The Future is NOT Self-Hosted
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So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?
Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.
Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn't usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you're going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences. We're talking massive fines and/or jail time.
Edit: I should clarify that I'm not talking about services here, but content itself.
wrote last edited by [email protected]There's so much to host that isn't related to pirated media sharing though. I host like 5 services and only one could be related to that. I know you clarified that you're talking about content, but there's also so much content that isn't related to pirating either. Like most of the fediverse for example
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The future is community-hosted
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so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn't enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
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So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?
Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.
Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn't usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you're going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences. We're talking massive fines and/or jail time.
Edit: I should clarify that I'm not talking about services here, but content itself.
The point is that clouds aren't inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they've become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it's not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
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The future is community-hosted
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Every city should host main public web servicies for its citizens, each one as an instance of a complex system, that's how anarchy works.
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End-to-end encryption means the service provider can't see your data even if they wanted to
Not necessarily. All it means is that intermediaries can't see the data in transit. You need to trust that the data is handled properly at either end, and most service providers also make the apps that you run at either end. Your library is more likely to buy whatever is cheapest than what respects your privacy the most (e.g. probably Google drive, not Tuta or Proton).
The incentives for even community-hosted services (e.g. if the library spun up its own cloud servers) to share/sell information is just too high. Maybe the library found someone uploading illegal content, and they wanted some monitoring in there to catch service abusers going forward. They'll probably put something into the client that a third party monitors, and now you have someone snooping on everything.
Instead of this, I think P2P storage is the better option for those who don't want to self-host. That way there's an incentive for the person providing storage to not know what it is (reduce liability), as well as the person submitting the data (reduce risk). Unfortunately, most current solutions here are a little shady, because they either rely on volunteers (no guarantees about data integrity) or anonymous payments (again, no guarantees about data integrity).
I'd like to see something in the middle:
- apps that work off buckets of data, that the user configures
- services that provide data guarantees that users can choose (e.g. AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Hetzner Storage boxes)
- common protocol between apps for accessing this data
So if you want more storage, you buy said storage and know who is responsible for protecting it, and your app doesn't care where it comes from.
That's possible, but the bigger leap is getting people off the major platforms like Google's or Microsoft's cloud.
You can already do what you want. S3 with HTTP, XML + XSL for responsive / dynamic content.
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Its funny to say a worse experience because I can confidently say that all the services ive replaced are equal or better than their corporate counterparts. And sometimes better by 10x
I never wonder, is "X" is on jellyfin? Yes, good. No, give me 5.
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You can already do what you want. S3 with HTTP, XML + XSL for responsive / dynamic content.
Sure, but where are the apps?
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Every city should host main public web servicies for its citizens, each one as an instance of a complex system, that's how anarchy works.
Hi! This is what I'm trying to do with tucson.social. Wish the city would get back to me. I don't want to own/operate Tucson.social alone perpetually. Lol.
It would allow me to expand to a lot more community services outside of social media, chat, and Meetup platforms.
There's dozens of us! Dozens!
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so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn't enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
Absolutely not.
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so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn't enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
I didn't get the vibe that he didn't enjoy it. More that he figures that a typical person wouldn't enjoy it. And that I would agree with.
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The future is community-hosted
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Great article!
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I'm limiting myself to only open source applications on the tablets. Strictly nothing from Play Store or Aurora.
I like KOReader for my Kindle, but it's available for Android too. Have you tried it?
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The future is community-hosted
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I'd love to help community host stuff, but I'm terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.
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The future is community-hosted
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If you do not have physical access, it is not yours. Trust absolutely no one.
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The future is community-hosted
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«legally aquired» lol
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I like KOReader for my Kindle, but it's available for Android too. Have you tried it?
Yes, KOReader and Librera FD are two applications I use currently.
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I have bought a few otherwise hard to find books on Amazon. Actual paper books. At least used to be possible.
Yes, when I buy books on Amazon it's the dead tree kind.
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When you call the shots, you get the outcomes. It's honestly not a bad way to live. Best of luck to ya!
Thanks, it is enough for me.
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The future is community-hosted
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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 future is community-hosted
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The future is P2P
