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>The edge device has to be dead simple that someone with hardly any technology background can place it and set it up. This is the main thing preventing adoptio

>The edge device has to be dead simple that someone with hardly any technology background can place it and set it up. This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. They're a royal pain in the ass to set up and use right now. Smartphones were kind of like this too before the first iPhone. There's nothing except that really preventing their widespread adoption. It's just that nobody's designed a really great one yet. >most customers will never have that level of interest in IoT products This was also the prevailing attitude about smartphones before the first iPhone.

photojosh 9y ago
> This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. I don't agree. There'd be someone at least even tackling the problem, if there was actually a value proposition in it. The closest I can think of is Synology NASes, I suppose you roll the edge gateway into one too and that's your home server? Thinking about what I use my home server for: media library, and backups. Both of those have been (mostly) supplanted by streaming and online services respectively, so I'm struggling to justify the home server even for the electricity to run it... but it is shortly to become an "IoT" gateway too (running Homebridge) since I agree with the top comment that it's best when as little data as possible leaves my local network.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa. There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users and it could have privacy settings that are designed to put the users in the driving seat rather than features designed to foment addiction, oversharing and selling eyeballs. For people who take a lot of digital photos and videos, local backup/data sync is simply always going to be faster than equivalent online services, so there's an 'in' to the chicken/egg problem. I think the fact that this hasn't happened yet is because hardware companies tend to suck at software, software companies tend to suck at hardware and hardware companies that don't suck at design are pretty rare.
  - photojosh 9y ago
    > There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa. Absolutely. Where we disagree is that there's actually applications that would significantly benefit from being hosted on a home server as opposed to online servers or on-device. > There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users and it could have privacy settings that are designed to put the users in the driving seat rather than features designed to foment addiction, oversharing and selling eyeballs. There's been a number of attempts to make such a project, and they've all failed to gain any momentum. The difficult part of this problem is indeed "kickstarting the ecosystem", not any of that other stuff. > For people who take a lot of digital photos and videos, local backup/data sync is simply always going to be faster than equivalent online services, so there's an 'in' to the chicken/egg problem. Yes, but for 90% of people they do their photo work on a single computer, and plug in an external USB drive to do backups. That's quite simple to do, so the difficulty is demonstrating a real benefit to a server-based system that makes up for the extra cost. Apple's AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products actually delivered this solution, but were niche enough sales that they couldn't be bothered continuing with them.

photojosh 9y ago

> This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. I don't agree. There'd be someone at least even tackling the problem, if there was actually a value proposition in it. The closest I can think of is Synology NASes, I suppose you roll the edge gateway into one too and that's your home server? Thinking about what I use my home server for: media library, and backups. Both of those have been (mostly) supplanted by streaming and online services respectively, so I'm struggling to justify the home server even for the electricity to run it... but it is shortly to become an "IoT" gateway too (running Homebridge) since I agree with the top comment that it's best when as little data as possible leaves my local network.

crdoconnor 9y ago
There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa. There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users and it could have privacy settings that are designed to put the users in the driving seat rather than features designed to foment addiction, oversharing and selling eyeballs. For people who take a lot of digital photos and videos, local backup/data sync is simply always going to be faster than equivalent online services, so there's an 'in' to the chicken/egg problem. I think the fact that this hasn't happened yet is because hardware companies tend to suck at software, software companies tend to suck at hardware and hardware companies that don't suck at design are pretty rare.
- photojosh 9y ago
  > There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa. Absolutely. Where we disagree is that there's actually applications that would significantly benefit from being hosted on a home server as opposed to online servers or on-device. > There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users and it could have privacy settings that are designed to put the users in the driving seat rather than features designed to foment addiction, oversharing and selling eyeballs. There's been a number of attempts to make such a project, and they've all failed to gain any momentum. The difficult part of this problem is indeed "kickstarting the ecosystem", not any of that other stuff. > For people who take a lot of digital photos and videos, local backup/data sync is simply always going to be faster than equivalent online services, so there's an 'in' to the chicken/egg problem. Yes, but for 90% of people they do their photo work on a single computer, and plug in an external USB drive to do backups. That's quite simple to do, so the difficulty is demonstrating a real benefit to a server-based system that makes up for the extra cost. Apple's AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products actually delivered this solution, but were niche enough sales that they couldn't be bothered continuing with them.