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

robertmao.com

151–160 of 205 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that. Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.

Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates.

And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't even get to have a public IP for their router anymore, and having every non-tech person punch a hole in their firewall to access their photos... I'm sure that's going to go well.

And if you somehow manage to do that, how are you going to share your photos in your personal server with your friends? Because that's pretty high in people's needs.

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

#152
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal has a lot of problems with changing devices while preserving history. As in it's often just impossible.

Are you aware of this https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-devi...

I think so, this looks like the feature where adding an new linked device transfers messages from your phone.

What still isn't possible as far as I am aware is transferring messages from Android to iOS or vice versa. Last time I looked into this was a few weeks ago.

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

#153
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…

> end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people Matrix has solved this problem.

I've tried to adopt Matrix multiple times over years.

IMO the UX is evidence that e2ee is not solved.

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

#154

> 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…

The system you are describing exists already, in China. And indeed it "makes many, many things possible". For one, it makes the concept of a ticket meaningless: either your "single living organism" (i.e. biometric ID) has permission to enter the movie theater, or get on the train, or whatever, or it doesn't. The hassle reduction is enormous! And it is also widely considered dystopian.

Clearly the crucial issue is the "untraceability" of the ID. In practice somebody is going to have to know who is who, and in practice the state is going to arrogate that role, as perhaps it should. So the fundamental question is whether it is possible to make the state democratically accountable.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues. In 1996 there were especially no incentives from corporations for a free operating system to exists, yet Linux was born on the back of a few hard working engineers and the whole industry catched up, it created a lot (if not the majority) of business. You can engineer ~free and easy self-hostin…

The weird thing is, LLMs do seem to create an environment, in which such shift is not impossible. By this I mean, I know I personally use search engines a lot less now ( and I suspect that here I am not that much different from other internet denizens ). If true, there is a possibility that the existing ad model will -- out of necessity -- have to adapt to a new venue. This did not seem to fully happen yet ( provider…

>internet denizens

The word netizens was right there! Still worked though.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that. Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.

Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates. And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't ev…

There is always a way to make things more complicated and/or expensive. That is not the goal of the exercise, though.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates. And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't ev…

There is always a way to make things more complicated and/or expensive. That is not the goal of the exercise, though.

What I listed is not optional, it's the bare minimum if you want to have a widely-adopted self-hosted solution for someone's digital life.

If you're going to recommend your non-tech family store all their photos in raspberry with a single hard drive with no backup, that's kind of evil.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm gonna be doubly pedantic - that wasn't the container id, that was the actual container name. As a name, it is valid.

I actually did think of that so that's definitely the best kind of correct!

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

#159
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well.. It depends what they are. Social networks, obviously are an issue. But for personal email, photos, vids, content etc, that's not isolating; the self hosted versions have the same sharing / coop features as the google/ms ones for most / all personal needs. And setting up is just not very hard. It is a niche, I agree, but at least where I live, people are getting increasingly angry with the big corps and are ask…

Until you can give consumers an AppleTV type box that they can buy at Walmart, plug in and maybe spend 5 minutes setting up, then never have to think about again, you simply aren't going to get 90% of the population to self-host anything. Most don't have the knowledge to make it happen and won't be able to understand the documentation needed to acquire that knowledge. The rest simply can't be bothered with it.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that. Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.

Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates. And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't ev…

a cheap virtual host with a reverse tunnel...
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