drew_lytle

Thanks so much for reading a commenting friend! Here's hoping together!

Couldn't agree more! Thanks for reading and leaving a comment Paul!

#LocalFirst baby! I agree that that would be ideal, but as someone who spent two days using Google Takeout to transfer 4 TB of photos from Google Photos to my server, even with easily downloadable file formats, they still make it a nightmare haha.

Interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Interesting! Thanks for sharing! Stallman was, indeed, right lol

You're not crazy! I remember getting one of those remotes with my first iBook!

Totally! Before going the full self-hosted route, I actually had an old computer I used as a simple NAS. For this project, I was just looking to make everything as easy to use as any other app my wife and I were used to.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Couldn't agree more! And most of those commodities/utilities you mentioned are usually either publicly funded, cooperatively owned, or regulated to keep prices down and protect consumers

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Seems very inline! Thanks for sharing!

Haha yes I have a tendency to bury the lede a little – thanks for reading!

Looks super interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Definitely! But even if I could convince everyone I know to do that, that feels like a nightmare to manage haha. Thanks for reading and commenting!

Couldn't agree more – bring back the radio – thanks for reading and commenting!

Thanks for your comment! Yes, I ignored the VPS angle simply for ease of narrative, but you're right. I also updated the shared album example to hopefully better explain why this is hard from a technical and UX perspective.

As to the "convince people to switch" angle, I think the benefits of data interoperability would be pretty significant and eventually lead people to switch to providers that have that or would likely incentivize providers like Apple to implement that into their products.

Ideally, no one would have to switch and everything would just get better.

Sounds interesting and kind of similar to https://solidproject.org/. Thanks for reading and commenting!

Yeah, I think this is a super interesting path! Federation of Nextcloud would be crazy. Thanks for reading and commenting!

So interesting! I'll have to check those out! Thanks for reading and commenting!

Yeah, trusting people and systems is hard. But we live in a society and trust is just part of the game. For me, I am far more likely to trust a community of people that all build, operate, and own a service we all rely on than a company that will sacrifice anything for profit.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Couldn't agree more – thanks for reading and commenting!

Super interesting idea! Thanks for reading!

> Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.

Totally agree, but there's a lot more nuance here. Giving each friend an account on my server would require it be exposed to the public internet which is difficult to manage securely. And SSO doesn't really make this very convenient because that means everyone would have to sign in and sync to everyone's servers which is a lot of work for the user. It's a UX problem.

The solution as I see it here is services that can interoperate and sync files across hosts. So, my friend's Alice and Bob can both have their photos synced to a separate server and can choose which photos to share to my server. Separate but connected.

Thanks for reading and for your comment!

Hey! Thanks for the comment!

> But why should a (public) library be interested in providing such services? For funding? What about costs?

Public institutions like libraries are usually funded through government mandates. We as citizens decided that having free access to books is a good thing and nations, states, and municipalities dedicate tax dollars to fund those programs. So, if we decided providing internet-based services through the library was also important, we'd enact mandates for that, too.

Not saying that's likely, but it is possible.

> At-cost service[s] provided by the libraries will probably collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a cheaper plan.

At-cost actually means it couldn't be cheaper (at least if economies of scale are equal). That gets a little hairy because companies like Google can provide services like Photos and Drive for "free" because they make so much money selling search data, but generally speaking that's the deal.

> Also, host by a library still creates centralized service, which comes with all problems that a centralized service inherits. It only shifts the problem, not solving it.

Totally agreed – if there was only one library. But, there are tons! And as I mentioned, if the services are based on interoperable standards, you could easily move your data between services and have them talk to each other so there's no vendor lock-in. Think ActivityPub for files.

Thanks again for reading and engaging in the discussion!

Totally. There's a whole other article somewhere in there about the, "If buying isn't owning than piracy isn't stealing" sentiment online. Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading and for the kinds words! Would love to read more about the USPS concept and couldn't agree more about the UX gap.

Lets connect! Send me an email – hn@drewlyton.com!

Interesting! I'm planning on running PiHole in the near future to block ads at the network level. Excited for some more, "It was DNS" moments.

To the point about people not knowing how much they've given up, I think another way to phrase this is that people don't know how much has been taken away from them. This is why we need better consumer protections for internet services.

Yes! And I think this way of building software is having a come-back with the local-first movement! https://lofi.so/

Yeah, at one point in writing this article I had a brief aside about more "off-the-shelf", accessible solutions to self-hosting like Synology. But I cut it because I honestly don't think they make the process that much easier. They help with hardware, but the software setup I think is still pretty difficult. Thanks for reading!

Wow! Thanks so much everyone for reading and creating a real discussion around my article! Means a lot!

Totally agree that without economic infrastructure supporting the model, it's completely unsustainable. Good-will is not a business model. Thanks for reading!