What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think...
beyond individualism
What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.
In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
It is nice that he created a cloud environment for a pointy/clicky people :)
But if I where to do such a thing:
1. Cloud only used to send and store locally encrypted compressed backup data
2. Open an ssh port to the public, but deny logins. Only allow logins using ssh keys.
3. Download data from my system using sftp/scp
This protects you from being chased by DRM lawyers because the system is not public. Plus it is very simple to setup.
Setting up a Cloud System like described here is very great for end users, but it could get you into court, or at the very least lots of take-down notices.
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.
I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes.
If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu
For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
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!
What did they waste the bitcoin on? The actual project they raised money to do? If the founders became wealthy then it could be said to be a grift, but you just argued the reverse…
Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone.
Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".
SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
I set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here:
> I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.
So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.
That all depends if you're willing to run stuff yourself, or be subservient on the good will of companies not to enshittify (pro-tip, they always will).
> Which raises the question: do they even own those books?
nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no matter if you bought a license or not
in additions license with clear deadline should always be required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly. It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices or violence .)
There has been a big move to web based apps (SAAS) as web-based software has improved. The biggest plus to web based software for the user is that there is no need to install anything.
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
> My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open-source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us.
Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full of negative impact.
The reason why giving this storage and control over to any company doesn't work is because their incentives are always towards enshitiffication. The issue of community access can always be solved by self hosting on a rented cloud server, its still your data under your control its just someone elses box with a high speed internet connection and global accessibility, self hosting gives you the choice who sees and uses it and how. The hardware isn't actually the important bit, its the software.
I think its not the future in its current form either, because it requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays. But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.
The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah, that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the hard thing because it's the right thing. Heck, maybe the right thing will also be the easy thing if we come up with better ideas like yours.
So, the thing we have right now is Tailscale - and it's freaking awesome.
But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines.
I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together.
It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this.
I get that you can basically do this with Tailscale. Basically. But I want the next thing to be designed from the ground-up around this kind of design. People, sharing apps with each other.
If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.
You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.
You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.
Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.
There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks.
I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
I don't know if this idea was inspired by the Library Socialism movement or if it is an instance of "great minds think alike", but people who like this idea, may find Library Socialism appealing as well
There have been solid efforts with niche adoption that have quite nice UX like Umbrel [1] that allows installing all the mentioned and a ton more open-source apps [2] just by using a UI. It was spawned as bitcoin node hardware+software combo but expanded and is now primarily about self-hosting.
The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.
> Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers
I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.
Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.
It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating self hosting with having a physical server in your house.
Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.
You're almost there with your excellent lineup of self-hosted tech. Just throw in Headscale and some Tailscale clients and you'll be there. (Or any number of mesh VPN alternatives, like NetBird)
The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
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.
> The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.
My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.
My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.
> Self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs.
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.
As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.
That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).
> Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things
Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of the data and software, than the location of the hardware.
> Well...since our friends can't access our server, the only good way to do that would probably be using an app like Google Photos or iCloud
Get a domain and set up a subdomain for Immich (maybe add a tunnel if it is a home server). I have friends using my Immich instance without problems, it's just another app.
> I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I can't see how one can convince people to switch to a community cloud if Apple Cloud etc. exists. Most people just won't understand the difference or benefits.
Could the friends access the server through the VPN?
> It's secured behind our own VPN.
> So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Well...since our friends can't access our server
136 comments
[ 1547 ms ] story [ 3941 ms ] threadWhat we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.
In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
But if I where to do such a thing:
1. Cloud only used to send and store locally encrypted compressed backup data
2. Open an ssh port to the public, but deny logins. Only allow logins using ssh keys.
3. Download data from my system using sftp/scp
This protects you from being chased by DRM lawyers because the system is not public. Plus it is very simple to setup.
Setting up a Cloud System like described here is very great for end users, but it could get you into court, or at the very least lots of take-down notices.
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 of you do, let me know what you think!
I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179795
If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu
For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
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!
What did they waste the bitcoin on? The actual project they raised money to do? If the founders became wealthy then it could be said to be a grift, but you just argued the reverse…
Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".
SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
https://www.pikapods.com/
https://thebox.youatme.email/
Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.
if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.
So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.
I self-host the following:
nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no matter if you bought a license or not
in additions license with clear deadline should always be required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly. It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices or violence .)
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full of negative impact.
That's old school P2P since 25 year. this is not new and not future...
I think its not the future in its current form either, because it requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays. But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.
The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah, that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the hard thing because it's the right thing. Heck, maybe the right thing will also be the easy thing if we come up with better ideas like yours.
But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines.
I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together.
It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this.
I get that you can basically do this with Tailscale. Basically. But I want the next thing to be designed from the ground-up around this kind of design. People, sharing apps with each other.
If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.
You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.
You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.
Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.
There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks. I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
https://librarysocialism.org/
The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.
[1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos
[2] https://apps.umbrel.com/
I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.
Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.
[1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch
Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.
You're almost there with your excellent lineup of self-hosted tech. Just throw in Headscale and some Tailscale clients and you'll be there. (Or any number of mesh VPN alternatives, like NetBird)
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
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.
That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.
My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.
My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.
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.
As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.
That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).
> Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things
Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of the data and software, than the location of the hardware.
> Well...since our friends can't access our server, the only good way to do that would probably be using an app like Google Photos or iCloud
Get a domain and set up a subdomain for Immich (maybe add a tunnel if it is a home server). I have friends using my Immich instance without problems, it's just another app.
> I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I can't see how one can convince people to switch to a community cloud if Apple Cloud etc. exists. Most people just won't understand the difference or benefits.
> It's secured behind our own VPN.
> So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Well...since our friends can't access our server