I did a fair bit of work in this world of self sovereign identity a couple years ago. We abandoned the project because we felt it won't get adoption. We also embedded a verifiable credentials in a CRM making it as a platform to manage VCs at scale and nobody cared. Most people don't care it seems. Or maybe it's just too future tech and we're not there yet.
The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
21–30 of 205 posts
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#22I am truly excited to see others are thinking in the same trajectory. I’ve been contemplating on these ideas myself for quite long time.
The service providers should provide basic low level infrastructure, not own or access our data. I have a vision on how it should operate, it would be interesting to dive into this project to compare.
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#23The 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 for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues.
In 1996 there were especially no incentives from corporations for a free operating system to exists, yet Linux was born on the back of a few hard working engineers and the whole industry catched up, it created a lot (if not the majority) of business. You can engineer ~free and easy self-hosting.
I agree it needs to be personal, there are no appealing middle-man options.
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#24I still struggle to see what exact problems Decentralized Identifiers solve and how exactly they would make the Internet better. Ommiting additional complexity they bring - where to store them, how to control them etc. - what new use cases they would allow? How would they solve some of the incentives problems on the Internet we currently have?
Having controlled by the user public-private key pair instead of multiple accounts on a variety of platforms doesn't bring self-sovereigninty by itself. Whatever you post/publish must also be discoverable by other people - and that's where we go back to centralized platforms/services of today.
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#25Ah, yes, the cure is the magical token.
If you want a better future, make better self hosted apps, that are accessible, easy to set up, and don't lack features ordinary people ask for.
No fancy token ever beat an easy button. And no poorly built self hosting app is helping...
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#26The 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…
Substantial part of population can't even manage their router or simple devices say NAS... And by manage keep them up to date.
Now think of actually running something consistently. And react to changes in that... A task a few steps above.
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#27The thing that got me into self hosting is the phone App Store. I started writing personal applications to do what the media apps on the App Store could not. The results have been amazing and the required effort is less than I expected.
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#28The thing that got me into self hosting is the phone App Store. I started writing personal applications to do what the media apps on the App Store could not. The results have been amazing and the required effort is less than I expected.
What are some personal applications you created to fill these gaps?
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#29The 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.
And these desktops today for 99% of people are just dumb terminals for the cloud where everything lives.
Re: The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
#30So far nobody explained one simple use case - self-hosted Instagram.
How does that work? I want to see the pictures of my friends, and they want to see mine. And I also want to see the pictures of some influencers.
What's the self-hosted Instagram setup that makes this work, while all the involved parties are self-hosted?