131–140 of 287 posts
Ideas like the Solid protocol have a limited timeframe to make it or go away. Not sure why anyone is still talking about it. TBL is rightfully a legend but this is now just a windmill. Next, please.
Next, please.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why you're imagining such ridiculously bad infrastructure that it has to access every person's house every page load. Decentralized does not need to be slow like that. And very limited upload does get to be a problem if you want more than a couple people/servers to be able to access your media posts at the same time.
I replied to a comment that was talking about user upload speed. They replied to a comment about other people’s computers. Did I misunderstand? How do you get good infrastructure without using other people’s computers?
The person you replied to is assuming a reasonable distributed system.
Both of these proposals (as far as I've read them, YMMV) fail the evolutionary test. At the scale we're talking about, ideas must proceed as evolution does: not with a far-away goal in mind, but with incremental changes, each of which individually must be an improvement over the status quo. We are at (near) a significant local maximum, and (again, as far as I've read, which is not all of it for sure) the people pitch…
I agree. And looking at the average web user specifically, is "owning your own data" enough of a UX improvement? Maybe paired with less ads and products that optimize for the end-user rather than advertisers? I think... maybe. I hope so. It's going to take a lot of work done for little money, which is concerning, but I'm optimistic.
In terms of NAS, I have long wonder if there is a market for a combination of both online and offline. We will need at least 2 HDD for redundancy and to prevent bit riot. And the NAS will be sold as a whole package and subscription, with an encrypted backup services included for first 2 years and requires the backup subscription to work there after. The profit margin is first on the hardware and then on long tail bac…
>> And the NAS will be sold as a whole package and subscription... Misses the point entirely.
Right now everyone is only talking about options that are extreme in both ends.
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God forbid that people actually have to learn and do something instead of sitting around being a doomscrolling tiktok zombie... /s
Slightly offtopic, but the sheer scale of the phenomenon you allude to - of screen-addled zombification - is really turbo-charging my own misanthropy. People staggering around, necks hunched, eyes down, all but glued to their miserable little toys. Everywhere, everyone, all the time. It's just pathetic . I guess I had hoped humans would have more self-control than this.
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> This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally Not even close to the case for any big player. It just exists as a moat for smaller companies.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and sort by amount, these are not small companies and amounts aren't exactly trivial either, with a mechanism to get bigger if ignored.
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Everyone wants "free ad-free no tracking no payment" Internet. Nobody wants to compensate anyone for it, and therefore nobody wants to host it. Then the people who have not viewed an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years complain that the internet sucks and we need to go back to IRC and chan boards. As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to.
IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category. Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.
Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc. Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surv…
Nothing changes because the ask is silly and disconnected from the reality of normal people's lives. So what happens if Google has all your data? To the best of my observations over the past 20 years: best in class services, cheap, paired with excellent security and data availability.
What happens when the rising tide stops but the boats still have to rise?
My bet is that we will hate Google, Facebook, Amazon, modern Microsoft a lot more than people in the 80s and 90s hated IBM and old Microsoft.
Ideas like the Solid protocol have a limited timeframe to make it or go away. Not sure why anyone is still talking about it. TBL is rightfully a legend but this is now just a windmill. Next, please.
This comment has inspired me to target SOLID and “things I can do to help” on my Sunday afternoon research block. This type of commentary is rife in this article thread and is now just a windmill. Next, please.
Some things are fire, some things are warm, and some things are DOA.
And I’m typing this on my Linux desktop (f’real).
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/data-wallets-...
It was an idea that never went away. Many people have wanted to self host everything. Sadly companies have found it easier to centralise, and then as a bonus can monetise that data.
It wasn’t the companies but the users that found it easier. There’s a reason why everyone’s on Facebook, instagram, and gmail instead of running their own hosts—because it’s vastly easier for the majority of people to do so, and because everyone else is there. We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.
So, why can't I have that?
During my standard install of my favourite distro, I would only need to enter my name, subdomain and email password for everything to be magically installed, so I have a standard web site, some file sharing and email out of the box.
However, it would take me a fortnight to get this setup and I wouldn't have a clue how the email actually worked, if it worked. This wouldn't be my first rodeo either, so I wouldn't be starting entirely from scratch. I am also sure that there are some that have setup umpteen virtual linux machines that they could get everything done by tea-time.
Whether two hours or two weeks, it is still not that much work in the bigger scheme of things, which makes me wonder, why haven't I got some all-singing and all-dancing bash script that automates the whole process? But why has nobody else done it either, to make it fully open source and as easy to obtain as it can be?
Also, why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this? It could take the mainboard and power circuitry from any laptop, and, out the box, provide a decent web server, mail server and whatever else.
There is a suspicious absence of products in this space.