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

robertmao.com

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

#11

Post by crinkly »

anonzzzies wrote: post #8
GianFabien wrote: post #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…

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 c…

Yeah been screwed here a couple of times. You have to treat all these companies as disposable. Use them until they piss you off. Do not build your entire universe on someone else's turf.

It's cheaper and more convenient to fuck something off quickly than sue them.

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

#12

Post by chrisvalleybay »

GianFabien wrote: post #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…

It was also unthinkable that everyone would have their own desktop computer at some point. If we were able to make self-hosting be as simple as having a desktop, it might be possible.

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

#13

Post by vaylian »

The article argues for interoperability through standardized protocols. Freedom is achieved through the possibility to move one's own data to a different host when the current host becomes problematic. Either host can be a commercial service, a friend's computer or your own server. Self-hosting is only one option among several in this model.

If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected pieces of data that require storage in a relational database, then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead of just returning a self-contained blob.

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

#14

Post by pferde »

The good news is that every self-hoster will be more than happy to start using this hypothetical self-sovereign solution with their data, if and when it becomes available.

I know I would. I'm just not smart enough, nor have the correct kind of experience to start designing, building or evangelizing such solution, so I am stuck waiting for someone else.

A good example is ForgeFed, which I can't wait to mature enough to be usable.

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

#15

Post by kragen »

GianFabien wrote: post #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…

The same reasoning shows that most people will never own their own nuclear reactor, airplane, rifle, automobile, computer, refrigerator, or house, or raise their own children. So, while there is some truth in it, I think it may be leaving out some relevant factors.

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

#16

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

robmao wrote: post #9
kennywinker wrote: post #7

> 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.

I am not a writer and the blog posts I have built are really long and I am pretty sure that noone except myself have read them, but I really feel as if I use AI quite a lot to code some one off projects and nowadays a general overreliance on them too.

I am pretty sure that sure, it might be more tedious to actually manage your thoughts into more structured format to present to a larger audience and you might think that AI is meant for such tasks but I personally feel as if there is something about using AI in writing that feels sloppy most of the times.

Write bad but original. Maybe it won't get to the top of the HN, but you get the widest amount of freedom if you are really passionate about writing.

(I am thinking of stopping to use AI / using AI to just teach me things if I find a need to create a project that I am genuinely curious to build myself)

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

#17

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

kindkang2024 wrote: post #4

Forever free, forever sovereign. DID with ZK human proof on blockchain… Is this possible?

I have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0 gas fees.

I don't really like crypto that much from a currency perspective given its history with scam but I like the technology just a little bit so I built it.

If someone is interested on someway to monetize or I don't know just talk about it, I am more than happy to.

Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail things that can allow you to prove an amazon transaction or tax reciept etc. which can prove human proof so yeah I think its possible.

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

#18

Post by noirscape »

anonzzzies wrote: post #8
GianFabien wrote: post #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…

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 c…

Cory Doctorow has a good term for what those big American tech companies do; rather than too big to fail, they're too big to care[0]. Because they've muscled all their meaningful competition out of the way (or at least think they do), they instead start ignoring support requests and increasingly alienating customers.

You'd think that eventually market forces would try to correct this, but in practice that doesn't happen because big companies can just buy out any entity that's an actual threat to them/cover so many areas that getting rid of them is nigh impossible. (There's some attempts to limit this from the EU and before 2025, the US as well, but a major part of the beef the US has with the EU is that they're trying to force these major tech companies to care again.)

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...

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

#19

Post by poisonborz »

Deeply disagree.

Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks".

I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.

If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.

Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks.

Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.

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

#20

Post by MoreQARespect »

GianFabien wrote: post #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…

>The majority of folks are consumers and unable and/or unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting

The majority of folks just want to text and call on their phones. They are unwilling to handle the complexity of having an entire computer in their pocket. -- 2006

>There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues.

Right. And Yahoo didnt want to be a search engine. They wanted to be the home page of the internet.

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