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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

#121

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

Physical dependency is different than logical.

With my computer, I’m dependent on my supplier for the tools. There’s usually a reasonable market serving a variety of tools. With a storage service provider, I’m dependent on their rules, and there’s high friction (migration) to escape from those rules.

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

#122

Post by 8fingerlouie »

I fully agree with the points the author makes about self hosting. You’re not liberating anybody and you’re just creating more obstacles for sharing data.

Sure, if your user count equals one, then go ahead, but as someone who has self hosted for 2 decades, trust me, you’re only making it harder. As soon as you want to share data or collaborate on data, you’re forcing another person to download and use a specific app, and you’ll be managing a bunch of users.

Add to that the fact that the internet is not a friendly place, and you’ll really cannot just take a lax stance to security. Everything needs to be top notch and patched.

Personally I’ve long since moved to public cloud. It doesn’t matter where my data is hosted as long as I have a backup of it, and everything stored in the cloud is encrypted (where applicable) before uploading it.

As for the didspaces product, isn’t that just what Resilio Sync and Syncthing did a decade ago ?

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

#123

Post by ndriscoll »

dare944 wrote: post #119
irishloop wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete.

I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).

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

#124

Post by hinkley »

If I had a database with push based replication instead of pull based, then one of the apps on my todo list would be done by now.

There are certain application types where I think it makes sense to self host the admin interface and cloud host the rest. None of or only a fraction of the write traffic is ever exposed to external access, and if done right the app can work fine with two nines of uptime on the admin services. Which puts it into the realm of running it out of your home office and having it sync to the cloud.

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

#125

Post by aeblyve »

I'm not really convinced of this in the long term. Commodities like baskets or vases were something that were once made by each tribe individually but became industrial products made in relatively fewer places (relative to human settlement) at much larger scales.

The economies of scale of cloud computing seem to prescribe the same trajectory to computer services as well for completely material reasons, not ideological ones.

In any case, differentiation is only made possible by a base of de-differentiated socialized production. Electricity.

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

#127

Post by monsieurbanana »

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.

A 30 dollars box will replace cloud storage, photo storage, video steaming, and all the other services people expect to have? I don't think you have though through what exactly you're trying to replace, we're not talking about tech people wanting to host their static blog here.

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

#129

Post by wmf »

cat-whisperer wrote: post #128

I'm curious, how does blockchain play into being self-sovereign? Is the idea that decentralized networks can give us control over our own data?

Some DIDs are blockchain-based (Ethereum Name Service and Worldcoin being the most (in)famous) but it seems like DIDs that are actually used (e.g. Bluesky) are either DNS-based or centralized.

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

#130

Post by raybb »

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…

Selfhosting has been tricky for a while. It's still not simple but things like https://Coolify.io (selfhosted Heroku) make it so so much easier to maintain and feel more dependable. Backups and upgrades will still be tricky but they seem resolvable.
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