Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameismon | Hacker News Reader

The problem with 90% of the free, open soure technology is the lack of a decent User Interface. Want to make a change in the way it works? Dig through the config file to find the one setting you need, or query the DB to tweak that one little thing.

The day something like a pi-hole can be installed as easily as a sim card, and can be left alone running without having to interact with it via the terminal will be the day open source software would have gotten mainstream coverage (No, Linux is not mainstream, unless you consider Android)

View on HN

I would love to start a small business selling pre-configured Pis with an external SSD and the basics of a self-hosted setup (Nextcloud, Bitwarden, Mastodon, hopefully Matrix once Dendrite is production-ready) along with a basic auto-renewable domain subscription. There _might_ be enough people concerned about the security of their nude pictures and the censorship/disinformation practices of FB/Twitter that they'd be willing to pay $150 + $10/year in order to have a turnkey 'your personal, private cloud' product.

Two issues I wouldn't know how to solve are:

(1) backups - not having backups for your personal data would be utterly irresponsible, but adding an E2E encrypted cloud backup to the package would come with substantial recurring costs

(2) public Internet access - from what I understand very few Internet providers will allow you to just run a publicly-accessible webserver from your home router, and for a lot of people it's going to be a bad idea due to having a crap router and horribly unsecured devices on their local LAN. You would have to add a cloud-hosted bastion server, which could be super small and cheap, sure, but it's still a monthly cost and now your 'personal cloud' is reliant on Hetzner or whomever, killing the product's sales pitch

1. backups - ship an external drive. No it won't help them if their house burns down, but it's easy to encrypt and handles most failure cases.

2. public internet access - skip it, setup a vpn.

I run a Mastodon. It’s not very good at de-duplicating media. Your SSD will quickly be filled up with a thousand copies of reposted memes if you do not configure it to aggressively prune remote media.

I run Pleroma (because I'm running it on a Pi) and it has the option to just not re-host external media.

I see your point and I'm not contradicting you, but I do feel that this expectation of comfort is the main hook that locked down technology is using to get us. Once we're used to it we don't easily give it up. But I think it leads to passivity. And once everything is catered to the lowest common denominator, it starts to get in the way of any usage out of the ordinary.

Doesn't this also point the way to how FLOSS can win? Go ahead and have a config file with options for everything, but out-of-the-box everything should work, be smooth, attractive, and a joy to use. Create a more comfortable environment than the commercial options. Actually cater to the lowest common denominator.

I agree that this is the way. Fairphone, Pine, Librem, etc all try to provide their things along these lines. It would be great if we could make FOSS more profitable.

The expectation of comfort is why anyone pays for a service-and why people make them. What would you choose to do? Build all your furniture on your own, or get it built by a machine and pay for it?

That being said, I do feel that it does lead to passivity, particularly when there is a single dominant player in the market. Case in point: Office before GSuite.

It's a matter of definition, but I feel technology can do more than just make our lives more comfy. Anyway my point is that the chase for comfort can actually hurt us. Maybe we should try some carpentry?

The whole point of technology is to improve our lives. What you call ‘comfort’, I call the entire point of the thing. If it takes more work to get a piece of technology to do what you want than it takes to do the thing without technology, why use it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com