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The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

robertmao.com

1–10 of 205 posts

Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

#5
The majority of folks are consumers and unable and/or unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting, self-sovereignity, etc. They will gravitate to what is free and easy. There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues.

If you decide to foster an online community, then you might end up being the tech support to that community. For many of us, that is not an appealing choice.

Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

#6

The majority of folks are consumers and unable and/or unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting, self-sovereignity, etc. They will gravitate to what is free and easy . There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues. If you decide to foster an online community , then you might end up being the tech support to that community. For many…

Not just majority, vast majority. This article is really about 0.01% of the population who is into this.

Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

#8

The majority of folks are consumers and unable and/or unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting, self-sovereignity, etc. They will gravitate to what is free and easy . There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues. If you decide to foster an online community , then you might end up being the tech support to that community. For many…

There are no incentives until you get screwed over yourself. As an entrepreneur and long term (almost 40 years) owner of running businesses, I have been screwed over by anything from banks to insurers to couriers to, let's just name names, Google, Paypal, Stripe etc. Without recourse. But PERSONALLY, I have also been screwed by the same services, without recourse. And for that reason, I (try to) use services that I can visit and sue which means they need to be inside country where I live aka sovereign. I know I can sue Google theoretically but if it's not about 10m euros+, the Dutch lawyers/courts are going to tell me not to do it as it's not possible to even get a 'sorry' from American companies. While if it's a Dutch company, I just walk into their office and the CEO is going to explain to me why they did what they did. And because they know this, I have had my accounts reinstated when blocked, always can pick up the phone to 'my' account manager and IF they screw me, I know my rights and I will get a 'sorry' + money back without laywers. The actual 'I'll be at your office in 30 minutes' is usually enough to make anything happen.

(also, sitting with the owner / ceo very often results in them learning about something they actually did not know; a few months ago I went with bol.com managers through some process on their site which they didn't know was completely broken because of 'anti-fraud AI' and they kept blaming me (not only me, just 'dumb users'), so seeing them trying themselves and failing was hilarious)

Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

#9

> This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model, but all opinions expressed are my own Why not post the prompts, it’ll be a shorter read with presumably the same amount of new information.

The prompt is much longer and less structured than the blog post.

Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

#10
I disagree with this.

The ideological approaches to these problems always seem to result in adding more technology to the problem, which introduces more attack vectors, more control points and more complexity, all of which are difficult to understand and manage. The real problem is you should not need to identify yourself all the time. And the best way to do that, contrary to the SaaS culture on here, is not to hand over your stuff to someone else where you need to identify yourself to get it back or even involve yourself in "services culture".

So over the last 2 years I unpicked all my dependencies and moved to a reductionist and disposable model. The "minimum happy subset" is pretty much a domain with an IMAP box still, as it was 20 years ago. The IMAP box is dumb enough to be moved around. And your stuff should be in simple files, with well-documented formats, on the computer that you own and control. An average user can self-manage this with minimal effort. Everything else I have found to be 100% disposable.

This incidentally lines up 1:1 with the non-technical friends I have who just don't care and do it that way anyway. Perhaps we care too much.

Also can we just get some plain old HTML presented like a 50 year old book next time.

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