151–160 of 459 posts
The reason why giving this storage and control over to any company doesn't work is because their incentives are always towards enshitiffication. The issue of community access can always be solved by self hosting on a rented cloud server, its still your data under your control its just someone elses box with a high speed internet connection and global accessibility, self hosting gives you the choice who sees and uses…
Well-said, Drew! This is inspiring. The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah, that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the har…
This is exactly what I’ve been building for a decade, but it’s not just a “community hosted cloud platform”, it is an entire reimagining of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram and all the other community platforms, for an open source world. Here is an overview of how the payments work: https://qbix.com/ecosystem And here is the software you can try for yourself over a weekend: https://github.com/Qbix If any…
> So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Who is doing this anyway? Nowadays everyone has his instagram profile on private and if you need to share some pics, you do it via Airdrop. lol
During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
(and many comments here didn't seem to read it)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting. Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?
A whole host of reasons: - Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose. - Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is…
> Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.
Dont SMTP servers already retry a few times before giving up? Plus it is not like you're using the phone to host content for the whole of the internet. It would be just for your close circle usually.
I am not saying phones make the perfect servers for all kind of applications but for certain kind of workflows... I think Phones are pretty good. Our network infrastructure (NAT, firewalls etc... limited data plans etc..) is the main headache for most of these use cases. But the network infrastructure is a problem even for our laptops, home computers etc..
Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone. Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call". SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all b…
- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing
- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on
- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.
- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.
- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini
- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.
- The Mac App Store was introduced
- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks
And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"
Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.
I can also see it possible to 'self-host' things once you use a cloud where you can do 'confidential computing' stuff aka. the hosting provider does not have access to whatever it is you're running. That functionality is there on the major clouds now (EC2, Azure, GCP) all have the Intel/AMD/Arm TME/SEV/RME stuff implemented but finding it on a device that you can self-host in your little storage cupboard is impossible right now (EPYC 9004 seems to be the lowest available with that technology). At a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption if you are not in control of the hardware space itself.
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…
Will you clarify "centralization of content and the licensing"? Regarding DRM, specifically. If you own said content then sure, you can E2EE and store it in whatever cloud you prefer while avoiding common attention/control/data hoarding (read: enshittification) of commercial online cloud & online services. If you're saying DRM is OK then you're conflating commercial commodities with public utilities. The point of the…
I think the point is in a delivery of commodities (storage, IP licenses, water, power) there is some benefit from the generally fungible nature of the commodity, which makes it harder to put high prices on them, which makes doing it yourself more expensive and inefficient unless you value something very specific.
It's true I don't own the water from my city nor own access to it (it's a license, effectively), and I pay a delivery fee and purchase units of water. But like most people around, I don't value the intangible of truly owning access to the water under my land and drill a well, I just use the commodity. So it goes with e-book licensing and video licensing, too, and I don't think that they're regulated utilities affects this decision whatsoever - enough people value cost and convenience sufficiently to think licenses are fine for their use case instead of ownership.
>The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs.
The former could say they make money by enriching lives in their own way.
Is this arguing basic human needs should be charity? If so, even the most humble city will charge for water. Further, companies are often created to make money by providing production and distribution of that human need. Utilities are not altruistic but can be fair enough when held in check by a state.