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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

121–130 of 459 posts

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#121
post #70

I agree with the title, but not the solution and that’s okay. Is the future endlessly tinkering with and running stuff out of your house? I think nope, that’s just your hobby. I think of the centralization of content and the licensing as something that works so long as it’s a commodity market, that is, it’s hard to 2x the price of an ebook over a dead tree which I can own. Investors may wish otherwise, but they have…

Couldn't agree more! And most of those commodities/utilities you mentioned are usually either publicly funded, cooperatively owned, or regulated to keep prices down and protect consumers

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#122

So, the thing we have right now is Tailscale - and it's freaking awesome. But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines. I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together. It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this…

that is just usenet with extra steps

No, thanks. I want to limit the number of people I share content with. Not broadcast to the world.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#123

So, the thing we have right now is Tailscale - and it's freaking awesome. But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines. I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together. It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this…

You can invite other users into your tailnet.

Right, but that doesn't work when I have a hundred friends, and they each have a hundred friends, and etc.

If I "Share" nodes on my tailnet with a hundred people, it's way closer to what I want.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#124
post #50

I disagree with some of the authors takes here: > Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of the data and software, than the location of the hardware. > Well...since our friends can't access…

Thanks for your comment! Yes, I ignored the VPS angle simply for ease of narrative, but you're right. I also updated the shared album example to hopefully better explain why this is hard from a technical and UX perspective. As to the "convince people to switch" angle, I think the benefits of data interoperability would be pretty significant and eventually lead people to switch to providers that have that or would lik…

I like the vision though and would love to see it become reality, if just to have the alternative.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#125
post #81
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker has basically solved the deployment issue. For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up in ~5 minutes with a docker compose and env file. There are whole OSes built around it, like casaOS which gives users a neat front end/dashboard for their self hosted stuff. Also for cost eh idk. For $300 you can have enough hardware and storage to self host everything, even a Google photos alternative. Most pe…

> For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up in ~5 minutes with a docker compose and env file. That is a very small part of operating. How about keeping it update and running? Data backed up?

Docker is still too complex for the layman, and that's ultimately who we have to win over anyway. Big Tech makes it super easy to surrender privacy and sovereignty by giving them your e-mail and a password to create an account and use a new thing. Apps make it easy to do the same, but now for your physical location and device identifiers as well.

Until setting up a private chatroom for your family is as easy as downloading an app on your phone, people are going to keep going back to Big Tech. UX for IT folk and UX for the layman are entirely different beasts, and the UX for IT is only recently improving thanks to things like Docker and the containerization of software making it more widespread and commoditized.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can invite other users into your tailnet.

Right, but that doesn't work when I have a hundred friends, and they each have a hundred friends, and etc. If I "Share" nodes on my tailnet with a hundred people, it's way closer to what I want.

Tailscale lets you grant various admin roles to other users, but it does also let you share individual nodes to people. Maybe that suits you're needs? It's on you to manage the human trust relationships though, but no technology can fix that problem for you.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#127
post #92
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you? Is this meant to be tongue in cheek?

No, I am serious. Do you have links to stories of AWS breaking into EC2 instances to eg read RAM for data that is encrypted at rest? And even if they do, this would present an issue for privacy, but the protocols would still enforce their own permissions (eg no custom amazon DRM for books).

Most of how the NSA operates is classified but this does not sound far-fetched to me in the slightest. Cloud providers frequently provide law enforcement information via subpoena. It's not really "breaking in."

From 2015, AWS asserted they were not involved in the PRISM program, but they would be under a gag order if they were, so you've gotta take it with a grain of salt: https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300077146/aws-finally-release...

Meanwhile:

> From the start of this calendar year through May, AWS received 813 subpoenas from the U.S. government seeking access to customer accounts. In those five months, the Seattle-based cloud provider fully complied with 542 of those court orders, submitted partial information in response to 126 and didn't respond at all to 145.

> Through the same period, Amazon received 25 search warrants from federal authorities and turned over all the data sought by about half of them, partially fulfilled eight others and withheld information requested by four of the warrants.

> AWS fully responded to only four out of 13 court orders that weren't subpoenas or warrants, while refusing to turn over any data related to four of those.

> Foreign governments were more successful with their solicitations to Amazon. Of the 132 non-U.S. requests fielded by the cloud provider, more than 80 percent yielded complete data disclosures, while just 13 percent hit a dead end. Amazon also complied with the only request it received during the five months under review to actually remove a user's data from its servers.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#128

The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to chan…

> I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it. Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world. That's a bunch more diverse than the government doing ho…

> Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world.

Last time I checked, AWS was estimated to have ~5% of all web sites in the world hosted in its infrastructure, while AWS+GCP+Azure combined equate to ~66% of the global cloud compute market. That doesn't even get into the "providers" who are really just reselling major providers at a markup (like Vercel).

It doesn't matter if your town has hundreds of storefronts if one subsidized Walmart is putting them all out of business. Likewise, if every business in town is dependent on the Walmart, then it's really Walmart that controls things and not individual or collective business owners.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#129
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app...

You do exactly that.

"Oh but security."

Any security you get from hiding behind a firewall is illusory at best. You still need to keep on top of updates and tech news. And I want to be able to access my stuff from wherever too.

Most of my friends don't have to, because they have me and at least 3 other friends who also self host.

There's a couple of things I won't let others in (like, my email domain. That's like my last name, so nope). But things like _sharing a video_? Yeah, I'll let them log in.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#130
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens to the site when that phone gets lost or stolen or falls on the floor and breaks?

Phone apps could backup data to another location the same way a laptop can.

but then why not host from that second location?
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