The future is community-hosted
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Techno feudalism mentioned. Queue a Varoufakis talk
The future (and the past) is piracy.
Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet’s inception.
False. They came along after the fact and sullied the waters, then lobbied to make it illegal to tinker with the DRM locks, then got richer than God.
Something that’s always given me trouble is sharing my music.
If I hear a cool song and want to send it to a friend I have to go to YouTube.
And many of my friends send me Spotify tracks. The share feature of Navidrome has been incredible for this.
I can send them a link and have a listen party with them and then erase the link when were done.
It’d be nice to have this feature in more of the self hosted apps.
I wish more services adopted the service Tidal uses that sends 1 link that then points to YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, and Apple music.
It looks like you can self host Navidrome.
Yeah that’s what I’m doing. Its been great
Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
Has anyone ever worked with them IT wise?
I do so in four different EU countries and know people who do in the US and Canada. And…well…there is a reason local governments often went towards the cloud services. Do people think Joe Admin in Bumfucknowhere can operate what basically becomes a MiniDC? And who controls that?
Sorry. Either go “host at home” and only fuck up things for oneself. Or do it properly with a proper DC. Colocate if you want. But that? I know it sounds appealing, especially for someone entering selfhosting (like the author did a few weeks ago). But there is a reason hosting is a business once it comes to other peoples data.
I can easily host vaultwarden, trillium, docker-mailserver, jellyfin, borgbackup and syncthing instances for my 5 neighbours. Everyone who’s even slightly good with computers can do that for their neighbours. That’s what I think when I hear “community”. Not online fandoms.
Yeah. And I am sure you won’t do anything bad.
But we all know how many that will not be the case. There were countless cases of school IT staff being malicious, of healthcare IT staff being malicious. Do you think that won’t be happening regularly on a small community scale? And that goes both ways: What happens when your neighbour suddenly accuses you of stealing passwords from you?
Don’t get me wrong - I am also providing services to my friends and family. But I absolutely do refuse to do so for any vital or financially debilitating services (which I consider vaultwarden for example). And I am seeing large issues with promoting this model as a solution - which need to be addressed.
I trust my neighbour more than I trust Big Tech.
With Big Tech we know full well they’ll completely legally, ethically and anonymously harvest us, profile us, manipulate us, encircle us and enslave us in their digital slaughter house. I’ll take my chances with 10 million community organizers and the occasionnal small time crook instead of the certainty of a Big Tech Panopticon Mega DystopiaYeah,big US tech is cancer - but I am fortunate enough to not live in the US and there are enough mid size companies that fall under reasonable laws and governmental oversight (in the good way,not the bad way) that I can choose from. People always seem to think it’s “selfhost or big tech” but there is a shitton of solutions between them.
Mailbox.org, Infomaniak(but I would be cautious on them due to the changing legal framework), posteo,Mullvad,Photoprism,Passbolt,Hetzner Storage Space,Ionos, Deepl, etc. are all a sane middle ground for most people and
I much rather have people do that than fall into the arms of their neighbourhood asshole (and let’s face it,there are a lot of difficult characters in IT). Because first of all it’s people’s lives who are at stake - You can wait for the first creep who will use access to his neighbours photos (Immich,Photoprism,etc.) for some uncanny purposes. Who will use the WiFi&Device passwords saved to get access to someones CCTV system to spy on his neighbours. Etc. Etc. And, and this is as much of an issue,it will only take a few of these people to drive people away from all open source products, right back into BigTech.
Lastly: It’s okay,that you see it that way. But people need to be informed that these are the risks. If you would take those risks (and don’t think from an IT role but from your neighbours perspective here), go for it. I wouldn’t, we can absolutely agree to disagree. And I don’t think many would once someone tells them the truth: “Yeah, BigTech can absolutely access your files and possibly your passwords with enough efforts. If you let Joe over here host your files and passwords he can,but BigTech can’t.” I am not sure how people would decide.
Thank fuck I neither desired nor ever used Kindle. I used either my library app to read e-books or getting my booty from the high seas!
snot?
The future is federated.
I highly doubt that. Each federated node is fairly expensive to host since it basically needs a complete copy of everything on its peers.
I think the future is distributed. You connect to others, and if the network is large enough, each piece of data only needs to exist on a faction of the nodes to be safe from disappearing. Just think about it, across your various devices (laptop, phone, tablet, desktop, etc) you likely have a couple TB available, and your can buy cloud storage for any extra space you need. And you don’t need to always be online either, it’ll sync when two peers are online at the same time, so it’ll be eventually consistent.
The main barrier here is NAT IMO, you need to be reachable for it to work. That’s getting resolved with IPv6, but it’s rolling out really slowly.
I would say the future is in pooling resources.
Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.
Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.
All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.
But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.
And global cryptographic identities.
Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.
The future is P2P
The presence is P2W.
I’d love to help community host stuff, but I’m terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.
Zero-knowledge hosting solutions should help with that, but I’m unsure how the tech and UX has been going for that on FOSS as of yet.
This is really cool. And I would say a good replacement for current cloud setups. Since it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to self-host. Although I think this could only really be a cost saving measure since there are already services like protondrive that offer end 2 end encryption. And I would probably trust the reliability of proton drive over the community hosting my stuff.
The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything
Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I worry that quickly this will follow this path:
- Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
- Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
- Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
- The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
- They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.
Wouldn’t a zero-knowledge hosting solution (you provide hosting, but you can’t see what’s into it past a stream of binary) help with that?
«legally aquired» lol
I agree that we need to find a way to make this communal rather than individualistic, but government backing isn’t that. It would be nice if that happened and all, but with a thesis like that it feels like it’s missing the mark calling state-hosting "community ". How do we make self-hosted services something that can serve at the level of the community? Like a load balancing reverse proxy that points to the servers those in the community can host and everyone invites their friends and neighbours.
