If even the people who experience a different time gives up because "nothing changes" then it's truly over.
We need to do what we preach: sure, things are worse in certain things but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.
Also I think people forget to realise that the type of people who were online in the 90s are still online, many still does exactly the same things. The Internet just got so much easier to use for the rest of the people who doesn't really see the magic of it all. And that's ok.
People always complaining how bad things currently are, they are doing a disservice to all the services and communities still around. They are not sexy or cool but they exist.
~the internet~ got easier to consume but self hosting in many ways became harder because of how hostile the internet has become.
Self hosting is so much easier than before, though. Tools like docker and Tailscale make operating servers and using VPNs pretty painless.
Routing to your home address could be hard, but it’s also pretty easy and cheap to set up a reverse proxy from a server you can rent. Routing through a public CDN is also easy and cheap and solves a lot of problems like DDoS.
Not really that much harder, if it’s only for personal use.
Not really. But sure didn’t get easier. Entropy and all that.
>but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.
Understand your enthusiasm but to relate the discussion back to Tim Berners-Lee idea for SOLID data storage protocol... Running self-hosted things like email, NextCloud, Plex, sandstorm.io, etc -- are not relevant to the gp's "nothing changes" complaint.
Without dissecting the SOLID protocol, the basic idea is that transactional data is stored on a separate user-specified "storage pod". It's not just simplistic sharing of "name/address" profile data. Imagining some idealized scenarios might help:
- Spotify music : instead of "playlists, listening history" being stored on Spotify's servers, it is stored on the user's storage pod. Spotify makes API calls to constantly save that data to the user-controlled data location. If the user then cancels Spotify and switches to Apple Music service, Apple can just read the "music playlists data storage pod" and all the recommendations work as expected. No import/export.
- Amazon shopping: instead of order history being in a data silo on Amazon servers. It could be stored in user's "ecommerce orders storage pod". The user can then give permission to Walmart.com to read it to provide product recommendations.
The user "doesn't own their own data" continues with the current AI chat tools. The users' ChatGPT "prompts history" is stored at OpenAI instead of a user-controlled "storage pod".
The walled-garden and data silos don't just restrict consumers. Businesses have the same issue. They use SAP accounting software package or a SaaS tool and their data is locked up in those services. Exports are sometimes possible but cumbersome.
Therefore, self-hosting Plex on local server for a personal music library instead of using Spotify cloud doesn't affect the "nothing changes" narrative. TBL still wants people to have the flexibility/convenience of using cloud services but somehow still keep "ownership of their data".
On the other hand, if you were self-hosting a SOLID Storage Pod at home, and a company like Spotify wrote listening data to it, that's when the narrative changes.
It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.
> It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.
Not simply "not incentived" but actually decentivized. It's not just that companies lose the ability to have a better algorithm to recommend products, but the data itself is worth a fortune. Google, Facebook, etc are worth as much as they are because of the give amount of personal data they've gathered. And, the reason it's worth so much (well, one reason, and probably the least-scary one) is advertising.
Online advertising is the keystone keeping this pile of shit upright and I can't wait until that bubble finally pops. That is when the narrative will change. None of the ideas in this article will come to pass until all of the data that Google hoards is suddenly useless.
thats why this is a legal battle as much it a technological one
it comes down to the rights to own the data you produce, and have it easily accesible. Solid is just a way of giving people option to excercise this right
Well its a double whammy -companies are disincitivized, but also the average consumer does not understand or care what this means.
Most comsumers just want websites to work. Something like SOLID would add friction. People who care about privacy are a vocal minority.
when AI starts thinking on peoples behalf, then they will care more about privacy
i believe that this is rising tide, maybe those who care are minority, but not for long
> Online advertising is the keystone keeping this pile of shit upright and I can't wait until that bubble finally pops. That is when the narrative will change.
This can't happen until there's another viable revenue stream. Which requires smoothing out everything about microtransactions, creating a culture where people now expect to pay, and building trust that it won't get stuffed with ads anyway.
> but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.
Sometimes HN makes me feel like I'm the literal last remaining person on the planet who just... uses a desktop computer, and stores data on SSDs and HDDs, all physically connected to the machine, and never worries about how to access this data from another device because there are no other devices from which it should be accessed.
I mean, okay, fine, I do things like publishing to GitHub. But I still have a local copy, and I'm in control.
> We need to do what we preach
You start.
edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.
Not OP, but I am self-hosting a bunch of things, like my blog. I am trying to move away from Google, my primary email for important things is under my domain (not purely self-hosted, but still). I am also creating backups so that I can recover if a service is gone for any reason.
So yea, some of us are practicing what we preach.
Exactly, I've stopped worrying so much about what "everyone" is doing, and just continue to do my own thing. I've self-hosted E-mail and web for 15+ years at this point. I keep my music and movies on spinning metal in my garage with an NFS server running on it. Photos stored locally too, and everything backed up on my own storage. I don't care how locked-in Spotify keeps you, because I don't need Spotify. I don't care how much data Netflix collects, because I don't use it.
It's always fun to read articles about how urgently we need to go back to local-this and self-hosted that, knowing I never left!
Sorry, what? There are people with guns preventing us from self hosting websites? That’s certainly news to me.
Not simple website hosting, but if you want to do something like running social media, there are a bunch of regulations in the way that used to not exist, and regulations are enforced by people with guns (who are called police officers).
> regulations are enforced by people with guns
In what country?
In all the ones I know of, regulations are enforced by courts, without the use of guns or violence.
Posting these kinds of hot takes every day are probably why you got shadowbanned.
All of them that I'm aware of. There's generally a series of escalating actions, the last few of which involve direct physical violence against you. The only reason to comply with any of the earlier stages is the threat of direct physical violence from the later stages if you don't. Without that threat, the whole idea of being forced to do something collapses, since you can just completely ignore what the law is demanding you to do.
Sometimes the last stage in a chain of potential escalations is some kind of deprivation instead of violence. For example, if I get money taken from my bank account to pay a fine, and I only planned to use that money to buy a really big TV online, then now I don't get a really big TV, which is a punishment, but not a violent one.
But that's actually quite rare. It doesn't work with a brick-and-mortar store, because there would still be more stages of escalation available, where I could take the TV from the store without paying and then men with guns would come after me. It also doesn't work if I was going to buy food with the money, since starvation is a form of torture. It also doesn't work if I was going to pay rent with the money, since eviction is violent. Only relatively few escalation chains end in non-violent deprivation.
With fictitious legal entities it's more likely to end without harm to any natural entities. The last stages of the chain of enforcement against a corporation can be to transfer ownership to a different natural person, followed by dissolving it entirely. Both of those are just pushing words around on paper, and nobody gets a black eye. On the other hand, one could argue that dissolution is to a legal person what the death penalty is to a natural person, and we only just don't care as much legal people aren't real. I don't think have any ethical qualms with metaphorically murdering a corporation by writing a legal document saying it no longer exists, but it actually supports my point, that even against fictitious entities, escalation chains end with something analogous to shooting the corporation in the head.
Metaphorical guns, but yes. And if needs be, actual ones.
Ok, done. You next.