141–150 of 205 posts
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.
> There is no shared protocol for identity, no agreed standard for portable, user-owned data, no common infrastructure for composable interaction. I've heard this idea in several forms, and it's not what I think most people want. I don't want to live in a world where everything is trackable to a stable identity. Since the stable identity is ultimately trackable to your socual security number, this is essentially a wo…
We need a system for digital identity that can be confidently connected to a singular living organism. That identity acts as a sort of credential. With that credential, you can anonymously take online action that is untraceable to the identity, besides knowing the anon identity is a real, singular human. If you can follow that logic, you will see that this makes many, many things possible. Anonymous credentials are p…
I can't, because it's not logical. You want a credential that provides exactly one bit of information with certainty. It's not at all clear that something like that exists or if it did, how you would prevent multiple people from sharing the same credential if it was also actually possible to use it anonymously.
> It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law",
You're saying the credential can leak information about the user. You don't need many of these bits of information to de-anonymize someone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you only need to stream media and serve files, sure.
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…
Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough Cloud SQL).
At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in their view).
In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf war.
It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable authority.
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.
If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are dependent on one company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Goo…
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?
TLDR: Self-hosting is the source of truth for data; apps aggregate over it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people I would argue that Signal is a great example of this working quite well, and tons of normal people use Signal. It's no more frictional than WhatsApp.
Signal has a lot of problems with changing devices while preserving history. As in it's often just impossible.