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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

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

> 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.