educar

I disagree. I appreciate his courage in posting this. As an employer, this won't stop me at all from hiring him. I would definitely think about hiring you though, specially being so condescending as if you have seen it all.

Is this a problem? I have nothing to hide.

Do you have a choice not a believe him :)

I have trumpeted this many times but selfhosted​ solutions like cloudron, sandstorm, arkos are the way to go. We want iot devices to send data to our personal servers and not to big brother companies for analysis and mining.

That said, in my experience, people willingly give their data to Google and Facebook. I assumed people were not cognisant but this is not the case. Most people are very conscious of their decision and argue that their data is safer with Google and it's a good trade off. This seems like a PR issue and hard to fix even if selfhosted solutions reach maturity.

Do others share my thoughts? Would love to hear from privacy enthusiasts as to how we can promote better architectures for the web.

> AFAIK Sandstorm was way out ahead of its competitors in this space

I think of those listed projects only few are backed by for-profit entities (like sandstorm itself). Cozy in particular seems very well funded (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cozy-cloud#/entity).

I also think the alternatives link is a bit misleading because those projects aren't really direct alternatives. I have investigated a bit in this space (for my personal hosting):

* Cozy is simply for a personal server for email/contacts. This is more like ownCloud. It's not meant for hosting internet facing websites.

* Sandstorm is sort of trying to build a Google Docs style portal. People share these docs with each other. This is why it has a "frame" around every doc/app. It's also not meant for hosting internet facing websites (by this i mean, it is not optimized for hosting your personal public blog).

* Bitnami is 1-click images for opensource apps. I am guessing their main user base is people who want to install a stack quickly. It's a glorified docker pull or curl.

* Cloudron is about running apps on a server. This is automation (ssl, backup, install/update etc) of what you would be doing today, if you have to setup a server and install apps like rocket.chat, gitlab etc. Cloudron uses docker for the apps. Yunohost does the exact same thing without docker.

Many people are doing something about this. Change is slow but surely happening. We don't have the right products to trigger a privacy revolution but they are being built. Deploying a server and installing most of the apps required for day to day use had never been simpler. See cloudron.io and sandstorm.io (though sandstorm seems to have failed to find a business model).

https://cloudron.io/store/index.html is another app registry but meant for prepacked instant deploy apps (and not infra like nginx). I have been pushing them to use kubernetes or swarm to scale their offering.

Does self-hosting make sense for startups/products that are launching? Curious to know if there are start ups out there who value self-hosting from the get go.

TBH, it is really only in HN threads I hear about any dissent. Snowden hasn't been pardoned and most of US appears against what he did. But China is universally seen as a repressive regime (which it probably is).

If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. Brainwashed by years and years of media programming.

One man's terrorist is another man's hero. The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity. If the bombed people retaliate, they are terrorists. The truth is not black/white. Same way U.S data surveillance is OK but same thing done by China is seen as backward regime.

Just a FYI: Most interview calls come out of contacts and not by blindly mailing your resume to jobs@company.com. If you did just that, I am not surprised that you haven't gotten interview calls by simply sending emails to mailboxes nobody reads!

What app did you use to make the video?

As for the video, I would have preferred a shorter video (~1.15 mins)

For email, cloudron has a built-in email server (it's poorly advertised) - https://cloudron.io/get.html#selfhost . You can then read up https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html#email. Install rainloop for web ui.

For contacts, calendar, just install the ownCloud or nextCloud app. On android, https://davdroid.bitfire.at/ works great.

You should learn to multi-task :-) But seriously, we all prioritize and fight for things what we care deeply about. In the end, I live in a better world thanks to people like you who fight for civil rights.

This seems like an argument for argument sake. Our ISPs (not mine anyway) doesn't learn our detailed correspondence patterns. Google does. It reads my email and throws out ads. Seems trivial to decide who respects my privacy more.

Also, if ISPs are "tapped", you have a problem at the government level. IMO, privacy issues and government intrusion are not something technology can beat. Forget home servers and decentralization and usb sticks - If it's in your head, any determined government will waterboard that information out of you.

Well, have you checked out the platforms I linked? This is the whole point of the self-hosting platforms. They don't want you to put in the effort any more than buying a phone. You install apps and leave the security to the platform. At this point, this is really about how good the platform gets in insulating the user. If you feel like an early adopter, go try those platforms.

Those who are privacy conscious must first take the step towards self-hosting. They are many interesting approaches that are trying to make self-hosting practical. They make it trivial to run your own mail server, keep your contacts/calendar/files/notes. Why trust yet another mail/cloud company (yahoo, anyone?)? There are promising existing projects out there (like cloudron.io, sandstorm.io, yunohost). Go try them out today. The projects are open source and have issue trackers where you can contribute even if you are not a developer. Such solutions will empower the average person in the future.

Sorry to be negative but GitLab's performance is embarassing :/ It is so slow and it's not clear why. Is this because of rails? Just seems very poorly engineered.

> I think you under-estimate the difficulty to install services locally. Sure popular packages are usually easy, but things with even a little bit less support can take days to get right.

This. Generally it's people who don't self-host that usually claim that web apps are just a 'apt-get install' away.

I wish I felt your optimism that opensource projects just chug along with no monetary motivation/investment :) Keeping apps updated and the platform secure is a lot of work. I am also reading in other places that kenton will keep oasis running pretty much single handedly. All this seems like a lot of responsibility (might not be much work though).

This is not a big deal, you are simply not an early adopter.

This is the reason for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cQgQIMlwWw

I apologize for not thanking you for the project and just criticizing. Thanks for the amazing project, Kenton. I meant for it all to be constructive and I hope you take it well.

About 4), please do consider the fact that this is the exact same issue most of your users face. We have existing wordpress blogs, forum that we would like to migrate but cannot. Most apps have import/export which is broken (including wordpress which is supposedly mature) :/

Oh dear :( Sorry to see sandstorm go. I attribute the failure to many reasons:

1. The UI was very sloppy. For the user, one had to learn many new concepts (what is a webkey? why do apps not work on mobile?)

2. New app developer model meant that it was impossible to create apps easily without insane complexity. If you see all the apps, they had to fork from the main code base and generally lagged behind because packaging for sandstorm required a LOT of work.

3. The web frame that they added around each app was annoying. This frame could not be disabled and thus made many use cases like having a public forum, blog impossible.

4. Their own infrastructure was not self-hosted including using github (when gitlab exists), google groups (when nodebb app exists). They continued to use irc despite having a rocket.chat app as the main showcase. They should be dogfooding.

The alternatives today are at https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#self-hosting-.... I recommend https://cloudron.io. They focus simply on installing things and don't invent a new developer model (it's based on docker)

https://cloudron.io/appstore.html ?

Having seen the issue trackers of many closed source SaaS products, let me tell you that this is hardly anything. If anything, it's great that all this is in the open and I can assess and prepare myself in terms of sysadministration accordingly.

This looks great! Is this self-hostable?

What do you use for auto-fill on chrome with keepass?

There are many other players in this space - yunohost.org, cloudron.io etc. https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted has a better list

If you use docker to deploy, see cloudron.io. You can install custom apps and it takes care of encrypted backups to s3. And automates lets encrypt as well.