The Future is NOT Self-Hosted
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Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
I trust my local community more than i trust Amazon, that's for sure.
Communities might be incompetent with IT (today), but maybe they just need a while to catch up. It could work in 10 years from now, and we gotta work towards that point.
Also, note that "local community" doesn't have to mean municipality; it can also be your local nerd working part-time at your local library.
And this is somehow better?
There is a lot of room between "BigTech" and "Joe Average" doing it for his neighbours.
Mailbox.org, etc. (see my other post here) -
emailing his photos to his friends
that's sometimes difficult, e.g. when you have thousands of photos, and emails have a size limit of 20 MB per email. using matrix chat or sth is also not ideal since the other side will have to download images one-by-one. sending a zip file might work, but the matrix protocol might have a size limit for attachments.
an FTP server might work. also consider that you want to store the images somewhere, not just send them once. how do you do that with messaging services?
Matrix file limits are server-dependent, usually enforced for the uploader only. If you run a server you can set it to several gigabytes lol
Alteernatively, use a tool designed for file transfer: https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570256bb3b2
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emailing his photos to his friends
that's sometimes difficult, e.g. when you have thousands of photos, and emails have a size limit of 20 MB per email. using matrix chat or sth is also not ideal since the other side will have to download images one-by-one. sending a zip file might work, but the matrix protocol might have a size limit for attachments.
an FTP server might work. also consider that you want to store the images somewhere, not just send them once. how do you do that with messaging services?
It’s pretty simple to send a Nextcloud share link.
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I think the issue is more that large tech firms can absolutely deal with external security in their applications. The amount of times gmail or Microsoft 365 has been hacked and leaked a bunch of client data is statistically zero when looking at their attack area.
Joe Dirt self hosting a mail server for his neighbors on a salvaged rack server is 1000x more likely to get hacked or lose a ton of his neighbors' data than a big tech firm.
That is kind of the trade off for community hosting. There are very very few backup and security-literate people in communities.
Big Tech is what we need security from !
Prison are very safe, for the guards.
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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've had the same problem with audiobooks until I found the soundleaf app - it connects to my self-hosted audiobookshelf server and makes sharing with freinds super easy without having to use mainstream services.
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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.
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yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills. Renters are usually two levels away from the actual owner. Then there are all the people who live and work in cities but aren't official renters.
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills.
In my country it's illegal for the landlord to include utilities in the price.
It's the responsibility of the tenant to subscribe to those services in their name.
It's done to prevent landlords from cutting utilities on a whim or to pressure late payments. -
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?
Software suggestions?
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I've thought of all these, but what I'm describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you'd have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.
Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.
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The future is community-hosted
Related Hacker News thread:
I like the article, but agree with so many of the comments here as well.
Ultimately I think one thing I'd love for would be a way to simply provide services (like Immich) for people but where the client is end to end encrypted, and neither the user nor the service has to worry about the how.
Example: how can I share an Immich with my family and friends, but where I don't have access to any of their data. I.e. what signal does, but immich or any other service. I want to share my server with friends/family, but I don't want access to any of their data. It isn't a lack of trust, it's that I don't want that as even something they have to worry about
That same concept then extends here to community hosting. If we can solve the problem for a few, it should be scalable to many.
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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!
My partner has a Kindle,. its been connected to Amazon once when she got it.. 4 years layer it still hasn't been reconnected. Everything is just loaded and managed via Calibre. I have a Kobo but the screen on her 4 yr old Kindle is better then my 6 month old Kobo
