I’m sorry, no. If the FSF had a billion dollar budget, you’d still lose people immediately at the first instruction to open a terminal and become root. Your comment actually illustrates the exact point I’m making: the epsilon between us and them is widening, because the loudest voices want people to look at computing the same way our heroes of the ‘70s and ‘80s did and don’t realize this is unproductive. Freedom is too often equated with the way we have done things before.

You or I buy a phone and look for a terminal. They buy a phone and go straight to the App Store to install Facebook. And yes, people know what they want. They are on Facebook because that’s what they want. Look at pictures of my newborn, group of friends. Oh, all my friends are on Facebook and it lets me do that. What’s that, GNU Social? I need to figure out what? I need a server? Mail is decentralized. How many average people don’t use a central service like Gmail? People are choosing the things Free Software doesn’t like because for them it is better. Full stop.

Free Software has no competitive answer for anything the big names are doing for the average user. Not one thing. There’s enough people interested in it that competitive answers could be developed and find a market. The problem is unrealistic ideals (decentralization, often; how much of global SMTP traffic is spam, again?) placing unrealistic requirements upon a project and focusing all of its resources on things the average user doesn’t care about. What if I wrote a Facebook that cared about privacy and, somehow, miraculously got billion MAU traction? You’d be right back banging the same drum making you irrelevant about surveillance state apparatus because it’s centralized. Except the whole point of Facebook is network effect. So.

You’re deluding yourself if you think billions of people are clueless and Free Software has all the answers, if only there were a little more budget. Just look at the worldview evident in your comment. That sort of talk will make most anybody glaze over, and you immediately lose your chance to pull them to a better way of doing things. “Only use things to which you can read source code.” What’s source code? Nobody cares about the ideals. Adapt accordingly if you want to effect meaningful change. That’s my point.

There’s literally decades of proof based on what’s successful that we don’t have a firm grasp of how to adapt software freedom to Joe Random. You and I both know it’s better. Now figure out how to tell them and design systems that are palatable to the average user.

That’s my other point: I don’t think a customizable system with Free Software ideals in mind can sufficiently protect and be useful for the average user. I want to be proven wrong.