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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#291

Post by isaacremuant »

Translation: this particular user wants to make different privacy choices than the rest and pretends that we should philosophically follow.

All because Big Corp does anti open software/anti privacy thing.

Give me a break.

These platitudes ring like propaganda. I do what I want with my computer and data. You don't get to choose to "connect with me".

> Beyond individualism

To authoritarianism.

It's fine if the author wants to do all this but the kind of "we should all do X, which goes against your privacy/data/control beliefs because it's for our greater good" sounds so Rich CEO that knows better, kind of talk.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#292

Post by isaacremuant »

jtrn wrote: post #222

I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services. I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.…

> centralized provider for digital identity and authentication.

No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The war on drugs and the prohibition and many invasions also claim good intentions.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#296

Post by isaacremuant »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #169

The fundamental problem here is that bad apples don’t respect common sense agreements. If everyone who owned a kindle book, agreed to never share the downloaded version of the book for free on the internet, companies would not have to do this. I don’t see what’s the solution, if buying a kindle ebook is allowing you to share it for free on the internet. In the past people were limited by a physical copy, they could g…

Hah. I love how you put the alleged rights of companies over the rights of people.

"If you buy our Hulu Movie you can only watch it up to 4 people. We'll install cameras in your house to make sure you're not sharing them with a partner. What else can we do if you don't respect our increasingly shittier terms and conditions?"

Come on, man. No one guarantees you total security. Make good products. The belief that you have a right to surveil and intrude to protect against piracy is just so ludicrous. Specially when companies are constantly abusing people for profit.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#297

Post by eastbound »

wwwtyro wrote: post #219
voxleone wrote: post #155

Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*. 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…

I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will sto…

Beware of believing everything is available over torrents: They’re probably hosting, waiting for every library to dwindle, so one day they will close the tap. There are already very few websites that index torrents. It’s a classing monopoly-then-disappear, Google-Reader-then-no-RSS situation.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#299

Post by subhobroto »

This article took a weird turn midway. I really enjoyed the beginning and the start.

My takeaway of the middle part is that the author had certain expectations about self hosting that weren't realistic and they jump to certain conclusions I would not have jumped to.

Yes it's true that we here are an extremely privileged bunch but over the decades I've seen tech become widely more accessible even before. People were paid a bunch of money just to write HTML in 1997 and in 2025 anyone can write a production ready website using the SOTA LLMs.

I am convinced the future is self-hosted (which is why I clicked on this link!) and as the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. From that lens, majority of the public not self-hosting is a cost-benefit, not a knowledge issue. Ergo, if tomorrow TikTok charged every person $500/mo, most people would figure out a way to run their own federated TikTok (but most likely just start using a similar but cheaper service).

Consider, there will be a future when Google will struggle to make money (gasp! how can that be?!) and many years before that day comes, all the "free" gmail accounts will be gone - because by then, email will cease to serve as a method for a company to mine novel information, I imagine there will be no "free" GMail although "free" email might still exist then just because the cost to provide 10GB email would be insignificant and worth good PR to someone (but at that point, not Google).

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#300

Post by MoreQARespect »

subarctic wrote: post #98
MoreQARespect wrote: post #9

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…

Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benef…

privacy and control are things which people dont tend to think about until:

* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").

* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.

* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).

* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.

* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).

* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.

Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.

And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.

>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

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