I think we need to go even further - we need to reduce the cloud back to being dumb piece of infrastructure, compute for hire, paid by the hour. The only thing it should do is abstract away computation - not centralize data and processing under control of some companies (big or small, startups are actually the most annoying entities in the cloud ecosystem, IMO).

So for instance, I want my calendar or e-mail to be stored somewhere, I don't care where - hence in the cloud. But I want the data to be under my control. I can pay for a reasonable guarantee that the data will not suddenly disappear. I can pay for someone else's piece of code to be run against my data, but otherwise I want that someone else to stay away. Companies can earn money by providing useful pieces of code, and even managing stuff for people who absolutely don't care about how this stuff works - but we do need to reverse the idea. It should be arbitrary code run on demand against our data, not our data feeding someone's machine.

Classic web hosting still seems to do this job. In many cases, your data isn't insanely secure, unless you do the work to ensure it is yourself. But it's unlikely to be mined on a large, automated scale.

The issue isn't creating such a platform, it has been done. The issue is getting others to use it. That has not been done.

We've all been using one since the 80s: email. The interface is just poorly designed for social networking.

The email we've all been using is not all open-source and end-to-end encrypted, though there are open-source clients, some of which support end-to-end encryption.

em... the only thing that is valid to support end-to-end encryption is the end client. Otherwise it's not end-to-end.

Yes, and the end clients many people have been using don't support end-to-end encryption. So, we haven't all been using a e2e encrypted system already. We've been using a system over which e2e can be layered, and very few have been layering that over it. And many using it in a way where even with an e2e protocol, it wouldn't be secure, since they are using an third-party, remotely provided client that can be changed without their notice (webmail).

Well um, if you have an open protocol then instead of a monoculture you have many different clients, and you can't expectto CONTROL all of them and what they do. That's the whole point you are making in the first place. The irony is if you have true freedom and openness on all levels then you also can't control the tools that don't maximize their users' freedom/security/whatever so users of those tools are still locked in.

But YOU can choose to use what you want. And IT can choose to require certain things of those it communicates with. And now you're right back to less freedom in the name of more freedom, hehe.