, even better, help others not get sucked into content silos.
But am I obligated to do those things? Legally, no, of course not, but morally? I don't know. It's clear now that if someone (or a lot of someones, let's be real here) doesn't set up something like Twitter or Facebook or Discord or Gmail, that some company that may have questionable ethics will just do it. And, it's true that I don't have the resources to make something as big as YouTube or Twitch, but maybe if I (and a few tens of thousands of like-minded people) would have concentrated more on creating websites and services that would enable the teeming millions to do the things that we, the more technically-inclined, were enjoying the fruits of, maybe we would have had thousands of medium-to-large-ish communities instead of a handful of tiny communities and a handful of mega communities with nothing in-between.
So what do I do when my friends decide that they want a place to gather online? Do I just resign myself to using something like Discord or to I try to convince them to let me set up something like XMPP that they'll abandon in six weeks because it's not Discord (which is what they really wanted anyway)?
I guess this is all a long-winded way of asking: Do I, as someone who has the means, have an obligation to set up a resource for people who don't have the means, because, if I don't, someone else will eventually move in and do it in a way that is potentially harmful?
I don't have a good answer for that.