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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t the companies but the users that found it easier. There’s a reason why everyone’s on Facebook, instagram, and gmail instead of running their own hosts—because it’s vastly easier for the majority of people to do so, and because everyone else is there.

We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.

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But those who actually want to do this should be allowed by law to practice their ownership over their data.

I, and many like me, would pay for centralised service or any other service if it meant that we own our data and can tune the algorithms to our own preferences. I wont pay for doom scrolling, but would gladly pay for algorithm to serve me content that would better my human experience.

Governments have given corporation to much power, people need to rise up agains that, if it remains the same in AI age, we humans, and our collective mind would erode to the point of no return.

Users have the most power, by far. Corporations are the garden plants and users hold the hose. The graveyard of companies who didn't follow consumer trends is huge.

Unequivocally, users water plants that deliver in demand fruit while being most convenient and cheapest.

It is very easy to sign up to Facebook, Instagram, Gmail and everything else. No manual is needed for doom-scrolling and on-boarding is instant. Personally I would prefer to have my own full-on LAMP stack at home, with Postfix for email and everything accessible via my own subdomain.

So, why can't I have that?

During my standard install of my favourite distro, I would only need to enter my name, subdomain and email password for everything to be magically installed, so I have a standard web site, some file sharing and email out of the box.

However, it would take me a fortnight to get this setup and I wouldn't have a clue how the email actually worked, if it worked. This wouldn't be my first rodeo either, so I wouldn't be starting entirely from scratch. I am also sure that there are some that have setup umpteen virtual linux machines that they could get everything done by tea-time.

Whether two hours or two weeks, it is still not that much work in the bigger scheme of things, which makes me wonder, why haven't I got some all-singing and all-dancing bash script that automates the whole process? But why has nobody else done it either, to make it fully open source and as easy to obtain as it can be?

Also, why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this? It could take the mainboard and power circuitry from any laptop, and, out the box, provide a decent web server, mail server and whatever else.

There is a suspicious absence of products in this space.

> why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this?

Step 0 is to secure that box, as routers are obvious targets, even before they have self-hosted data. There are some products based on RPi, NAS and router form factors.

> suspicious absence of products in this space

Earlier efforts:

  Apache Wave (federated)
  Chandler
  Diaspora   
  FreedomBox
  Microsoft Groove (p2p)
  Urbit.org
  Sandstorm.io

Active OSS projects include Proxmox (https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/), Paperless-NGX (docs), Immich (photos), NextCloud and others, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Thanks for the links, however, everything above is off the mark, even NextCloud, which I once used to really like. The only problem is that you are instantly deep into the weeds that no PC/Apple consumer-civilian would ever wade into. Facebook and their ilk don't need a manual, and neither should a webserver with email server need a manual to get you started, just subdomain, email domain and username should get you started.

As for security, it is all a bit meh. If you have a box that only runs https: with no other ports open, you are half the way there. If you are just running static pages then you are done. If you run a NextCloud type of beast then you are opening things up, but my hunch is that it works just fine with nobody losing sleep on it.

One example might be the eero (now Amazon) router that is managed by cloud account and mobile device app. To get the simplicity you want, keep control plane in cloud and keep data on the edge device. Parts of the control plane could gradually migrate to the edge device over time, while retaining the same user-facing interface. But it would always be a challenge to "serve" content from home networks with NAT/CGNAT. Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale or similar proxy can help in some cases, e.g re-routing email to big providers that refuse to recognize self-hosted outbound.

95% of Americans had shitty upload bandwidth until very recently, since coaxial broadband is all they have at home. It still probably sucks for most.

There was no choice but to use someone else’s computers for moving around large files. Plus CGNAT and whatnot making people have to use dynamic DNS. If a turnkey solution could have existed 20 years ago, maybe a market for it would have developed before the big companies locked it down.

Does the performance of individual data ownership hosted at home actually change very much when people have gigabit upload speeds? Since applications can already make multiple asynchronous requests, if we’re imagining that applications would need to request user data from each user’s house, the upload speeds would primarily affect latency and not necessarily throughput. If this does affect throughput, and it certainly might, then I’d guess that everyone having gigabit upload speeds doesn’t fix the problem. If we’re talking about something like Reddit and Facebook needing to make external requests for every comment in a long thread, I’d wager that it wouldn’t matter if every single request could upload at 100GB/s, it would still be hundreds of times slower than what we have today.

Even if I’m wildly in favor of user control over data, I’d venture to say that there still is no choice but to use someone else’s computers, and not just for performance reasons. If applications have to gather every individual user’s data that gets shown to another user from somewhere outside their servers every time, won’t reliability and consistency and UX likely become nonexistent, in addition to the unusable performance?

I don't know why you're imagining such ridiculously bad infrastructure that it has to access every person's house every page load.

Decentralized does not need to be slow like that. And very limited upload does get to be a problem if you want more than a couple people/servers to be able to access your media posts at the same time.

I replied to a comment that was talking about user upload speed. They replied to a comment about other people’s computers. Did I misunderstand? How do you get good infrastructure without using other people’s computers?

If you think such a system would need to load every comment from a different computer when you visit a page and be hundreds of times slower because of that, then yes you did misunderstand something.

The person you replied to is assuming a reasonable distributed system.

Please elaborate. If true, and they were imagining some unstated infrastructure, then what is it and what does home upload speed have to do with anything? What exactly did I misunderstand?

The self-hosting machines are plenty to avoid the problem you described, where there's massive slowdowns getting anything at all, including tiny little text comments. I hope you don't need me to walk through every detail of how a distributed system can do comments in a reasonable way?

But self-hosting machines are susceptible to the "I can only upload pictures and videos at 5-10mbps" problem. That requires more difficult peer-to-peer systems.

The first problem only requires getting small bits of data onto the same machine. The second problem requires getting large amounts of data onto many machines. Or reasonably symmetrical upload speeds.

God forbid that people actually have to learn and do something instead of sitting around being a doomscrolling tiktok zombie... /s

Slightly offtopic, but the sheer scale of the phenomenon you allude to - of screen-addled zombification - is really turbo-charging my own misanthropy. People staggering around, necks hunched, eyes down, all but glued to their miserable little toys. Everywhere, everyone, all the time. It's just pathetic. I guess I had hoped humans would have more self-control than this.

Stop viewing them in isolation and view them as a product of their environment. They weren't born with a phone in hand, someone gave it to them and someone created Tik Tok for them.

That's a fair argument. It's also unfalsifiable and based on an underlying personal worldview. Specifically (I would venture) an "us and them" view of things where history is determined by groups and power - a left-wing outlook, basically! I'm a bit of a liberal individualist by nature, I see personal responsibility and autonomy as a thing. I'm not sure how I'd go about deprogramming myself of this even if I wanted to. But it would help with the misanthropy, for sure.

Ticktoks and Phones do not exist without a creator. Buck stops with the software dev and exec.

I got screwed, I had to pay quite a few hundred dollars with a 2 year contract with ATT and I waited in line at 6AM for my first smart phone.

Even today, I doubt I could get anyone to just give me a smartphone.

Not that I disagree with you, but that’s generally not how society works. If only everyone had some consideration, self-control, and curiosity, we wouldn’t have an environmental crisis, churches, corruption, or wars. Yet all of these things do exist and won’t go away no matter how I wish them to.

So the next best thing is trying to operate in the constraints that apply, such as most people being unwilling to learn new things and going down the path of least resistance.

There's all sorts of things I have no interest in learning because they seem unspeakably dull.

That some people don't want to spend time learning the thing that you happen to find interesting doesn't mean they're wasting their lives.

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