Thanks for the clarification and to be clear, I don't doubt your personal intent or FOSS background. The concern isn't bad actors at the start, it's how projects evolve once they matter.

History is pretty consistent here:

WhatsApp: privacy-first, founders with principles, both left once monetization and policy pressure kicked in.

Google: 'Don’t be evil' didn’t disappear by accident — it became incompatible with scale, revenue, and government relationships.

Facebook/Meta: years of apologies and "we'll do better," yet incentives never changed.

Mobile OS attestation (iOS / Android): sold as security, later became enforcement and gatekeeping.

Ruby on Rails ecosystem: strong opinions, benevolent control, then repeated governance, security, and dependency chaos once it became critical infrastructure. Good intentions didn't prevent fragility, lock-in, or downstream breakage.

Common failure modes:

Enterprise customers demand guarantees - policy creeps in.

Governments demand compliance - exceptions appear.

Liability enters the picture - defaults shift to "safe for the company."

Revenue depends on trust decisions - neutrality erodes.

Core maintainers lose leverage - architecture hardens around control.

Even if keys are user-controlled today, the key question is architectural: Can this system resist those pressures long-term, or does it merely promise to?

Most systems that can become centralized eventually do, not because engineers change, but because incentives do. That’s why skepticism here isn't personal — it's based on pattern recognition.

I genuinely hope this breaks the cycle. History just suggests it's much harder than it looks.

user:	ingohelpinger
created:	January 3, 2025
karma:	39