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

robertmao.com

51–60 of 205 posts

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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if I follow 1000 people, I make 1000 requests every time I open the app or refresh my feed? Also not everyone can be on a stable connection with a public IP address with good upload speeds 7/24. In the ideal world: sure. In the real world: impossible (at least for any foreseeable near future).

Perhaps it could make each request as you scroll? You don't need to see 1000 photos all at once. And if your friend has sketchy internet, perhaps it can push to you when they have a good connection.

It's not perfect, but if we want self hosted, we have to start somewhere and start working out the problems.

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

#52

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?

Federated social media through a common protocol.

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

#54
post #49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That hypothetical self hosting appliance would require constant system administration work, far worse than even the most complex "smart" washing machine.

> constant system administration work

why is that an inescapable truth? If the needs of such a self-hosted system is not changing, there's a theoretical argument that there shouldn't be any need to make administrative work.

if the environment changes such that this need arises, like changing/new protocols, new services, etc, it stands to reason that the seller of this appliance would release a new version, or an update of sorts.

Like mobile phones. You certainly don't constantly do "system admin" on your mobile do you?

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you talking about Android?

Can your player delete media files?

If yes - PLEASE SHARE!

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I follow 1000 people, I make 1000 requests every time I open the app or refresh my feed? Also not everyone can be on a stable connection with a public IP address with good upload speeds 7/24. In the ideal world: sure. In the real world: impossible (at least for any foreseeable near future).

Perhaps it could make each request as you scroll? You don't need to see 1000 photos all at once. And if your friend has sketchy internet, perhaps it can push to you when they have a good connection. It's not perfect, but if we want self hosted, we have to start somewhere and start working out the problems.

That would require javascript, and the set of people interested in self-hosting and the set of people willing to touch javascript with asbestos gloves and a ten foot pole do not intersect.

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

#59

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…

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

#60

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…

how are you disagreeing? self-hosting is not being ruled out. do you think me, my siblings, our parents and children, each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? we are going to trust each other. but why wouldn't we. it's easier to share our photo albums this way. it's that or facebook. pretty much.

and again, self-hosting is not ruled out, it's still an option. what robert says is that regardless of the choice we need self-sovereignty. that is orthogonal. you are still free to self-host. but we have to face the reality that not everyone is going to do it. even if we have the tools to make self-hosting easy.

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