> I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit.

I get where you're coming from, and as much as I'd love to see everyone become more technical, we live in a specialized society. You could use the exact same phrase to talk about fixing cars, making clothes, or producing your own produce & livestock.

A while back I, who has very little mechanical experience, decided to swap out my snow tires myself and fix a broken valve stem. After buying tools and parts (nearly the cost of having a mechanic do it) I probably spent nearly 12 hours on those two things combined. It was a slog, and didn't make logical sense for me to do it (working a bit extra to cover the cost of a mechanic's labor would have been more efficient), I just did it because I want to learn how to do basic mechanical stuff.

For a mechanic, that probably would have taken like 10 minutes - they might say "Hey, people should work on their cars more. It's not hard, people just want other people to fix their problems." But it's a lot harder for somebody who doesn't have a career in fixing cars, and I think a lot of IT guys have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to how easy tech is. Not that it's harder to learn than anything else, but that we already took the time to learn it, and it makes a lot more sense for people specialized in other things to outsource it.

The solution, IMO, is to create more user friendly alternatives to the user friendly centralized services. Open source &/or decentralization don't need to be much more complicated than something like Facebook would be.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply non-technical people need to suck it up and get comfortable with Unix man pages, say. I don't think that's possible on a large scale. But what might be possible is people learning to understand the invisible servitude they live under, and their lack of power over their own digital lives, and to start caring. That is a social and educational problem. If that happened, I believe the UX problems with self-owned software would mostly take care of themselves (and in many instances that is already the case, or nearly so).