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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

I've thought for a while that an interesting question is, "What would be the perfect way to deploy an open-source, distributed twitter/facebook/whatever replacement, where you run your own server and own your own data?"

Docker seems like a great step: give people a docker container image, and they can spin it up and hit a web interface to configure it with almost no extra knowledge needed.

Sandstorm seems like a great step too: now you can imagine a network of applications/plugins that know how to talk to each other, but all run on the user's server. And it can be made very friendly to non-techies. Nice work.

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Indeed, that's the idea!

Docker is awesome for what it does (and I'm extremely happy that they are forcing the Linux containerization stuff to improve, because Sandstorm uses the same features), but to really make per-user (or, better yet, per-document) containerization work, we need to change the programming model a bit. Lots of stuff that every app does itself currently (authentication, sharing, OAuth) really needs to be pushed down into the platform, which is what Sandstorm is doing. And, of course, it needs a UI friendly enough for non-programmers.

It would be even more compelling if it was packaged as a device, so that a layperson could plug it in, and log into it to install apps etc. An inverse-Steam box, if you will.

I would like to suggest taking a look at the "Freedom Box" project, their foundation homepage is at http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/ but there's also some stuff at https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

In short; It's a platform that started after Eben Moglen's talk "Freedom in the Cloud" - to establish a platform for running a decentralized network of Free Software social/personal services. It happened at the same time that so called "plug computers" (ie. small, somewhat cheap and decent System-on-Chip computers (think Raspberry Pi but with casing)).

The thought was and is (but I'm not all too up to date on the project) was to offer software and hardware in a easy package for whoever to setup easily and get started with.

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