> I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post.
That's exactly what the Solid [1] (or as a sibling mentioned, SoLID - Social Linked Data) project is about. Solid proposes decoupling the presentation layer and the data layer, having data providers specialize in helping FOAF or other RDF data be stored and easily queried, while the view layer would contain logic that queries your FOAF/other-triple data and gives you the experience you are looking for in an app.
I was waiting for someone to mention Solid. Solid takes all the bad ideas from the Semantic Web and goes all in on stupid. They've been pushing WebID for years which is flawed at its very core. It ties a TLS certificate to a web resource, your WebID profile, but isn't signed, anyone with access to the server could steal your identity. When you mention that to them their usual response either, "No problem, a raspberry Pi is $35. I run one in my basement and you should too!" or "No problem. You can change providers if they ever steal your identity because with Solid you have choices!".
So you bite the bullet, order a Pi, register a domain, basically become your own sys admin - and you thought getting your mothers wifi working was bad - running your own little data center out of your basement. Now you need to actually use this WebID thing...it just happens to rely on the HTML keygen tag. Haven't heard of that one before? That's because it's a rarely used, on again, off again, supported tag. That's not really going to work so they decide to do what they always do, piggyback on something that actually works. Enter, WebID-OICD that piggybacks on OAuth2/OpenID connect except profiles still aren't signed, oops.
None of your information is encrypted so your pod hosting provider has complete access to everything. For some reason they're cool with that. There's no way pod providers would collude to aggregate your data. You're going to have so much choice and the tech is so awesome that you're just going to seamlessly migrate from provider to provider that it's never going to happen. Don't worry that doing anything with it is going to be hopelessly slow because everything is federated.
That's exactly what the Solid [1] (or as a sibling mentioned, SoLID - Social Linked Data) project is about. Solid proposes decoupling the presentation layer and the data layer, having data providers specialize in helping FOAF or other RDF data be stored and easily queried, while the view layer would contain logic that queries your FOAF/other-triple data and gives you the experience you are looking for in an app.
1: https://solid.inrupt.com/