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Nobody wants their data on their own device. Nobody knows how their devices even work, let alone wants the responsibility of managing them. What they want is
by mtVessel 10y ago
Nobody wants their data on their own device. Nobody knows how their devices even work, let alone wants the responsibility of managing them.
What they want is what they're (sorta, kinda) being given. My device takes my data and puts it somewhere where all my other devices know how to get it. I don't wanna know how it happens, I just want magic.
We, who know how our devices work, and don't want anyone else managing our data for us, are in a vanishingly small minority.
The big companies are putting their money on clouds and centralization. And that's where it'll all go, because they have all the leverage. Twenty years from now, I'd love to reflect on how wrong I was to say this. But right now, I doubt it.
- quadrangle 10y agoSpeaking as a not-so-technical (never run a server) reader myself, what people like me want is not whether or not the data is on our own devices (that's an implementation detail) but the real issue of real reliability, privacy, and basically not having all the centralized bullshit that makes me feel helpless. None of the big systems run by the big corporations are actually reliable long-term. They change stuff all the time, come and go, change terms, and generally mistreat everyone. So we just learn to be mostly passive and kinda just play the game. It's a weird and totally undemocratic form of extreme bureaucracy, and we have no idea how to do anything more than superficial. So yeah, people don't want to take responsibility for all the data, but they do want the people responsible to actually be trustworthy, reliable, and serve the public interest. Is that just a complete fantasy, totally unrealistic?
- freshhawk 10y agoThe problem is that I'm not sure anyone has a way for you to get reliability, privacy and not having to deal with centralized bullshit without caring about that implementation detail. Because if you leave it up to someone else, they can make a lot of money by removing all but reliability from what you want. So they do.
- Kadin 10y agoWell, you can, but you have to be willing to pay for it. That's the key problem. Users love the idea of a free service that stores all their stuff, and that's pretty clearly not sustainable from a business perspective, but it makes it hard to compete with a real service. They'll keep their stuff on the "free" service right up until it crashes and takes all their crap with it, or the TOS is abruptly changed to delete everything older than 12 months or that's connected to an inactive login or whatever, and it's gone.
- freshhawk 10y agoYeah, I was counting those types of "free" services as falling in the "centralized bullshit" category. Bit of a fuzzy use of language there admittedly.
- edraferi 10y agoGoing decentralized doesn't protect you from other people as much as you'd hope. Check out Bitcoin's scaling crisis and the DAO hack. Decentralization just takes the power away from a profit motivated corporation and gives it too a loose group of developers with their own agendas. You don't get control unless you really do it yourself.