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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

#91

Post by akerl_ »

poisonborz wrote: post #78
monsieurbanana wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you lost me. Expecting one server per person in a household is unrealistic. Even if software becomes perfect, what about the hardware aspect? Expecting a family of 5 to have 5 servers all available and reachable from anywhere sounds like a nightmare, and just a waste of electricity. Your whole premise is that self hosting software can become a one-click deploy, if they can achieve that I'm sure different settings…

A server could be a $30 silent soap-sized box hanging on the router consuming 5 watts, you plug it in and it sets up services and domains ready to access. Why would this be a nightmare? It is already feasible on all levels. Assuming the house has fiber, reliability shouldn't be much of an issue.

Why do you think this hasn't already happened?

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

#92

Post by velomash »

poisonborz wrote: post #19

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…

The UX vs value provided for self hosting doesn’t make sense for normal people

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

#93

Post by xp84 »

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…

> There are no incentives until you get screwed over yourself.

In B2B you have a point. In the consumer space this doesn’t happen though. I know several people who have had big snafus with their data with Google, Apple, etc. but none of them moved to self hosting. I agree with the people who have said elsewhere that that’s mainly a user experience problem that could be solved - but I also agree the companies like Google and Apple will not provide any support to any standards which have the potential to commoditize or replace their strings-attached and corporate-controlled services. Meaning self hosting and avoiding those big companies’ stuff will continue to be rather lonely and isolating.

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

#94

Post by BobaFloutist »

poisonborz wrote: post #81
em-bee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it). and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a wa…

> it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that That's just an usability issue that needs to be solved. In 2002 nobody could believe that even elderly and children could use smartphones 20 years later.

And it turns out maybe children.shouldn't be using smartphones 20 years later.

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

#95

Post by xp84 »

chii wrote: post #54
nradov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upda…

One reason at least in my country (USA) is the dire state of broadband. A few people have awesome symmetric fiber, but it’s about a single digit percentage. Most of the rest uses DOCSIS with wildly asymmetrical ratios (e.g. mine is 1000 down/100 up), dynamic IP, and some have unreliable connectivity.

Getting people to self host without corporate dependencies unfortunately means dynamic DNS, revealing your home IP address, and means that when your home internet is down or degraded, it affects you even if you go elsewhere.

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

#96

Post by xp84 »

j45 wrote: post #77
apitman wrote: post #72

I'm optimistic about self-hosting/self sovereignty (which both fall under the umbrella of what I call indie hosting) long term. But I think both of these articles gloss over the fact that end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people. Key management is a completely unsolved problem. If you don't have e2ee, with current tooling most people will need someone they trust to run th…

These are all solved problems depending on what someone is after. Tools like tailscale/headscale combined with proxmox give most people point and click self hosting close to using a digital ocean droplet (which should never be used in production).

What should never be used in prod?

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

#97

Post by olddustytrail »

xp84 wrote: post #89
grepfru_it wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A server could be a VM taps head

“Hello, Metropolitan Police here. We have a warrant to seize… docker container ab38asdf8765jk on your home server. Go ahead and export its attached volumes and the image. We’ll wait.”

Docker IDs are hexadecimal so that one is invalid. Sorry Met!

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

#98

Post by smeej »

poisonborz wrote: post #63
em-bee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away…

> The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

Some people think otherwise because they trust each other, and understand that specialization allows efficiency and economies of scale.

Even if it's stupid easy to run five servers at home, there's sure to be one person who likes maintaining them more than the other four.

It's stupid easy to load and unload the dishwasher, but my sister didn't like handling the dirty dishes and I didn't like running around and putting them away, so I loaded and she unloaded, and we were both slightly but meaningfully better off on a daily basis because of it. Of course we could each just load and unload our own dishes, but a slight reduction in independence and freedom (counting on each other to do our part) improves things for both of us.

People often--I'd even say usually--work together because they benefit from it, not just because they lack the technical chops to do otherwise.

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

#99

Post by loceng »

Re: "（Disclaimer: This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model, but all opinions expressed are my own.)"

Anyone else appreciate the attribution to utilizing AI?

I'd further appreciate if they were willing to provide a link or version of what model they used, and ideally the prompt they fed it with - and perhaps the version controlled history of the prompt(s) they used until it output as desired? Not necessarily so seamless if only partly using AI for output.

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

#100

Post by loceng »

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…

Option then to facilitate true decentralization of total offline, local-first mode?

Where your data and updates - including network reference IDs and perhaps version controlled organizational data - can be direct one-to-one transferred in-person someone [like a physical data wallet perhaps on something as simple as a USB] rather than being self-hosted somewhere [on a machine or device that's connected to the internet, even if temporarily for pushing updates or waiting for peer calls].

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