If anyone hacking away or at the very earliest stages of a startup is reading this - run away. I'm sure this was a great learning process for the creator. However, as a new startup you should be aiming to take as many shortcuts as possible. Use every hosted or managed service that makes sense for you. Use anything that saves you time. Your job as the "technologist" is to deliver value (in the form of software) in the…
Not disagreeing but this assumes Silicon Valley budgets for startups. The story may be different if you're not funded yet and in discovery mode or if you're bootstrapping.
Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup
51–56 of 56 posts
Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup
#52Why some think that today tech is good tech and "self-hosting" it is a way to be free? Web tech have some reasonably good foundations but that's all, the rest is a colorful, animated bloatload mess. Modern web is needed not by us Citizens but by IT giants to rule the tech and indirectly the society, since information and communication are core elements of a society to exists.
Do we need Webmails? NO. We do need mails though, locally indexed with GMail-like powerful search (and we have them, see notmuch/mu maildir indexers based on solr), we need a modern MUA, that's for sure but why tie it to a modern WebVM a monster so big that only few giants can keep one up and no one can really know it even if FLOSS just for mere codebase size? We need mails on many devices, but that does not demand a central point.
We need notes, documents etc but definitively not a copy of Google Drive suite.
What we need are classic desktops a bit updated for modern users. Those really classic ones like Xerox Office System or more modern LispM and Plan 9 are far more advanced in tech terms than actual OSes and web-stuff. We miss the hw layer and they need a bit of changes for modern world but we can study them and we can run in that direction, a so powerful direction that no IT giants can compete.
Did you remember Popcorn Time? Why we need Youtube or Peertube when we can have a distributed app that's far superior by nature? Do you remember usenet? Yes, it base is old and crappy but it's a decentralized free place we desperately need and even if their base are crappy even today it's popular again for mostly illegal stuff (see Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr etc) to a point that for some is superior to bittorrent. I can keep going for long. It's sure that creating for instance Retroshare or Jami seems not much useful because until enough users adopt it there is essentially nothing to share, no one to talk to etc, but that's the way in all cases.
We can't build a self-hosted better-them-{Zoom,Meet,Teams}, we can build a far superior local app connected to a decentralized network though, and while giants can easily fight back or buy with big money something web-based they can't really do nothing with such application.
It's not easy: modern GUI libraries are almost abandonware, some are active but definitively derailed, desktops is in a deeply sorry state etc BUT we still have some good environments with a good language portable enough, there it common lisp, go, python, ... with their ecosystem. They all have issues BUT issues that can be compensated by a new FLOSS community to a point of re-creating the old classic: the desktop have an OS, a single application, fully integrated, with a relevant programming language where anything is at users hands. For those who never used classic system or modern Emacs it's really hard to understand why that's extremely superior but just try to invest seriously in Emacs and you'll discover why that "alien and strange" way it's the way to go and the modern way is actually a crappy absurd idea.
Long story short: we can't compete with giants creating personal web ecosystems, we can compete on desktops, and that's why all giants do their best, and fail to completely succeed, pushing desktops to the oblivion. No one can win a stronger, resourceful enemy at it's own game, to win a different strategy, not a copycat, is mandatory.
Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup
#53A simple reflection: why? Why some think that today tech is good tech and "self-hosting" it is a way to be free? Web tech have some reasonably good foundations but that's all, the rest is a colorful, animated bloatload mess. Modern web is needed not by us Citizens but by IT giants to rule the tech and indirectly the society, since information and communication are core elements of a society to exists. Do we need Webm…
Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup
#54If it's a learning project, or a part-time or hobby project, or if the people starting don't have a lot of money, then using a lot of self-hosted stuff will be an attractive alternative. There are lots of cases where with an ample amount of money or cash flow I'd agree with paying for SaaS or whatnot, but I don't think it's a good universal answer.
Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup
#55I live in the United States, and it's kind of shocking to see such privileged responses to what is ultimately a useful starting stack. Imagine a young engineer in Bogota, or Ukraine if you want to get topical. They may barely have the hardware to accomplish anything compute wise... and your answer is "Use AWS!" Access to the cloud is privilege to the highest degree. You used to need academic credentials to use someon…
OP also lives in the United States, so I’m not entirely sure where this idea that it was targeted at startups in the developing world comes from - its certainly not listed on the page. Also Ukraine is very advanced in terms of dev and IT, and developers and entrepreneurs still need to maximise their productivity, so I’m not sure your idea that the technology stacks of Ukrainian startups should look different because…
Not everyone has constant access to a computer they own, a reliable internet connection, or the luxury of a "cloud" to use for research and development.
Good for Ukraine, I guarantee this is useful to at least a handful of folks in that country. Those who do not have access to the luxuries those of us in the developed world take for granted.
Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The galaxy-brain plan is to start a SaaS for each thing, starting from the one with the fewest service dependencies to the one with the most, migrating earlier ones onto any services provided by later ones as possible/sensible, so by the end you are consuming a bunch of SaaS—but you own all of them.
Lol that's all the big tech companies in a nutshell, except generally they built them for their own moneymakers and them made them a SaaS after