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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

#31

Post by aetherspawn »

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…

Completely agree about working with companies in the same country so you actually get support, I learnt the hard way and now try and avoid overseas companies for this reason.

Calling out one company in-particular that we just got over an absolute nightmare of a messy divorce with, Freshworks. They are Indian-based, and their support in India treated us like we didn’t have any consumer rights at all after signing their SaaS contract (you know, one of those 1000 page things you have to sign when starting any random SaaS) and starting sending us random ludicrous invoices and refusing to ie downgrade the number of subscription seats or switch from annual to monthly billing, claiming that because we didn’t give them 60 days notice of reduction in seats we had to pay a whole year for the extra users blah blah blah, which might be legal in India, but is completely illegal in Australia.

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

#32

Post by nirui »

> We don’t need more “alternatives” to the cloud. We need a shift in architecture—from platform-centric to protocol-centric systems.

Nice idea, but that alone is not enough.

The POP3/SMTP protocol is still a server-client based model, and such model naturally gravitates towards centralized systems which leads to the problem we're facing today.

In my opinion, to encourage self-sovereignty, a protocol should decouple the creator and the publisher. The information created by the creator can be published on multiple publisher platforms selected/directed by the creator.

And ideally the creator should be able to directly sharing information with other creators too, like a P2P system. This should also help reduce the risk of information leaking thus more secure.

The protocol also needs to be flexible enough that it can adopt the needs of more modern users too, otherwise you'll found yourself back at the start line few years later.

P.S. If you think this comment is very empty, that's because it is. I've observed quite a few P2P based protocols over these years failing to gain popularity... this is one of the things really hard to get it right. I don't know how to do it, and many way smarter people also failed to do it. So, yeah, that's why this comment is so empty. But hey, if you can get it right, maybe they should give you a Nobel or something.

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

#33

Post by tonyhart7 »

nirui wrote: post #32

> We don’t need more “alternatives” to the cloud. We need a shift in architecture—from platform-centric to protocol-centric systems. Nice idea, but that alone is not enough. The POP3/SMTP protocol is still a server-client based model, and such model naturally gravitates towards centralized systems which leads to the problem we're facing today. In my opinion, to encourage self-sovereignty, a protocol should decouple t…

but creating new protocol (standards) also more harder, we can see the example with RCS message google try to push and that require a lot of effort even from big tech

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

#34

Post by vjerancrnjak »

salmonellaeater wrote: post #28
austin-cheney wrote: post #27

The 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?

Music player that does not skip 1 second of next track, scans my big library in a second.

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

#35

Post by tonyhart7 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #30

So 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?

hmm, another UI that connectly directly to S3???

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

#36

Post by austin-cheney »

salmonellaeater wrote: post #28
austin-cheney wrote: post #27

The 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?

* A media player with playlist of local media that executes in a web browser.

* proxies for http and WebSockets. Apache made this challenging and I thought I could do it better. I can now spin up servers in seconds and serve http and WebSockets on the same port

* tools to test dns, http, WebSockets, hashes, certificate creation, and more

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

#37

Post by chii »

chrisvalleybay wrote: post #12
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.

> unthinkable that everyone would have their own desktop computer at some point

it was unthinkable not because people didn't want it, but that it costed too much back then. Half a mil for a microcomputer that took up a room?!

Current self-hosting requirements are similarly expensive - time and money. If someone were to sell an appliance for which you could just plug into the outlet, and you get it all, then it would be pretty good. Like a washing machine.

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

#39

Post by TimByte »

BinaryIgor wrote: post #24

I 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…

You're right that discovery still tends to pull things back toward centralization. But if identity and data are portable by design, at least the gravitational pull of central platforms becomes more optional

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

#40

Post by jay_kyburz »

dist-epoch wrote: post #30

So 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?

when you follow somebody, you put their public url in a list, then when you open the app it requests the photos from everybody on the list?

I see no reason why everybody could not run a web server on their phone.

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