Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer
[Thread #17 for this sub, first seen 10th Aug 2023, 17:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot.
I am so happy to see some of the useful bots make a reappearance here. And you got yourself quite the nifty name, too.
Us, selfhosters - sure.
Average person who value convenience over privacy/cost - no. They’ll continue to pay and be in prisoned by the cloud.
Some might say they’re freeing themselves in a way though. Self hosting requires dedicating time you could spend doing other things especially when things break. People pay for convenience and saving time. When we simplify self hosting and updating to a point people can just download apps and press go then it will make sense for the average person
This. Self-hosting doesn’t need to be a nerd thing.
Docker kinda does it by being like an app store but for servers. It’s not very flexible but everyone using a particular image gets the same experience.
It’s funny how the pendulum swings, first people would never let other people have their files, then they invested wholesale in cloud computing, now they are seeing the downtimes and expense and are backing off.
Same thing with client/server, had it in mainframe days, then got away from it with PCs, now we have Chromebooks and Microsoft wants Windows to run from the cloud, which is basically back to client/server again.
We have so much computing power at home and the chances you have good reliable Internet at home are better than before. I revived 5 year old PCs and it’s way too much computing power for my self host needs. I’d have to pay $200+ a month for the same compute power in the cloud. Even a Raspberry Pi with 8GB is capable of running quite a bit for fractions of a penny in electricity.
My parents have a plethora of old office PC’s, so I can’t even imagine how people pay those priced to not even own the hardware.
An RPI can even fairly easily be solar powered if that’s ever a concern
Use open-source software! Do not rely on “someone else’s computer”. Build your own locally hosted cloud! If you can use open-source hardware when doing so: awesome. If not, make at least sure that everything needed to run the system is open.
Build your own locally hosted cloud!
This is the hard part to sell people. I feel like for self-hosting to become popular, there would need to be a “plug ‘n’ play” device that essentially has everything you need to set up a small server on your home network. If you could set up a home server as easily as you can set up a Google Home device, that would be amazing.
I run a bunch of stuff on Docker on my Synology NAS. It’s not quite plug and play but at it’s best it’s quite within the realm of someone who’s got some computer skills. At it’s worst though it can suck up a lot of time. I enjoy that kind of stuff when it’s not mission critical but I used paid cloud services at work for things that I run for free at home - precisely because I don’t want to be the one dealing with downtime in an emergency situation.
“Quite within the realm of someone who’s got some computer skills” means “inaccessible to most people”. I don’t mean to sound like an ass about it, but most people just don’t care enough about this stuff to invest even a bit of time in it (nevermind the upfront cost for a Synology or Qnap NAS).
Sure - but you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren’t experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who’s a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.
I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who’s used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.
Certainly it’s somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I’m sure in my house we’re dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.
This article, as much as I agree with it, conflates cloud hosting and remote-only software design. Cloud hosting really is a prison, but mostly for developers that are lured by its convenience and then become dependent on its abstractions. What we experience today in most mainstream software isn’t necessarily coupled to cloud hosting, but is instead a conscious product design choice and business strategy to deny users power and control of their data. In short, cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP are doing to software companies what those companies are doing to us. There is a way to use shared data centers without this kind of software design philosophy. As mobile continues to dominate, the solution we need likely involves remote servers but with a model that treats them with skepticism and caution, allowing data portability and redundancy across a variety of vendors. I should be able to attach a few hosting services to a software experience I use and transfer my data between them easily. The idea that local-first software is “freed from worrying about backends, servers, and [hosting costs]” is misleading, since my local device has to become the client and/or server if there is any connectivity happening over the internet. Wresting control of our data from the dominant software companies will require creating experiences that are not only different, but better, and doing that with a mobile phone passing between cell towers functioning as the server is a tall order. We have grown to expect more than intermittent connectivity with conflict resolution. Nonetheless, we absolutely should not accept the current remote-only software paradigm, but instead need to devise better ways to abstract how remote hosts are inhabited and create a simple multi-host option that is intuitive for consumers.
Hey, you make a great point. There’s a false dichotomy being presented here. As you see it, local-first is a bit of a misnomer when you already expecting your device to join a remote environment.
Yes, makes sense that we’re being lured by the so-called cloud hosting. Following a business model that sells convenience in lieu of data control, cloud providers are distorting our current understanding of remote hosting. They’re breaking the free flow of information by siloing user data.
Now, with that being said, I’d like to add something about your presentation. I’d suggest you avoid walls of text. Use paragraph breaks. They’re like resting areas for the eyes. They allow the brain to catch up and gather momentum for the next stretch of text.
Regardless. You brought light to this conversation. For that, thank you.
I’m glad you found my take engaging!
Paragraph breaks now enabled.
Great points. It’s the proprietary nature and lack of interoperability of “the cloud” that causes problems. My email is hosted on a remote server but I have control over my data. There’s no algorithm controlling what order I see my mail in or who I can forward stuff to. There are many different tools and clients available to me and to everyone else to work with their data.
Imagine if publishing a photo from my phone to Instagram meant copying a file from one folder to another. Or if I want to create an automatically translated voiceover from the captions of all my old Facebook photos in a video editor. Right now these operations require complex software. But the technology is all there and has been for a long time.
I often think about https://upspin.io
Exactly - interoperability is key, and is intentionally removed from many software platforms once they become big enough. Cory Doctorow writes about this here.
Companies have a funny relationship with interop. When companies are small and trying to build up their customer-base, they love interop, love the idea of selling ink for someone else’s printer or a way to read your waiting messages on someone else’s social media giant. Facebook once had a whole suite of interoperability tools to make it easy to plug Facebook into other services, but it has whittled these away over the years and today it routinely threatens and even sues rivals that try to interoperate with it.
A trend that I actually like is more software supporting using a user’s own iCloud or Google Drive as a data store rather than using the company’s own servers. The step that needs to take place is a way to use many storage providers simultaneously (including home server) with syncing behavior abstracted away. The software would essentially be a database cluster with a variety of heterogeneous nodes supported. A library that abstracts this multi-host pattern for use in both Android and iOS apps would go a long way. There is still the problem of the controller orchestrating uploads and syncs, though, which for most users would be their phone.
Upspin is new to me but looks like it’s right up this alley. Making the whole thing work for non-technical users will be one of the hard parts I imagine.
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That graphic is dope!
