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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#431

Post by ianopolous »

teiferer wrote: post #372
teiferer wrote: post #370

Couldn't this be solved by technical means? All those self-hosted boxes in people's homes could federate. That would allow the friends to upload their photos to an album. If you want to have copies of them on your local hard drive, a config flag could duplicate the data, automatically providing redundancy that's even useful for others. Not everyone wants to run a server at home and thoae who don't want to could rely…

Is Peergos the answer I'm looking for? If so, what's missing is a big push on the business/PR side. They'll need to replicate what Signal did for chat so that even my 80-year old mom can use it. Any other alternatives?

You're absolutely right. We need a big push on marketing and PR (Peergos founder here). We are self, grant and customer funded and a not-for-profit so we necessarily need to grow more slowly than a VC backed company, but that lets us keep our incentives aligned with our users. Our aim is absolutely ease of use, there shouldn't be a usability tradeoff for privacy in our view. We do already have some very non-technical users who love it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#432

Post by michael-hainz »

I agree that selfhosting can digitally isolate someone. Most of the time, I try to share the services I host with my friends so they also benefit from them. Maybe ideas like the fediverse will play a bigger role in the future to connect many of us, but community maintained.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#433

Post by charles_f »

> Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet's inception. Purchased digital goods have always been licenses more than owned assets.

There was a time when you actually purchased software. Owning a key gave you perpetual access to that software. And then SaaS came and now the only model ever considered is paying rent, even for stuff that runs on your computer.

That hasn't always been the case, and self-hosting seems to be the only way around that.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#434

Post by fsflover »

jcgl wrote: post #356
udev4096 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie is wrong, he likes to project his own ideas as wisdom and always factually correct. P2P networks have flourished. Bittorrent, bitcoin, Tor just to name a few successful ones

The size of the whole pie has grown, and, yes, so have P2P networks. However, centralized networks of various kinds have grown too. From application-level networks (e.g. networks messengers from Signal to Discord; payment networks from Visa to AliPay) to transport- and network-layer networks (e.g. cloud-oriented client-server topologies; Tailscale), you see growth in the centralized world too. While I don’t have hard…

> When he weighed the tradeoffs for making Signal, he came down on the side of a centralized architecture.

And as a result, Signal has a single point of failure and hacker/governments attacks.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#435

Post by quesera »

serbuvlad wrote: post #397
whartung wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends. Support has costs. Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay w…

Yeah, you need to have (I would argue basic) Linux sysadmin skills. If you don't have those skills, and aren't interested to learn them, then you shouldn't self-host, just because it's the hot new trend. The thing I like the most is the area effect. I have those skills so 5-20 people get a self-hosted experience managed by me. But even so, many people will be left outside of any such area. This too, is fine. My dad k…

This makes sense, but "area" self-hosting for friends & family is risky! For myriad reasons, but one critical issue is the persistence of other people's data.

If your friend becomes unavailable for medical advice, you go somewhere else. Disappointing but not tragic.

If you as the F&F host become unavailable (travel, exhaustion, illness, injury, or worse), then all of those people who depend on you are badly stuck.

Things will keep running in your absence (assuming they're set up well) for somewhere between "a while" and "unexpectedly, no time at all". How do your F&Fs migrate all of their data to some other set of providers (different for each media type?), port domains, set up security, etc, without LOTS of help?

You're the sole provider of a unique (and no-cost) service. This is fantastic, but a tenuous situation for your users.

I have grand ideas for how to solve that problem! But they may be too grand to attempt without funding. And I don't think there is meaningful commercial potential (who would understand this well enough to pay for it?), so it's not an attractive financial investment.

Edit: https://peergos.org/ is interesting.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#436

Post by isaacremuant »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #429
isaacremuant wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like "X guidance" that then becomes mandatory because "To cover ourselves we'll just follow X guidance". You're describing the same outcome pretending it won't happen. There's already OpenId. The government can already use it with a YouGov or similar systems which you could integrate with. There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who wi…

Is OpenID liable for identify verification? I don't see how they could be without physical offices everywhere in world. Passports require people to physically go prove themselves to a government employee, an actual attempt at identity verification. >There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who will think of the children", age verification for s…

Total security doesn't exist. You can also fake passports and many other things. Do you also want to add online ID verification to purchase alcohol in a convenience store because someone can trick the salesman with fake ID?

You're not analyzing any tradeoffs and going directly to the total surveillance total government power. I was spot on in my assessment from the first comment.

> There is a problem with people impersonating other people. There is economic gain from creating a trustable system in which to do business

There's economic incentives for lots of crimes. We don't install cameras in people's homes (or shouldn't) to make sure it doesn't happen. The possibility of a crime is not an argument for disregarding civil liberties.

> What outcome? The internet is still there, and all users can still do whatever they want.

This is the most disingenuous or naive comment I've read today.

Internet freedom is severely curtailed with different excuses around "protecting against foreign actors, drugs, porn, protecting the children, etc". The police can show up at your house and arrest you in a European country for posting political opinions on Twitter. ISPs will block websites and the government will force sites to require authentication to read about Israel criticism in relation to gaza.

> Including website owners that want to verify identity, and website owners that do not want to verify identity.

There's a lot of ways to silently encroach on liberties pretending it's "companies exercising freedoms" when it's actually governments directly or through payment processors forcing them to act in certain ways. Removing choice. Usually based on political leanings. Whether it's to ban specific types of journalism or forms of media.

You can pretend it's all correct and good limitation of freedom but we both know that's just an authoritarian position. Everything the government does in a country is good by definition, let's always ignore corruption and the natural desire to accumulate more power.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#437

Post by gerdesj »

drew_lytle wrote: post #327
gerdesj wrote: post #244

The title is showing quite a lot of ankle! OP is a proud self hoster. I run my own email, DNS and the rest. Yes: email. I run several domains including my own company and my own vanity domain and several more for friends. I have been doing it for decades. Goog, MS and co do follow standards and if you do too, they will be largely merciful if you keep your nose clean. I have even managed to run an email system from my…

Haha! "Showing a lot of ankle" – I've never heard that before! Thanks for reading and commenting – very cool that you've managed to successfully host email. I'm sad advertisers and spammers have turned that into essentially an unusable technology. Definitely a proud self hoster, but the main point is really that I don't think we're going to live in a world where self-hosting is the dominant method of using internet-b…

Self hosting email will always be niche and frankly it was pretty niche in the noughties too.

I do find that if you carefully curate an IP address ... now that's the real problem. Most IP blacklists aggregate and generally end up roll up to cover entire AS ranges and allocations instead of actual individual perpetrators. However, if you can grab a "corporate ISP" static IP address, you are normally OK, at least in the UK.

Then you need to get a reverse DNS entry sorted out, although this only bit one of my friends recently after five years of not me not bothering. rDNS used to be rule one in anti spam. Oh well 8)

Modern (lol) email systems generally look for SSL/TLS and SPF, DKIM is nice and if you have DMARC then you are clearly a jolly good chap. Then they have a ... rule set, some of which are as old as my email management experience and some of which are down right odd (and probably based on Bayesian learning)

Anyway, email self hosting isn't impossible. Anyone who claims to be a nerd really should be able to manage it ... 8)

I don't want to live in a world where self hosting is impossible. It'll be the same one where I don't own a drill-driver and that would be bloody weird.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#438

Post by programmernews3 »

EGreg wrote: post #7

This is exactly what I’ve been building for a decade, but it’s not just a “community hosted cloud platform”, it is an entire reimagining of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram and all the other community platforms, for an open source world. Here is an overview of how the payments work: https://qbix.com/ecosystem And here is the software you can try for yourself over a weekend: https://github.com/Qbix If any…

Maidsafe is one of the original crypto grifts that is still going and still hasn't made anything.

If the original funders kept their bitcoin they would be comfortably wealthy. Instead this company has wasted bitcoin that would now be worth billions over the past TWENTY years!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#439

Post by nirav72 »

movedx wrote: post #223
nirav72 wrote: post #217

I like self hosting . It’s not just about privacy or owning something. To me a homelab is also a hobby. No different than previous generations that tinkered with their cars as a hobby. As someone who works in IT - there are also ancillary benefits. What I learn at work, I apply to my home lab and vice versa.

I'd be interested to know what you run on your home lab thats assisting with your professional life :)

Two quick examples that I can think from the recent past - I work in a fairly tech conservative IT environment for mid-size industrial company. We're slow to adopt lot of industry trends. So when containers became popular in the mid-2010s, we pretty much stayed away until around 2020-2021. I've been running containers in my home lab for years and had a very grasp of building and deploying containers. So I was able to drive that change and also pass on that self-gained knowledge to many on team that were to new to the concept.

Another example - for years we were mostly a Oracle shop. With some SQL Server thrown in. But management wanted us to trim our annual licensing cost. So we switched a lot of our in-house applications to Postgres. I was using Postgres for years at home and had gained a lot of experience with it. So again, it was an area I was able to contribute a lot when transitioning away Oracle and Sql server.

On the flip side there are things I learned at work, that I was able to bring home and apply to my home lab. One being Ansible and other being network segmentation. Specifically around using VLANs and access control

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#440

Post by lotsofpulp »

isaacremuant wrote: post #436
lotsofpulp wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is OpenID liable for identify verification? I don't see how they could be without physical offices everywhere in world. Passports require people to physically go prove themselves to a government employee, an actual attempt at identity verification. >There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who will think of the children", age verification for s…

Total security doesn't exist. You can also fake passports and many other things. Do you also want to add online ID verification to purchase alcohol in a convenience store because someone can trick the salesman with fake ID? You're not analyzing any tradeoffs and going directly to the total surveillance total government power. I was spot on in my assessment from the first comment. > There is a problem with people impe…

>You can also fake passports and many other things. Do you also want to add online ID verification to purchase alcohol in a convenience store because someone can trick the salesman with fake ID?

And yet we still use passports. And yes, it would be super convenient to not have to have a physical ID on me to verify my identity. Nothing is changing legal rights or government surveillance capability wise, except that people gain convenience.

>You're not analyzing any tradeoffs and going directly to the total surveillance total government power. I was spot on in my assessment from the first comment.

As if the government cannot secretly subpoena and force Apple and Google to reveal anything they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

At least if the government operates an identity verification API, it can be subject to the constitution. Businesses are not subject to the laws that restrict the government, and governments love that loophole. If all the banks or tech companies ban you, tough shit, that is their business right. If a government service bans you, then you can fight it in court.

>Internet freedom is severely curtailed with different excuses around "protecting against foreign actors, drugs, porn, protecting the children, etc". The police can show up at your house and arrest you in a European country for posting political opinions on Twitter. ISPs will block websites and the government will force sites to require authentication to read about Israel criticism in relation to gaza.

This has nothing to do with government providing an identity verification API. This is a separate issue about not having sufficient civil rights.

>Everything the government does in a country is good by definition,

Not at all, and that is why the government should be the one doing it, so that it can be litigated in court, transparently. Currently, governments are loving the use of businesses to do bad things, and throwing their hands up because it isn't the government doing it, it's the business doing it.

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