Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

robertmao.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 205 posts

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

#161

Post by brewdad »

chrisvalleybay wrote: post #12
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…

It was also unthinkable that everyone would have their own desktop computer at some point. If we were able to make self-hosting be as simple as having a desktop, it might be possible.

For most people, keeping a desktop running securely and efficiently is beyond their abilities. Spyware and bloat and outdated, insecure software is the standard for most people.

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

#162

Post by Arathorn »

apitman wrote: post #153
fsflover wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

we solved it in element x, but there appears to be massive inertia towards adopting it because it doesn’t have threads or spaces yet.

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

#163

Post by atoav »

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.

That's like saying when you grow your own tomatoes you're dependent on the weather or your capability to deal with said weather. That is true. But it misses the point. When you grow your own tomatoes and the store sells only a certain bad tasting kind, suddenly wants to increase the price by factor 10 or stops selling tomatoes at all, then the value of growing it yourself shows. And they are dependent on the weather just like you.

If you self host, you're dependent on things sure. But the point isn't to reach some hypothetical perfect state of independence, the point is to get the flavour you want, not have to deal with them changing their business model, and so on.

The reason I self host my webservers is because my webhoster decided to charge a premium for SSL certs. So much in fact that for the cost of one cert per month I could run a webserver for a year.

Then I had my mailservers noster taking decisions I didn't like, so again I went and self hosted.

Some of those things are running for a decade now and I have yet to experience the catastrophic events you mention. Sure you need to do your due diligence and know your craft, but at least I am ot affected by someone changing their business model or deciding it isn't profitable anymore.

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

#164

Post by throwawayexmple »

survirtual wrote: post #140
ants_everywhere wrote: post #86

> 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…

[dead]

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

#165

Post by kamranjon »

t-writescode wrote: post #137
andy99 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, to be clear, you’re upset by their transparency that they used LLMs while plenty of other writers use it to: * brainstorm * reword hard sections they garbage’d out on accident * catch typos / formatting / flow issues But only because they chose strong transparency about their activity?

The disclaimer said the article was drafted with the help of an LLM - if they just did the list of things you mentioned I wouldn’t think they would need to put up a disclaimer (you don’t see disclaimers saying this article was written with the help of Google or Wikipedia) - the fundamental issue I think is that they are letting the LLM actually write the article, which I think people know, pretty viscerally, that they disagree with.

I had the same reaction, which is that I do not want to read something that was written by an LLM and immediately backed out - which is great I really appreciate their disclaimer, it helped me not waste my time on things I don’t personally want to consume.

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

#167

Post by j45 »

xp84 wrote: post #96
j45 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Digital Ocean. Notes in my previous comments somewhere, I can see if I can find it.

Among other things, their system has a massive bug that will delete your servers without notifying anyone with a valid and working CC on file.

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

#168

Post by aborsy »

Go to a grad office and talk to PhD students in technical subjects (other than CS). Ask them, what is a certificate, DNS, reverse proxy, SSH public key, docker, TCP/IP, hypervisor, … You would be surprised how many people have no idea! You can’t expect people manage their servers.

I spent half of today tracking down a DNS issue at home. Your home lab will evolve and there will be changes. You need to stay current with the required knowledge, and that takes time and attention.

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

#169

Post by manquer »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #145
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.

I can change a colo location in minutes if it’s virtual or a couple of days if it’s a rack of equipment. I can change my transit provider too. Supermicro seem to have supply problems right now, but dell don’t. If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are dependent on one company.

We are tied to ASML and TSMC and to an extent to the likes of NVIDIA .

As cost of innovation in the industry soars, you are bound to end up with a monopoly or at best an oligopoly who will collude.

Competitors get acquired or fully fail when their research is not successful .

It is just as true in pharma and healthcare.

Like it or not in tech we are stuck with no real choice.

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

#170

Post by andyferris »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #86

> 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…

Separate from actual-human-identity, a internet-facing digital system needs some concept of user identity to provide privacy. Either people authenticate, or you share data publicly - where is the middle road here? How do you come back and reauthenticate with a private system later if you don't have a stable identity for the system to recognise?

I'm not sure what's forcing these DIDs being one-to-one with a human, or why have the ability to create as many pseudonomynous identities as you like results in centralization or authoritarianism?

Post reply on HN