Just a hunch. When you look at a Home Screen now it’s a blast of colors fighting for attention. Black and dark background icons now stand out. This cycle happened with favicons in like 2015 too.
For me it was this edition of ‘The Fountainhead’ by Ayn Rand that I pulled out of a little free library. Longest read of a book ever because I had to revisit so many passages so often. I kept thinking to myself how beautifully descriptive the language was but wow everyone is an asshole.
Years ago, when I started building a decentralized discord clone, people asked me why. I wanted a communication tool that was truly decentralized, in a way that no state actor was able to gain control over.
Signal's design wasn't capable of group chats beyond a certain size. The features only went so far. And it has failure points such that countries block them by firewall and have to rely on the good graces of others to run proxies, which ultimately get shut down or blocked too.
App stores do not share in this ideal — their concern is profit, and will bend backwards when forced to by regulatory bodies.
Amazon and others are complicit in helping state actors maintain their control of the web, and are profiting handsomely from the arrangement.
None of this happened by accident. And I only saw it getting worse. I realized what I was building in this chat application went beyond just chat, and how pressing it was to make this general purpose.
