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> When I can run a personal server on a personal device and serve content to thousands - some of whom may want to peer it, if it's interesting enough - then we

> When I can run a personal server on a personal device and serve content to thousands - some of whom may want to peer it, if it's interesting enough - then we may see a genuinely free Internet. Uhh... you can do this right now. Like most people you may not have the skills or equipment necessary to do so, but 100% anyone can do this today, down to hosting their own DNS server. (And then they can discover that it is much cheaper to pay someone else to do it for them.)

anoncake 8y ago
If you don't have the skills or equipment to do something, you literally cannot do it.
- samontar 8y ago
  The skill barrier is low. It’s all turnkey now with cloud platforms. Literally just a web tutorial away. The hard part is the audience and the fact that video hosting is expensive for individuals.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    But depending on which "cloud platform" you're using, you're drifting back towards centralisation again. Possibly the most important change that my previous post alluded to was that everyone's ISP used to bundle some basic web space in the same way that they bundled a basic email account and ran their own Usenet server. You automatically had a web site if you just ticked the "on" box, and you could upload your content with a simple FTP transfer. Many ISPs provided some "my first web site" level instructions to get you started on building things yourself, even with the inevitable "under construction" graphic. Sadly, those days are mostly gone. With the rise of centralised hosting (sorry, "cloud") services, ISPs seem to have backed away from including those kinds of secondary facilities in their typical plans, except for maybe email addresses. And so now, it is mostly only larger organisations and the geeks and enthusiasts who self-host in any meaningful sense, and everyone else is hosting their basic business site on Facebook, their blog on Medium or WP, their geek-friendly site on GitHub, their vlog on YouTube, etc.

anoncake 8y ago

If you don't have the skills or equipment to do something, you literally cannot do it.

samontar 8y ago
The skill barrier is low. It’s all turnkey now with cloud platforms. Literally just a web tutorial away. The hard part is the audience and the fact that video hosting is expensive for individuals.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  But depending on which "cloud platform" you're using, you're drifting back towards centralisation again. Possibly the most important change that my previous post alluded to was that everyone's ISP used to bundle some basic web space in the same way that they bundled a basic email account and ran their own Usenet server. You automatically had a web site if you just ticked the "on" box, and you could upload your content with a simple FTP transfer. Many ISPs provided some "my first web site" level instructions to get you started on building things yourself, even with the inevitable "under construction" graphic. Sadly, those days are mostly gone. With the rise of centralised hosting (sorry, "cloud") services, ISPs seem to have backed away from including those kinds of secondary facilities in their typical plans, except for maybe email addresses. And so now, it is mostly only larger organisations and the geeks and enthusiasts who self-host in any meaningful sense, and everyone else is hosting their basic business site on Facebook, their blog on Medium or WP, their geek-friendly site on GitHub, their vlog on YouTube, etc.