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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

421–430 of 459 posts

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The…

Are you against governments issuing passports too? I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport. Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who. Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government…

Not to access the Internet. In any case, many governments already have OpenId for their and other people's services.

Be transparent and honest with your exact "new thing" and we'll easily pull from the thread.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#422

Translation: this particular user wants to make different privacy choices than the rest and pretends that we should philosophically follow. All because Big Corp does anti open software/anti privacy thing. Give me a break. These platitudes ring like propaganda. I do what I want with my computer and data. You don't get to choose to "connect with me". > Beyond individualism To authoritarianism. It's fine if the author w…

I think collective, democratic ownership is kind of the opposite of authoritarianism, right haha? But I agree choice is important! Thanks for your comment!

Define collective democratic ownership and how it conflicts with the rights of individuals. Why does the collective good need to be the future instead "get your hands of my data". Don't you see there's no one true collective and that politics corrupt?

Every time a party in a democracy wins some group claims they're evil and wrong and suddenly it is not 'democratic'. They will label things along partisan lines whereas I'm making the point of protecting the individual no matter what.

We do agree that choice is important so the inflammatory "no future" to one of those choices is a contradiction if you actually want to preserve it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of apps would you want to self host on phones?

Offline maps, music/video library, all/most photos. This is all working on my GNU/Linux phone.

All this works on Android also no? OSMAnd, VLC, tons of photo gallery apps exist..

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#424
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game: - There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing - There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to…

SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting. The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the c…

so much this. even late 2000s had an upstream problem.

impossible to serve anything with ISP blocking common ports to save their precious upstream bandwidth in a cable network, which is mostly downstream.

i couldn't believe when i moved to a place that had newer DSL tech (one block from the ATT brick building holding the city repeaters, so zero latency baby!) and while cable was giving everyone way over 100mbps connections i was only on 3mbps, but zero latency and 3mbps up too against who knows what that best-case-100mps-down cable really had for up... i could setup servers, had all open ports etc. it was mind blowing and at the same time it's so stupid that it highlights how bad it was then. we still had T1s at work in 2005 iirc.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#425
Th solution would be services that use encrypted S3 as a backend.

If services like immich, nextcloud, etc. were designed to have the bulk of the files on a 3rd party S3 compatible encrypted server (eg - only thumbnails and pointers to the encrypted database on the local server), then it would be much more practical to be able to use the big companies for private, safe, metered usage.

I envision the following: Some company offers a phone app which with one click will install your own "self-hosted" Immich or whatever. Immich (in this future version) relies on encrypted S3 files for hosting, and in the contract it says the host will not steal your encryption keys. Since this gives MUCH more control to the user, this service become popular and the hosting company grows (like. Whatsapp hockey stick growth). Soon, other hosting companies offering competing apps. (Hopefully, these apps continue to be developed, and agree on some interoperable standards between them.) Since the data storage is all on S3 you can easilly move from service to service or from S3 host to S3 host.

There is nothing conceptually difficult about such a future, and it would be worlds better than what we have now.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offline maps, music/video library, all/most photos. This is all working on my GNU/Linux phone.

All this works on Android also no? OSMAnd, VLC, tons of photo gallery apps exist..

Yes, the question was about self-hosting.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you against governments issuing passports too? I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport. Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who. Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government…

Not to access the Internet. In any case, many governments already have OpenId for their and other people's services. Be transparent and honest with your exact "new thing" and we'll easily pull from the thread.

Providing an identity verification API does not mean it has to be required to access the internet. That decision would be for each website to make.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to access the Internet. In any case, many governments already have OpenId for their and other people's services. Be transparent and honest with your exact "new thing" and we'll easily pull from the thread.

Providing an identity verification API does not mean it has to be required to access the internet. That decision would be for each website to make.

This is like "X guidance" that then becomes mandatory because "To cover ourselves we'll just follow X guidance".

You're describing the same outcome pretending it won't happen.

There's already OpenId. The government can already use it with a YouGov or similar systems which you could integrate with. There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who will think of the children", age verification for social media).

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing an identity verification API does not mean it has to be required to access the internet. That decision would be for each website to make.

This is like "X guidance" that then becomes mandatory because "To cover ourselves we'll just follow X guidance". You're describing the same outcome pretending it won't happen. There's already OpenId. The government can already use it with a YouGov or similar systems which you could integrate with. There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who wi…

Is OpenID liable for identify verification? I don't see how they could be without physical offices everywhere in world.

Passports require people to physically go prove themselves to a government employee, an actual attempt at identity verification.

>There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who will think of the children", age verification for social media).

There is a problem with people impersonating other people. There is economic gain from creating a trustable system in which to do business.

>You're describing the same outcome pretending it won't happen.

What outcome? The internet is still there, and all users can still do whatever they want. Including website owners that want to verify identity, and website owners that do not want to verify identity.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#430

I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees. To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed. I can also very sim…

IMO, that is worst of both worlds. You still put your data out there on somebody else's computer but also get to maintain the infrastructure.

Unless you end-to-end encrypt your data, hosting on a VPS is just a marginal improvement over using Google or Apple's regular cloud.

To me self-hosted is having full control over the data. That includes where the data is stored, not just who's maintaining it.

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