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> Most people don't want their own server. Yes and No. It is true people don't want their own server because it's too much hassle to set up and maintain, with

> Most people don't want their own server. Yes and No. It is true people don't want their own server because it's too much hassle to set up and maintain, with not much upside. But we've never actually experienced this so nobody really knows whether people will want this or not. Nobody knew we needed a touch screen phone that works as a computer either. You can only tell AFTER such a thing becomes available. > No, because their phone doesn't have an always-on high-upload-bandwidth internet connection! This is exactly the infrastructure problem I was talking about. It has nothing to do with the hardware ability itself. In case you're still thinking your iPhone is a crappy computer, No, the iPhone in your pocket is already performant enough to function as a full fledged server. It's the network that doesn't support it. > It's more likely that everyone will get an automatic slice of a good server somewhere Unless this comes as completely free AND it comes built into the device, people won't likely jump onto using something like this because there are free alternatives. If you think about it, every iPhone user owns their "own cloud" (iCloud). This was unthinkable several years ago. Same thing may happen when people can have servers running on their own devices. My point was, if the infrastructure can evolve to match the type of things devices can already do, all mobile devices will suddenly turn into p2p devices overnight. And a lot of powerful things can happen.

derefr 9y ago
> In case you're still thinking your iPhone is a crappy computer, No, the iPhone in your pocket is already performant enough to function as a full fledged server. It's the network that doesn't support it. A crappy computer, no; a crappy server, yes. The available network is part of a server. A URL that points to a machine that can't be accessed whenever the owner goes into a tunnel, is a URL nobody will link to. (Another part of the evaluation of "a server" is the available concurrent I/O throughput. There is a reason the term "slashdotted" exists, and thinking an iPhone—or even a home PC—makes a good server for serving anything with any exponential-interest-curve potential is it. This is also the reason why nobody has built the sequel to Iridium using cube-sats.) > Unless this comes as completely free AND it comes built into the device Yes, that's exactly the future that cloudlet advocates like IBM are talking about: 1. the ISPs run compute clusters at the edge, including both setting up traditional co-los, and making their in-home gateway modems into compute hosts as well; 2. the device/"cloud" providers (Apple, Google, etc.) make agreements with said ISPs to pay for time on those edge-clouds; 3. the device/"cloud" providers resell (possibly at a loss, to encourage lock-in) the use of the aggregate edge-cloud to the app developers on their platforms; or, they let developers use the edge-cloud in their apps for free, and pass the costs onto only heavy users, the same way they do with document storage today; 4. the users of these devices suddenly have cloudlet-enabled apps, and most don't have to pay a cent more. Amusingly, you can already see that the device/"cloud" providers are trying to short-circuit this whole process, skipping the ISP step, by simply selling people consumer-electronics devices that could sit in their homes, connected to ZeroTier-like overlay networks, hosting mobile cloudlets. You know, like the Google Home and Amazon Echo.
- lgierth 9y ago
  > A crappy computer, no; a crappy server, yes. The available network is part of a server. A URL that points to a machine that can't be accessed whenever the owner goes into a tunnel, is a URL nobody will link to. This is one of the very points that IPFS tries to address: decoupling content from location, so that additional copies of the same content in different locations of the network can actually strengthen the content's availability, instead of being non-addressable and thus wasted.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Works if you're serving a static webpage; doesn't work if you're serving, say, a private chatroom. This is what decentralized execution environments like Ethereum seek to solve, but running an Ethereum node on your phone is not the same thing as actually serving a private chatroom from your phone. In fact, Ethereum is much closer to the cloudlet side of the spectrum of solutions, insofar as your client (the phone) is just sending commands to a computer "somewhere else" (in this case, ~everywhere) that then acts as the server.
    - lgierth 9y ago
      Works with IPFS if you use Pubsub, cryptographic capabilities, and CRDTs :) Check out PeerPad: https://peerpad.net https://peerpad.net edit: what I also meant to say is, a chat room doesn't need computation (although there certainly use cases that do)

derefr 9y ago

> In case you're still thinking your iPhone is a crappy computer, No, the iPhone in your pocket is already performant enough to function as a full fledged server. It's the network that doesn't support it. A crappy computer, no; a crappy server, yes. The available network is part of a server. A URL that points to a machine that can't be accessed whenever the owner goes into a tunnel, is a URL nobody will link to. (Another part of the evaluation of "a server" is the available concurrent I/O throughput. There is a reason the term "slashdotted" exists, and thinking an iPhone—or even a home PC—makes a good server for serving anything with any exponential-interest-curve potential is it. This is also the reason why nobody has built the sequel to Iridium using cube-sats.) > Unless this comes as completely free AND it comes built into the device Yes, that's exactly the future that cloudlet advocates like IBM are talking about: 1. the ISPs run compute clusters at the edge, including both setting up traditional co-los, and making their in-home gateway modems into compute hosts as well; 2. the device/"cloud" providers (Apple, Google, etc.) make agreements with said ISPs to pay for time on those edge-clouds; 3. the device/"cloud" providers resell (possibly at a loss, to encourage lock-in) the use of the aggregate edge-cloud to the app developers on their platforms; or, they let developers use the edge-cloud in their apps for free, and pass the costs onto only heavy users, the same way they do with document storage today; 4. the users of these devices suddenly have cloudlet-enabled apps, and most don't have to pay a cent more. Amusingly, you can already see that the device/"cloud" providers are trying to short-circuit this whole process, skipping the ISP step, by simply selling people consumer-electronics devices that could sit in their homes, connected to ZeroTier-like overlay networks, hosting mobile cloudlets. You know, like the Google Home and Amazon Echo.

lgierth 9y ago
> A crappy computer, no; a crappy server, yes. The available network is part of a server. A URL that points to a machine that can't be accessed whenever the owner goes into a tunnel, is a URL nobody will link to. This is one of the very points that IPFS tries to address: decoupling content from location, so that additional copies of the same content in different locations of the network can actually strengthen the content's availability, instead of being non-addressable and thus wasted.
- derefr 9y ago
  Works if you're serving a static webpage; doesn't work if you're serving, say, a private chatroom. This is what decentralized execution environments like Ethereum seek to solve, but running an Ethereum node on your phone is not the same thing as actually serving a private chatroom from your phone. In fact, Ethereum is much closer to the cloudlet side of the spectrum of solutions, insofar as your client (the phone) is just sending commands to a computer "somewhere else" (in this case, ~everywhere) that then acts as the server.
  - lgierth 9y ago
    Works with IPFS if you use Pubsub, cryptographic capabilities, and CRDTs :) Check out PeerPad: https://peerpad.net https://peerpad.net edit: what I also meant to say is, a chat room doesn't need computation (although there certainly use cases that do)