You'll know when it hits mainstream when it's referred to on the nightly news and every media outlet is running at least an account for each program, but hopefully an instance for each organisation.
I spent quite some time trying to find a better way to put it, but stupid, idiot, ignorance, incredulity just didn't seem to cover the experience of WTAF?
When you launch chrome, you need to tap in the url bar to show the keyboard, so you can enter a search term or url, even when you start in incognito mode and have no bookmarks.
I have avoided Microsoft software for 25 years or so, so I don't have any reference point, but there was a time when Google lead the pack in innovation, that's no longer the case.
The boundary of where to host what, is not fixed. You cannot host the internet at home. Where people sit on the spectrum varies depending on skill, resources and need.
I highlighted several options that provide a solution for someone with limited skills and resources.
You could host a CALDAV server or a next cloud at home and use the suggestions I provided, or you could use those hosted by someone else.
My answer was to provide ideas, not a how-to guide, answering, in my opinion, exactly what OP was looking for.
That it doesn't match your idea about solving the problem tells you that there are many ways to solve software problems. My suggestions had a low barrier to entry.
There are thousands if not millions of open source solutions scattered around society. Some are feature complete, most are not. Some are maintained, many are not. A handful are funded, the rest is not.
What open source needs, more than anything else is fundraising and the means to distribute those funds to the tune of the trillions of dollars that the corporate world extracts in profits from those open source efforts.
In other words, the people who make this need to get paid.
Firefox terms and conditions, Red Hat, and several other projects that have caused uproar through the community, are all caused by the need to get paid to eat food and have a roof over your head whilst you contribute to society and give away your efforts.
Here it's all about ChatGPT, nothing about neural networks, nothing about machine learning, or about what we used to call expert systems.
You do realise that the journalists around us don't sit still long enough to make the distinction, and I can guarantee that the Orange has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. The general public has no clue at all.
Hopefully ChatGPT et. al. will choke on their own input shortly, take all the trillions of investment dollars into the sewer and cause a few CEO's to suddenly discover the meaning of Defenestration.
.. dreaming is fun ..
On a positive note, something we, as-in science, got from this whole kerfuffle is back propagation, which for the first time gave us the ability to (partially) solve until now unsolvable multivariate problems.
Hopefully more will come of that before the LLM in charge pushes the big red button into oblivion.
What could possibly go wrong .. though to be fair, the current crop of LLM are evidently smarter than the Orange running the country at the moment .. even including typical LLM hallucinations.
You'll know when it hits mainstream when it's referred to on the nightly news and every media outlet is running at least an account for each program, but hopefully an instance for each organisation.
We're nowhere near that.