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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

#111

Post by brabel »

AstralStorm wrote: post #48
throwawayexmple wrote: post #44

'Decentralized Identifiers' centralise identity in the DID. That's tautological. Thus that in itself fails an idea of sovereignty: that choosing to be identified uniquely is your choice. Barking down this alley, while useful from the perspective of NFTs, does not add much to the concept of actual sovereignty.

Nah, if you run your own identity service, you're supposed to be able to issue any number of unverified identities yourself. The problem there is that others do not play at all with these, plus actual trust has to be somehow solved. Typical solutions to trust in DID involve either a big central service, a government approved signature... Or theoretically a distributed web of trust but that bit is under development.

For ephemeral DIDs to be useful they need to be recognized by the authorities that issue "credentials" based on them. For example, if a website/app requires proof-of-age (you know, like the UK now) you could use a DID for whom a credential showing something like "this is a person who is over 18 years old" was issued by the Birth Registry Authority (or whatever they call you in your country), and the website/app could then check the signature of the credential and be sure it was signed by the right authority. As the owner of a "main" DID, you could request many DIDs (and issue "credentials" based on those), presumably one for each website/app, to evade tracking.

If there was another mechanism to prove age, for example, if everyone had their Date Of Birth on a blockchain or something like that, it could be possible to not rely on a single Authority, but to my knowledge that wouldn't be acceptable in any country of the world... only the government is recognized as an "issuer" of Birth Certificates and names, and I think that's how it has to be... that makes it possible for the government to find out which apps you're using, unfortunately. But there may be ways around that... I believe the whole Verifiable Credentials Working Group uses Verifiable Presentations for this, see https://hub.ebsi.eu/vc-framework/ebsi-w3c-vc-vp

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

#112

Post by dingnuts »

irishloop wrote: post #103
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…

> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups. It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.

You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand

I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean.

Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.

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

#113

Post by lotsofpulp »

akerl_ wrote: post #91
poisonborz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

CGNAT (lack of ipv6), and lack of fiber, meaning lack of upload bandwidth.

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

#114

Post by sylens »

Until we achieve a good ecosystem of interoperability between servies that allow for self-sovereign movement, we should be encouraging people to move off the big tech platforms and use smaller businesses that value things like open source, self hosting, and having control of your data. While most of us here on HN would prefer to self-host Immich ourselves, for my friends who are not that technically proficient, I recommend Ente to them - E2EE alternative to Google Photos with a way to easily get your data out (you can even sync it to a local copy routinely) and self-host if the price ever gets too high or you want to move providers. I'd like to see more companies and platforms follow that model.

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

#115

Post by brabel »

vaylian wrote: post #66
dsego wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federated social media through a common protocol.

For example: https://pixelfed.org/ Which is literally the fediverse alternative to instagram.

If I choose a "community server", how does that differ from just using the Instagram "server" by using Instagram itself? Can't the community server ban me, or delete some of my data they don't like, for example? Or even sell my data?

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

#116

Post by mnahkies »

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…

A basic way to head off most of the security issues is throwing it behind a VPN (eg: wireguard) - no need to put stuff on the public internet if it's just for your own consumption. You can still include your mobile devices etc.

Separately I think k8s is a solution to much of the difficulty. I don't use it outside of work as the baseline costs are too much (my personal cloud bill is under $10 and I want to keep it in that range), but the packaging offered by well maintained helm charts is hard to pass by - people dunk on it for being complex but imo it only exposes inherent complexity and simplifies a lot of other stuff.

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

#117

Post by andy99 »

infinitezest wrote: post #75

> （Disclaimer: This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model, but all opinions expressed are my own.） This is when I head to an LLM to summarize the key take-aways. If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it. That said, I certainly agree with the summary! :P

Yeah I stopped reading when I saw that, I don't care what GPT thinks and am completely allergic to the idiosyncrasies of LLM writing. Plus, yeah the whole idea they couldn't be bothered to write it, or as a corollary to think it through.

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

#118

Post by oceanhaiyang »

andy99 wrote: post #117
infinitezest wrote: post #75

> （Disclaimer: This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model, but all opinions expressed are my own.） This is when I head to an LLM to summarize the key take-aways. If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it. That said, I certainly agree with the summary! :P

Yeah I stopped reading when I saw that, I don't care what GPT thinks and am completely allergic to the idiosyncrasies of LLM writing. Plus, yeah the whole idea they couldn't be bothered to write it, or as a corollary to think it through.

Very anti-HN thinking to be posted here. I see a common trend in people loving blogging for it helps solidify their thoughts. Making an LLM do this is only wasting everyone time.

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

#119

Post by dare944 »

irishloop wrote: post #103
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…

> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups. It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.

Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing.

The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?

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

#120

Post by ndriscoll »

xp84 wrote: post #95
chii wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 add…

Dynamic DNS doesn't reveal your IP to anyone that doesn't know the domain name. Most self-hosted services also have offline modes. e.g. my finamp playlists are synced to my phone when I'm home and then play offline anywhere else. Within your home if your Internet connection goes down, a self-hosted service (e.g. streaming video) has better availability than cloud ones.
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