The future is not self-hosted

> I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.

Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world. That's a bunch more diverse than the government doing hosting, as per your suggestion. Or having towns contracting Microsoft for it, which would be the result with kolkhoz or sovkhoz cloud hosting.

> most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place

Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.

I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.

Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who is.

This is what I imagined when reading Neuromancer and other sci-fi of that time. A public online space that we share. Sure, some corners will get gross and dangerous. But that's what humanity looks like.

It's strange to me that we never included public spaces in our growth and innovation of the internet over the past 30 years. Of course I expect companies to do their thing as they've had free reign to do, but it wouldn't have taken much cost or effort to add a couple publicly funded data-centers where everyone gets a little space for themselves.

At least in the US, I think it's because we've allowed those who run our government to get far too old. The people running the country have not really understood the public good of the internet outside of commerce. Don't get me wrong, I've benefited from said commerce for my entire career, but I think we, as a society, have lost quite a bit of ground by not collectively owning a piece of this thing as it grew.

Once upon a time the airwaves were ours, and music thrived because of it. These days the airwaves are all practically walled off with massive monopolies controlling them. It's an overall detriment to our creative progress.

I know I'm an old man barking at clouds, but I miss the radio from when I was young - there was actually new and interesting music there. The internet feels the same way for very similar reasons.

In the days of old, I had 2 different co-lo's shut down on me with minimal notice.

I moved to AWS and haven't had that problem since.

> Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time.

That's your demand, not everyone's demand. And it seems are also indirectly assuming here that this is impossible without self-hosting, which also is not necessarily true.

The problem, is, we don't know. Self-hosting is like backups, it's working for a situation which might or might not happen; it's annoying, and it can save your ass, but most of the time you will never know if it ever will save your ass, until it actually happens. And until that point, it's just annoying. So we usually don't know if we really want to re-read a specific book and whether it has been become unavailable for us. We simply don't know that, until it happens.

> I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.

True, but that's why you should have backups. You don't need to manage a whole infrastructure for all your stuff, when you can also just make regularly backups. Of course, to be fair, most people don't even make backups, or know how to manage them well. But I would say those people can't (or should?) self-host their infrastructure anyway, they would probably blow their own data up in one way or another and lose them anyway.

> I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.

See, that's your stance, most people don't give an f** about this. They want things now, and don't care for some uncertain future.

> but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical.

Which most people are not. But it's not about the technical ability, self-hosting is mainly a problem of time, money and habit. Yes, many people can get it done if they invest into it, but they don't, many can't. And that won't ever change.