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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#351

Post by chadcmulligan »

There was a time (around y2k iirc) where you could buy a box preconfigured with databases and so on, there was a movement to make these things 'appliances' like toasters but the winds changed, sun and oracle were selling them and maybe netscape? I have a time capsule (which is still working) sitting in the corner quietly keeping backups for me - I don't do anything to it and it just keeps working. Maybe the issue isn't that the future is not self hosted but the future is appliances, it would be nice to have a server thing with some icons on it to make it a photo server/database server etc.

One of the reasons people use the cloud is because these things have become hard to set up, they really shouldn't be.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#352

Post by [deleted] »

eastbound wrote: post #297
wwwtyro wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#353

Post by raudette »

microtonal wrote: post #326
brailsafe wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that…

I had the iPod Touch and iPhone relatively early (well, much earlier than the general population). I don't remember Shazam being important at all, I think I only discovered it a few years later. What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most…

I second this - for me, it was the browser - it was usable with normal websites.

It was SO much better at browsing than my BlackBerry at the time. Though I vastly preferred all messaging on my BlackBerry.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#354

Post by bostik »

MrJohz wrote: post #288
bostik wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there something materially different here with the internet? Yes. There are effectively no hard copies. It is possible to change the historical record of any non-printed material to suit your particular needs like never before. You can think of this as a world beyond Orwell's or Bradbury's wildest nightmares.

On the other hand, it is now easier than ever to make copies of materials that we see. Famously, the internet never forgets, and even the smallest mistakes or slip-ups are retained in perpetuity, as long as someone is interested enough in keeping hold of the original copies. And there are a lot of organisations that are very interested in keeping hold of original copies. I would argue that the opposite is true: it is…

I'd like to think I'm not. In the past, at least there was an original "hard copy" - and any regime wanting to rewrite history would have to meticulously either eradicate any prints, or - as happened in the Eastern Bloc - they would have to physically rewrite history. Pages from books were lifted out, edited to suit the needs of the narrative, and then meticulously put back.

With online-only records any hard copies will be incidental. The source-of-truth for any record has always been online, and can be retroactively edited with much less fanfare. Incidentally, it will also be much easier to flood the world with the updated narrative.

Hell, we have Musk publicly advocating to edit old online material to suit the new, "more desirable" narrative.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#355

Post by sgarland »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #345
udev4096 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck being owned. If you don't take the action to safe guard your personal data, no one will. Stop living in a fantasy

Thanks for your concern but all my personal data is perfectly safe. I keep it in an old fashioned thing called a "backup" --- complete with encryption. I maintain 3 copies --- no hosting required. One copy is strapped to my wrist at all times so it is always just as safe as I am --- if not safer. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6784665

That’s pretty cool! Especially with how dense microSD cards are these days, you could probably store every (important) photo an average person has without issue, along with the normal documents and whatnot.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#356

Post by jcgl »

udev4096 wrote: post #264
waldopat wrote: post #183

Moxie Marlinspike nailed this in his web3 critique from a couple years ago: "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as infrastructure... However – and I don't think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want." That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary be…

Moxie is wrong, he likes to project his own ideas as wisdom and always factually correct. P2P networks have flourished. Bittorrent, bitcoin, Tor just to name a few successful ones

The size of the whole pie has grown, and, yes, so have P2P networks.

However, centralized networks of various kinds have grown too. From application-level networks (e.g. networks messengers from Signal to Discord; payment networks from Visa to AliPay) to transport- and network-layer networks (e.g. cloud-oriented client-server topologies; Tailscale), you see growth in the centralized world too. While I don’t have hard data, I’d casually assert that that growth is comparatively far larger than the P2P growth.

Also, if you’re referring to Moxie’s classic post about centralization vs. decentralization[0], I think you’re mischaracterizing it; it doesn’t claim that P2P is altogether inferior, wrong, or any such thing. I’d summarize his point as being that anchoring your application to a decentralized P2P protocol makes your application development less agile. In other words, there are engineering tradeoffs there, between centralization and decentralization. When he weighed the tradeoffs for making Signal, he came down on the side of a centralized architecture.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#357

Post by dwoldrich »

Users don't know what they want. There is simply a lack of vision for a human-focused self-service platform with a hook to get ever-expansive services over consumer-grade internet.

Corporate/investor greed is a limiting factor to the design. Network security and hardware/software vulnerabilities are the near impossible barriers to long-term viability. A solution basically needs to be unhackable to compete with cloud.

I have a platform vision that would definitely work, but I have no idea how to solve the greed or security issues. (No, Rust won't solve it! ;)

EDIT: Oh, and nation-state actors and corporate espionage. An independent, successful cloud competitor would be a prime target - they'd be relentless and burn it to the ground. Impossible problems.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#358

Post by erikerikson »

dwoldrich wrote: post #357

Users don't know what they want. There is simply a lack of vision for a human-focused self-service platform with a hook to get ever-expansive services over consumer-grade internet. Corporate/investor greed is a limiting factor to the design. Network security and hardware/software vulnerabilities are the near impossible barriers to long-term viability. A solution basically needs to be unhackable to compete with cloud.…

> Users don't know what they want.

Users don't know what's possible and without knowing what's possible they can't imagine it well enough to evaluate whether they will want it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#359

Post by dwoldrich »

erikerikson wrote: post #358
dwoldrich wrote: post #357

Users don't know what they want. There is simply a lack of vision for a human-focused self-service platform with a hook to get ever-expansive services over consumer-grade internet. Corporate/investor greed is a limiting factor to the design. Network security and hardware/software vulnerabilities are the near impossible barriers to long-term viability. A solution basically needs to be unhackable to compete with cloud.…

> Users don't know what they want. Users don't know what's possible and without knowing what's possible they can't imagine it well enough to evaluate whether they will want it.

Yep, gotta sneak it into their network under the cloak of some other product and then go, "oh btw, it's like a cloud. Here's our new 2026 features you can buy into." Only then will they realize what is possible and decide they want it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#360

Post by jonhohle »

Aurornis wrote: post #176
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 personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies. But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streami…

/People of North Korea entered the chat

Oh wait, they didn’t.

As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)

We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.

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