Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

The gradual return of self-hosting and federated data networks (as evidenced by a top-ranking submission today about a federated blog platform) is where I put much of my hope in countering this doomsday scenario.

I feel the natural modern protest action is to starve ravenous information collectors as much as feasible. But as with others in the self-hosting movement, I've always been part of it, haven't stopped hosting the things I care about myself. Many of us never got into the habit of feeding the insatiable information machines. Why post photos to Facebook or Instagram when you can just put them on a web server; why involve a third party at all?

But the user interfaces of self-hosting and decentralization as a broader concept are way behind centralization. There's a lot of ground to cover. Still, I am happy to see gradual growth in interest. Gradually, even for novice self-hosters, it's going to get simpler to post photos onto that personal web server and let friends know where to find them without involving a data-hungry third party.

There's a wonderful way of sharing photos which denies information brokers entirely and is very secure if you make it so. It's called a photo album, the kind you put paper pictures in and give to your friends when you visit them and talk about your vacation.

If this doesn't work for you, think on how much of that is because of the anomie and alienation of modern life. Network effects have arisen in part to counteract this. People demand real-time idea and moment sharing on servers because they do not live anywhere near close to friends or loved ones, and because the individual person is increasingly alienated and alone, demanding instant actions from a virtual network due to the withering of a physical one.

The rediscovery of the physical is the only solution. You buy books from a local bookseller and discuss them in a physical book club. You cannot buy them from Amazon and discuss them via Goodreads without providing information freely in collectable format.

probably too luddite for this place, but information collecting will find a way.

On the other hand, photo albums were quite often tedious props for narcissism.

(I have some relatives who force people to sit while they narrate slideshows of holiday snaps on a laptop; new technology, same old pathology.)

> Why post photos to Facebook or Instagram when you can just put them on a web server

Because push-out services like Facebook actually work, while doing a lot to capture people's attention? Grandma isn't going to your web server without coaching and a lot of repetition and then when she gets Facebook she's going to forget.

It doesn't have to be this way, but it is this way, and the people who self-host and decentralize (and I do host a good chunk of my stuff myself so I include myself in this) mostly do it for themselves. The UX for normal people sucks.

If you get your family on something like Diaspora (or other self-hosted social network platform of choice), though, Grandma doesn't need to check Facebook. All the photos and discussions she wants to see are on your Diaspora server.

Who maintains this server in a family with no IT people? Who fixes it when it's down? Who maintains it when you are busy? What happens when its attacked and you're too busy to respond?

I made the assumption that anyone reading this would be or know at least one IT person.

To the other questions, nobody will beat Facebook at convenience and availability. Any self-hosted solution loses out of the gate if those are the criteria. But if you see using Facebook as making a deal with the devil, maybe you're willing to put up with some downtime and inconvenience to avoid the alternative.

Giving up some convenience is pretty much the tradeoff for any security-conscious decision. TOR will always be slower than a direct connection, but you get anonymity (as long as you use it smartly).

> Who maintains this server

Ideally any hosing provider selected from a robust market of hosting services competing on cost/bandwidth, cost/server-{storage,cpu}, uptime/support guarantees, and any other actual recurring or per-use costs.

Any software running on the server (a database, HTTP service, etc) should be a separate concern. Maybe you roll your own. Maybe a small fee to license a software package that includes updates/fixes. Most people ideally should be able to a community maintained package. The point is that someone needs to be able to select a hosting service like they select other common services (e.g. utilities, cable TV), plug in the URL of any other services they want to use (or select a suggested option), and be free to change their mind at any time.

If data storage and software is packaged in an interoperable plug-in style, it would be easy to, for example, move your comment database to another provider by retaining their services and notifying your main hosting service of the change.

Of course, this will never happen in our current environment of businesses that prioritize trapping people into walled gardens and view interoperability as a threat to their surveillance-based revenue.

Rolling out "grandma" as a reason to not do N is a tired chestnut that is growing less relevant with every passing day. It's ageist. It also ignores the fact that all of the people you're casually dismissing lived through the creation of the web and remember a time when going to someone's web server to view their particular content was the norm. You also appear to overlook the utility of post-it notes in your claim that coaching and repetition are a required ingredient for success.

My dude. Most of those people who grew up during the rise of the internet did not experience it. The time when "going to someone's web server was the norm" was outside their lived experience. Your average sixty-year-old probably got a computer when they were forty (because that would be 1998) and what they did with it was generally minimal, modulo company intranets and the like. Of course there are fantastic technologists of that age and I've been privileged to work with some--but they're neither the mean nor the median. Grandma or Grandpa get less relevant as demographics change. But it's still a pretty huge obstacle to doing anything. That'll get worse, too, given the upward collection of wealth.

But here's the other problem: it's changed on the bottom end, too. If you're between about 25 and 50 right now and are nontechnical, you might have gotten deep enough into the internet at a formative period to not feel weird about having to deal with a decentralized web. (I am one of those people, I stress.) But that window? it's smaller than you think!

O RLY. So you claim your average sixty year old with (in your example) 20 years of experience owning a personal computer, is somehow so technologically illiterate as to be unable to utilize browser bookmarks, desktop links, or write down a URL on a post-it note? Alternately, are we pretending that smartphones aren't utterly pervasive in all demographics, including people's grandparents? I mean, yeah, if you absolutely had to you could probably cruise the local K&R cafeteria for the odd outlier who is totally technologically illiterate, but that group is also unable to utilize social media to any extent either and so aren't particularly germane to the conversation. So no, outside of the minds of a handful of programmers, there is no real obstacle.

It's not grandma that's the problem it's your kids.

Are you telling me you're going to convince your teenage kids / college students to abandon Instagram / Snapchat / etc.. In order to join some social network Dad wants you to be on where none of their friends are and everyone at school is going to make fun of them for being disconnected and weird? Because they should be worried that Mark Zuckerberg et al are harvesting data about their school drama of what kid has a crush on who and which teachers are the worst?

There's no way.

I leave as an exercise to the reader to prove that if the grandkids are on Facebook, Grandma will be also. Hell, if the grandkids are on FB and the only way to access Facebook was command line ssh, Grandma would learn how to do it.

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