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The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

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Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#21

the cloud is a failure of the internet originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. then the industrialists went full-cloud on this idea. and the 'intelligence' got concentrated in a few gigantic industrial warehouses. but it sure feels more orderly this way. why spread the load when you can focus it and centralize it?

It's also a failure/the greed of ISPs, who cut upload speed from average consumers so they can sell it to datacenters and firms at a markup, making sure that a local server will always be slower than a cloud instance unless you pay extra.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#22
post #13

the cloud is a failure of the internet originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. then the industrialists went full-cloud on this idea. and the 'intelligence' got concentrated in a few gigantic industrial warehouses. but it sure feels more orderly this way. why spread the load when you can focus it and centralize it?

If everything is in your closet, how do you want to provide reliable auto-scale, redundancy, backups etc? I have friends in Ukraine, where shit literally blows up on a daily basis. And if this example is too extreme for you, I also have friends in Germany, where overflowing rivers remove whole houses once a year. There are services that need to be reachable all the time and you simply need replication in different ge…

Sure.

Bittorrent-like tech has answers for you here.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#23

I'm going all in on Local First, it addresses so many issues with the current "app" web. Better responsiveness from UI, working offline, privet data, lower server costs, just as a start. Somewhat counter to the article, I would argue that local first isn't about having "no cloud", it's "low cloud". So you could go P2P for sync, but you can also have a much more lightweight sync service on a central server. Both are v…

CleanShot X for Mac is a great example of this. It's basically a screenshotting and screen recording tool that you install. But you can also tell it to upload your images and videos to their cloud and get a link to share them with your friends or coworkers (especially helpful for screencasts for example).

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#24

This is how things worked 15 years ago, before the “cloud” hype took off. In my opinion, things worked great. You could get stuff done. I’m intrigued that there’s a “movement”. I suppose that’s what you need to get news articles and promote change. What’s old is new.

It's interesting how scarcity of work experience in a technology can drive up advertised job opportunities which in turn drives technology adoption as everyone seeks to boost their resume with the in demand skills.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#25
post #14

I don't know what this fluff is doing on HN. They make it sound like the Cloud Mafia forces everyone to use their server farms, instead of offering a product that people willingly choose to use. The rest is some hazy hype of CRDTs, as if their usage magically eliminated editing conflicts. Kleppmann is legit and his book is great, he deserves better than this.

They do force it. The force your non technical CEO and your non technical customers to value these stupid cloud servers far too highly. This forces many to embrace cloud tech purely for marketing reasons.

Companies embrace cloud tech because it turns large capital budgets into operating budgets, and prevents dental implant companies or soda distributors from having to figure out how to hire competent sysadmins.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#26
I'm happy for an article like this that I can invite people to read. I often tell people that the "cloud" is a lock-in for subscription based everything, where you have literally no control of your data nor the slightest insight in to who can access it, where all privacy boils down to whether mega-corporations don't lie, and so many other compromises and shortcomings.

Most of the responses are, "but it works for me", "it's convenient", "I don't want to run my own servers", and/or, "everyone else is doing it", as though not using the cloud means all those things go away.

Many of these people genuinely don't care about privacy and completely lack the imagination to envision what could be done with their home security cameras' feeds, their Ring doorbells' feeds, the settings on their Nest and so on. Even when we have stories about assholes scaring the shit out of people via babycams, Amazon turning over Ring footage that the homeowner explicitly said not to, or houses getting burglarized because criminals knew the house was empty because the thermostat was set for vacation, people still seem to imagine these aren't the kinds of things that are rare and won't happen to them.

It reminds me of the early days of online credit card fraud and online phishing - people had a hard time realizing that it was more likely than they believed.

While most people's eyes will glaze over during the discussion of CRDTs, and while I can't wait to see more local tools that negate the need for "cloud" services, there's a lot in this article that can be pointed to when people might benefit from learning about possible long-term issues with the cloud.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#27
post #23

I'm going all in on Local First, it addresses so many issues with the current "app" web. Better responsiveness from UI, working offline, privet data, lower server costs, just as a start. Somewhat counter to the article, I would argue that local first isn't about having "no cloud", it's "low cloud". So you could go P2P for sync, but you can also have a much more lightweight sync service on a central server. Both are v…

CleanShot X for Mac is a great example of this. It's basically a screenshotting and screen recording tool that you install. But you can also tell it to upload your images and videos to their cloud and get a link to share them with your friends or coworkers (especially helpful for screencasts for example).

Why not dropbox or whatever place you use to share files normally? a screenshot program does not need a cloud.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#28
post #13

the cloud is a failure of the internet originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. then the industrialists went full-cloud on this idea. and the 'intelligence' got concentrated in a few gigantic industrial warehouses. but it sure feels more orderly this way. why spread the load when you can focus it and centralize it?

If everything is in your closet, how do you want to provide reliable auto-scale, redundancy, backups etc? I have friends in Ukraine, where shit literally blows up on a daily basis. And if this example is too extreme for you, I also have friends in Germany, where overflowing rivers remove whole houses once a year. There are services that need to be reachable all the time and you simply need replication in different ge…

Services that need to be reachable all the time tend to not be connected to the internet.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#29
Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business.

Why?

On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the network group, who are very fixed in their ways and make very few concessions; and the middleware group which is what you need to connect to anything else of importance. Four groups! All with their own workflows, their own SLAs, their own exemption policies, etc. It's a nightmare to get anything done and the business is frustrated that things take so long.

Now I'm on a team that does everything in AWS. We keep everything serverless so the infrastructure and systems teams can't butt in, and the cloud environment eliminates the need for interacting with the network group. I only have the middleware group to contend with. The result? We're delivering much-needed solutions far faster than any other group in the organization. They also have far fewer business impacts (read: support issues impacting operations) than the applications we have on-prem.

People seriously underestimate the time and energy required to keep a highly-available, and DR capable datacenter running. They also underestimate the complications of interacting with all the teams need to keep that datacenter running. We have found that AWS is faster, cheaper, better than hosting on-prem.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#30
I don't care as long as I control my data and leverage the collaboration opportunities that the cloud gives us. That means I want real files with documented formats on my real disk on my real computer and to be able to work with them with other people. And I need to be able to work offline for a couple of weeks at a time.

At the moment the only real product on the market which comes close to this is O365. I can literally stop paying for it, disable OneDrive and open all my documents with LibreOffice tomorrow if I desire. The same is not true for Google Docs and iCloud which have complex exit strategies.

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