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Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#111

Post by water-your-self »

richardw wrote: post #97
bryan_w wrote: post #61

How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra. 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

Why? Honest question. I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-connected data centers. I’d like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I want to,…

Apple is now policing the images you own. They intend to observe everything you upload to ensure it aligns with local legislation. Some good, a lot of bad.

Beyond that, if someone owns your data they can simply decide what you pay tomorrow and its burn it or pay.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#113

Post by layer8 »

bryan_w wrote: post #61

How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra. 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

Routers work because ISPs require them. ISPs however aren’t fond of supporting the home server use case.

I wish for a world where battery tech wasn’t so limited. Imagine if everyone could just run a full-fledged server 24/7 on their phone, as a simple app, with a reasonable data plan.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#114

Post by hutrdvnj »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #89

There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

I think we need something like micro payments. Take lichess for example it's the biggest open source chess website completely ad free and runs by donations. If you divide the total monthly costs to run the servers by the number of games and you get a tiny fraction of a dollar cent. I don't remember the exact number, but it has been in the order of 1k chess games equals 1$. If you could charge 0.1 cent per game, then this website could run without any extra donations.

Another idea that comes to mind is that the server side could be somehow run by the connected users. Users have storage + cpu cycles. Similar to torrent as long there's enough users (seeders) the game server will continue to work. Lichess for instance has tens of thousands players online 24/7.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#115

Post by imiric »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #89

There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

Forget open source—there never was a simple way for users to self-host web ~servers~ applications that gained any traction whatsoever.

Opera gave it a go more than a decade ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere. Like a sibling comment mentioned, Sandstorm was a push in the right direction, but it also eventually failed. Docker and current container solutions are still way too complicated for the average user.

The fact web founders focused so much on making the consumption of web content easy rather than producing/serving it is partly the reason why the web is so centralized today.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#116

Post by afpx »

macrolime wrote: post #108
erikpukinskis wrote: post #89

There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

There's the SAFE Network that will do exactly that. It's pay on put. You as a developer would have to pay a one time cost to store the app on network, but that should quite cheap. Users would then pay to store their own private data through the (web)app. It uses its own browser and protocol as sites are stored on a peer to peer network. It's still in somewhat unstable test versions, but I think there's hope it can be…

https://safenetwork.tech/

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#117

Post by lettergram »

water-your-self wrote: post #104
lettergram wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree for centralized services. I think In the end all information will be accessible and searchable. Since the beginning of the written word, there’s been an exponential expansion of information. Scrolls, book, news papers, radio, TV, internet, etc. So in terms of infrastructure, I think a way to tap into and share information regardless of restraint will be the end result. It would need to be cheap, impossi…

I completely disagree. We see a continuing trend of consolidation and obfuscation. Most social media hides and scatters information intentionally to absorb user time, theres no value in providing information quickly and accessibly. I fear Google becoming worse is also by design as well. Its only time until they introduce their own infinite scroll.

I agree short term that’ll be the case. For a long time, radio was viewed as a dying form of communication, until TV started censoring large sections of what people wanted to listen to. Then you had the rise of people like Limbaugh, Jones, stern, etc

The reality is people seek the truth when they know they’re being lied to. Very few people in the west trust news

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

Part of the issue with Google, etc has to do with the “Trusted News Initiative”.

I definitely agree the trend will continue. However, once an innovation with then properties I described can occur it will dominate.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#118

Post by shad0wfax »

Good question!

I am biased in this answer because I am building https://hotg.ai/ but I see the world going towards a more fragmented ecosystem. So:

- Portable computations - sending your workloads to any place where the data is

- Good local storage that keeps you compliant with local laws

(edited for format)

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#119

Post by imiric »

richardw wrote: post #97
bryan_w wrote: post #61

How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra. 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

Why? Honest question. I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-connected data centers. I’d like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I want to,…

Because it's my data. I should decide who can access it, when and on what terms. Relying on someone else to do it for me is an unnecessary middle man that exists for the only reason web developers haven't made a good technical solution that would be simple, secure and reliable enough for everyone to use. For goodness sake, we've had to come up with laws for how companies can use our data instead of solid technical solutions that address the problem.

The focus for the past 30 years has been on simplifying web content consumption. Everyone knows how to use a web browser. Why hasn't there been a similar push to make serving web content easier? There have been some attempts (Opera Unite, Sandstorm, Docker... web3?), but none have prevailed.

A possible answer could be because it has created a huge market for 3rd party services to step in and make things easier for web users. And now it's probably too late to stop the train. But there's no reason this couldn't work while empowering the user.

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