The recent push by Apple to promote privacy controls has attracted and renewed trust in the brand. That's my theory as a partial explanation of recent success.
They correctly identified privacy controls as something people actually want for real, even just knowing it's there is a nice feeling. Knowing my front door is reinforced with 7 optional locks, is much better than a fly-screen door with a privacy policy attached.
Meanwhile, MS and Google and Facebook remove options and rely on the opposite of privacy: over-sharing by default. Telemetry by default. Ads, suggestions, ads pretending to be suggestions, bloatware.
Apple is the one commercial entity that could completely disrupt surveillance capitalism and reboot the digital space to an era reminiscent of the Microsoft monopoly - but now with their huge attached and interoperable mobile user base.
What they simply need to do is make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy and support a number of new/updated protocols for decentralized online interactions (messaging, blogs, search, social etc).
Monopolies are never optimal, but given the dismal moral basis of the other "big tech" I'd take it any day...
> make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy
They did this for years: every Mac starting with the first release of Mac OS X had a built-in Apache webserver, and activating it was just the click of a button in the Sharing preference pane.
Problem is, the segment of people who a) are willing and able to create web content, and b) only want the very basics as provided by Apple (including whatever versions of Perl and other server-side languages happened to ship with the OS) is a fairly slim one.
The other problem is, almost no one has an ISP that's friendly to self-hosting from your home.
I believe Apple removed Web Sharing from the Sharing preference pane a few years ago now.
I did not know about built-in Apache (cool). Last I have seen this was in a NAS server. I was never into the Apple ecosystem but I recall hearing e.g. about appletalk [0]
What you describe are both real hindrances and somehow not fundamental. E.g. people migrated en mass to centralized social media also for simple personalized websites (which in retrospect might not have been in their best interests).
My sense is that as time goes on it will take an active act of suppression for self-hosting not to become potentially much more widespread and ofcourse if a major and credible player can remove friction points for non-technical people this will only open the floodgates.
As for ISP's, yes, they are a big part of the problem.
They correctly identified privacy controls as something people actually want for real, even just knowing it's there is a nice feeling. Knowing my front door is reinforced with 7 optional locks, is much better than a fly-screen door with a privacy policy attached.
Meanwhile, MS and Google and Facebook remove options and rely on the opposite of privacy: over-sharing by default. Telemetry by default. Ads, suggestions, ads pretending to be suggestions, bloatware.