12 ms·

I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources. For the majority of use

I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources. For the majority of use cases, we don't need distributed storage, compute, etc. Just start making these self-hosted "servers", "data pods", etc as easy to install as desktop software and make it clear that they are inaccessible when the computer is off. People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house. Modern societies have reasonable upload speeds and electricity/network uptime to support it. Sure, things like ISP firewall/NAT and dynamic IPs are a bit of a barrier, but you can have volunteers help with relays. For example, I can easily fire up a Tor onion service on my never-turns-off home desktop computer and reach my stuff from anywhere. Why can't I reach my friends' stuff the same way? Because, to use business-speak, there's nothing "turnkey". It's something I've been pondering and working on. Sure, the bigger players may have to be in DCs, have more stringent uptime requirements, and distribute their bandwidth/workload more. But for most of us, desktop software and web-of-trust style connections could go a long way so long as the front of the software has a FB feel (e.g. a feed, messages, etc). We can tackle discovery, searching, aggregation, offloading, etc later.

wmf 8y ago
Try Sandstorm. Home servers are a very difficult sell (see $500 Helm) compared to VMs running in a data center and IMO the privacy difference is mostly illusory.
- brachi 8y ago
  Could ellaborate why is illusory?
  - wmf 8y ago
    Data centers and (paid) cloud vendors don't look at your data and the police can get into your home as easily as your VM.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      Nope, they can't. There are reasonably-strong legal protections against police entering your home, because it's the main place where you actually have a legally-acknowledged expectation of privacy.
      - dboreham 8y ago
        Hence “But her emails...”
      - beat 8y ago
        Most people have no real reason to be concerned about police looking at their data, even if it does somehow happen (not in America, anyway). So as a need, it's a vanishingly small market, limited to people who actually have something illegal to hide - drug business, child porn, whatever. As a want is a different thing - people, convinced to be afraid of Big Brother, want to shield themselves. But that's still not a very large market, when it comes to people paranoid enough to actually do something about it. If I had data that I legit feared the government finding, I wouldn't be protecting it with a home server - I'd protect it by encrypting the crap out of it and storing it on a pretty generic cloud service, not in my home or anything easily traceable to me.
        zozbot123 8y ago
        Nope, you're thinking of this backwards. The people who actually have something illegal to hide might actually try to do what you're saying here, make it untraceable somehow (at non-trivial risk and expense, of course!). But if what you're worried about is more casual, warrant-less invasion of privacy by your government (that isn't motivated by something as blatantly illegal as the examples you chose), "just store it at home" is a no-brainer.
        kjetilk 8y ago
        Right, but if you had data that were just that confidential to you, that's the easy part. Just encrypt it and don't let anybody look. I don't really have that kind of data, but I do have a lot of stuff that's just private, in the sense that I don't have anything to hide, but I close the door when I'm in the toilet. So, really private data, encrypt it, store copies in many safe places, you're done. That's not really what Solid is about. Solid is not just about me, it is about us. The stuff we do together. The sharing we do, but we share not just with anybody, but with someone we trust. It may be something really trivial: I share my grocery shopping list with my wife. It is not sensitive by any means, but it is also nobody else's business. Those are data used on my terms. Nobody should be peeking into my life to map me, as I go along with my daily business, but my daily business consists of interacting with a lot of people, and I do share and I want to share, but I want personal data control. Now, personal data control is really the key to permissionless innovation. So, we're not just doing it to protect from snooping, once people have their data then you get a level playing field were there can be competition for the best user experiences.
- kodablah 8y ago
  /me goes to sandstorm.io, click install, skip past the paid version on to self-host, see it only works on Linux, close tab ^ That is your expected reaction by normal desktop users. I mean literally download an exe and up pops up your feed ready to add your friends, or favorite businesses, news sites, link aggregators, etc given their onion ID (yes, onion ID is annoyingly large, especially v3, but discovery/identity comes later, don't let it hold up the system). I'm not convinced you need a "home server" in the traditional sense. Just accept what you lose, uptime, if you use your laptop or phone to do the hosting. You can share between them too given a synced private key which is the software's job, not the user's. Still, an ephemeral self-hosted-on-desktop social network can go a long way (and again, people will let the need for uptime drive their always-on desktop decision). This stuff requires such little resources to start, a cheap Raspi w/ a install/reach-from-other-device would work just fine if they don't have a home computer and want one just for this. Large storage can come later. I do agree the privacy difference is minimal.
  - MentallyRetired 8y ago
    Truth. This stuff needs to be EASY. If I'm capable of setting up but too lazy, my mom stands zero chance.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I think the ideal use case for Sandstorm is either the service model or best-case the "your family computer guy runs it for a ton of people you know". If I stand up a Sandstorm server at home this year (which is likely), I'll probably allow any friends or family to use it. The "normal desktop user" should probably not be running their own self-hosting setup, because they will fail at backups and reliability and performance.
    - hinkley 8y ago
      Or, one proposes a system with redundancy built into it, so that a machine going down or getting soda poured on it doesn’t take out the whole network.
- losvedir 8y ago
  Is sandstorm still around? I was a big fan of the idea and mission, but then I thought kentonv kind of wound it down when he joined Cloudflare.
  - kentonv 8y ago
    Yeah unfortunately it's basically on life support now. For the first year after the company folded, I was still hacking on it frequently on weekends, but these days I mostly only push the monthly release to update dependencies. It's just that Cloudflare Workers is, well, successful, and it's... more fulfilling... to work on a successful project. :/
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  The apps on sandstorm are super out of date. When I checked a few months ago the gitlab version was from 2016
bennofs 8y ago
I've found secure scuttlebutt (www.scuttlebutt.nz) really impressive. By using public servers called pubs as meeting point they can ignore lots of issues like NAT punching and discovery. I don't like that it seems to be based on an immutable log but it showcases well how much is possible with offline first, sync when possible software (just like syncthing)
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  I have been meaning to try SSB, I have had some success using DAT[1] to transfer large files between friends. 1: https://datproject.org/ https://datproject.org/
amelius 8y ago
One problem is still asymmetric upload/download speeds for many (most) home connections. Often upload is 10x slower than download.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- smhenderson 8y ago
  Data caps on upload as well not to mention many ISP's have terms that prevent you from running services on your account. If you want that from them you need a business account which typically costs quite a bit more. At least that's how Comcast and Verizon are in my neighborhood...
  - amelius 8y ago
    Perhaps the definition of net neutrality could be extended to cover this problem. I mean, if we want an internet where everybody is treated equally, then symmetric upload/download speeds are a basic requirement.
    - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
      The tricky thing is that ISPs have traditionally offered symmetrical service, but only as "business class". So they would protest that they already sell that, customers just need to pay (double, triple) to get it. That said, my (just residential) fiber connection consistently tests slightly faster upstream than down.
- teleclimber 8y ago
  And users expect their internet services to be fast. If every request involves leaving the backbone to go all the way into your home and then back out again, good luck with that. I think the better solution is to leverage cheap vms. At least performance stands a chance. It's just a matter of making cloud computers accessible and usable to non technical people.
sliken 8y ago
Back when mobile devices were rare, skype used p2p and was very popular and novel. But then an increasing percentage of nodes were mobile with limited power, limited bandwidth, and much less storage. Even being a member of a DHT (a nice way for distributed peers to keep track of each other) is a prohibitive from a battery life and bandwidth perspective for phones. So Microsoft moved skype to a centralized service and have been trying to monetize it since. The problem with decentralized servers isn't technical, something half as fast as your phone could easily handle distributed versions of popular websites. The arm based "wall warts" were plenty fast, and they are several generations old already. How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? If it is advertising, what's the benefit to users? Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized? It does seem that a modest arm based server that's silent, potentially integrated into a wifi router would hugely reduce the downsides of p2p networks. Free power, cheap bandwidth, and being part of a p2p network they would avoid long startup times for applications. Users on their phones would get instant access to their data while their local node did any proof of work, DHT tracking, earning the reputation necessary to use bandwidth, cpu, and storage from other peers. I don't see any technical barriers, just that users wouldn't care, and nobody would want to pay for it.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist. > Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized? They wouldn't. And ideally, beyond the annoying hoops on initial versions (e.g. discovery/identity), they shouldn't. Your software needs to win on features. A self-hosted, subscribable Reddit clone w/ chat would be a very good start.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations. The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter. Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, or companies allow their developers to do so.
bluGill 8y ago
First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates. It needs to be like a thermostat from the 1950s - maybe it lacks the latest features but it still works just the same as new. I'll accept maybe it only needs to last 10 years, but that is the minimum time. I have family to think about: I don't have time to update my servers every time some new zero-day is fixed. I'd rather pay someone else to deal with those details. My five year old is growing up time with him is far more important that fixing security holes.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates. Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. The software itself might evolve to an hands-off, evergreen-type of approach, but for now just a desktop daemon is fine. The reason keeping servers updated seems so non-trivial is that we visualize it in an ops sense like we're at work.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. As confirmed by the lack of complaints about auto update in Windows 10. I mean, its not like updates ever break anything anyways.
    - SpaceManiac 8y ago
      I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. Automatic security patches make a lot of sense in the current security climate, but once that infrastructure exists it is irresistible to use it for random feature creep and marketing.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        > I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. I disagree. I've yet to encounter a system where automatic updates didn't sometimes break things. It's a nice theory, but in practice things break when you change things they depend on even when you're trying not to, and a lot of developers don't try that hard. Not to mention, sometimes you're dealing with design flaws that cause API changes, or programs relying on behavior that wasn't officially part of the stable interface. Auto-updating causes more problems than it solves.
bilbo0s 8y ago
Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP? Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise. I also feel like people are proposing solutions based on technologies as they stand today. Chosen solutions to the decentralization issue need to consider realistic future cases. Just as a quick thought experiment, what happens in the near future, say, 3 to 5 years out, when a huge chunk of people are using 5g technologies as their primary connections? AT&T, or sprint, or verizon, or what have you will still get all of your traffic information in this, very plausible, future case. "It's encrypted." or "It's going through a relay." Is just not a sufficient response to privacy if you wish to have privacy from AT&T. I mean, think about it, chances are, the relay will be using AT&T too. Which brings me to the big problem with solutions like these, ie - inevitable recentralization. Google, or Facebook, (and now because of how this new decentralization idea works, even AT&T), are in an almost unassailable position to act as the "switchboard" for all of this non-indexed data. Need to know where your aunt, who just moved, is on this new decentralized network? Are you going to ask google? or "WeAreDecentralizationIdealists.com"? Oh, you're going to ask your own node? Sorry, her new information has not propagated to your node yet. Check back tomorrow. Oh forget it, just call your aunt and ask her to give you the new information so you can input it manually. No, she will need to be registered somewhere to seamlessly communicate changes to her node's connection information. And that "somewhere" will likely be a BigCo. If we want to replace the behemoths, we need to come up with solutions that are just as easy to use, (easier actually), and avoid any possible blocking or tracking. That requires some very creative people to think radically. Easily blockable in home network nodes I think, are not only not really solving the problems, but are also doomed to failure usability-wise when compared with google or facebook.
- confounded 8y ago
  > Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise. Putting an automatically configured VPN on such a box would be extremely easy, no?
- kodablah 8y ago
hathawsh 8y ago
There should be a marketplace for apps running on home routers. It would change the Internet as we know it. Developers should be able to create router apps and submit them to marketplaces and users should be able to install router apps of their choice with just a few taps. Routers have a few key advantages over most other computing devices owned by the public: routers normally have a public (non-NAT) IP address, they're always on, and battery power is not a concern. If people could install a Tor implementation on their router with just a few taps, Tor usage could expand dramatically. Developers of decentralized social networks might finally get a foothold once the installation problems are gone. IMHO the best way to re-decentralize the Internet is by creating routers that host arbitrary apps, along with a marketplace of router apps. The way to bootstrap this idea seems simple: sell a new router with a thin margin, provide SDKs for free, let developers charge what they want for the apps, and take a 30% cut from app purchases. The plan seems so clear that I wonder why I haven't yet heard of anyone doing it. :-)
- kodablah 8y ago
  The obvious problem with in-home edge compute like that is the shittyness of router implementations, combined with the shitty software out there, combined with the lack of common interfacing with the router by a human just begs to open up a world of devices to botnets. Needs to be interfaced with by humans regularly.
  - hathawsh 8y ago
    Right. Whoever does this needs to be competent at building a safe, stable, and usable router OS.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      OpenWRT/LEDE is a thing. But don't expect cheap home routers to be able to run useful services-- the cheapest hardware is truly bottom-of-the-barrel, even OpenWRT had to drop support for lots of devices.
    - sliken 8y ago
cordonbleu 8y ago
there is a "deprecated?" server software. i use it daily, its called Pichat, and so far it seems to be deleted from the internet. it is a chat server/webserver/fileserver. it comes in linux, and win version it is on horde as well as the SDK for it. Tell me if you would like to know more. this is not my software, if you [whomever that may be] are the person or part of the team that created this [pichat] please chime in.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat is this not it?
  - cordonbleu 8y ago
    i found that one on github on raspberry Pi, but thats not it. here is a link to my horde , its is http only for now so your browser may pop up a warning, ignore it , and please i am NOT as in no way trying to screw anybody with this link http://erebor.ftp.sh:8008/public/ http://erebor.ftp.sh:8008/public/ i think im rate limited right now so i cant get into any long back n forths right now :-) BTW the link leads to an instance of pichat.
  - arunforthemunni 8y ago
    look at this persons -about in thier profile. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cordonbleu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cordonbleu this is handy as well. https://freedns.afraid.org/ https://freedns.afraid.org/
the_common_man 8y ago
Try Cloudron. https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html
kjetilk 8y ago
Actually, we've been chatting about this, and I think it would be great to start selling Solid servers on a OLinuXino board with a nice box around. Not because it would make us a lot of money, but to demonstrate that you, at least a bunch of nerds, can easily take complete control, from everything to the Open Hardware to the MIT-licensed server. I'm running Solid on my own box, and I can't see myself doing it any other way, but it was pretty hard to set it up. We need to change that.
gmax 8y ago
What if everyone had a personal always-on cloud storage like dropbox, or even their ISP, where data is encrypted and access managed via crypto keys exchanged directly between clients so that plaintext never leaves the client. This gets us around devices being offline and NATs. Clients communicate via these always-on cloud stores using them as store and forward network, along the lines of http://cweb-services.com/intro.html http://cweb-services.com/intro.html There are challenges like establishing initial connections, or push notifications, but these can hopefully be worked out.
deevolution 8y ago
>I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources This same thought has popped up in my mind as well before... I think it's a probable future only if these devices are discrete plug-in and forget machines and generate revenue for the owner.
zbentley 8y ago
> People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house. I think you radically overestimate the desire and ability of the average computer-user to consider their devices' uptime.

wmf 8y ago

Try Sandstorm. Home servers are a very difficult sell (see $500 Helm) compared to VMs running in a data center and IMO the privacy difference is mostly illusory.

brachi 8y ago
Could ellaborate why is illusory?
- wmf 8y ago
  Data centers and (paid) cloud vendors don't look at your data and the police can get into your home as easily as your VM.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Nope, they can't. There are reasonably-strong legal protections against police entering your home, because it's the main place where you actually have a legally-acknowledged expectation of privacy.
    - dboreham 8y ago
      Hence “But her emails...”
    - beat 8y ago
      Most people have no real reason to be concerned about police looking at their data, even if it does somehow happen (not in America, anyway). So as a need, it's a vanishingly small market, limited to people who actually have something illegal to hide - drug business, child porn, whatever. As a want is a different thing - people, convinced to be afraid of Big Brother, want to shield themselves. But that's still not a very large market, when it comes to people paranoid enough to actually do something about it. If I had data that I legit feared the government finding, I wouldn't be protecting it with a home server - I'd protect it by encrypting the crap out of it and storing it on a pretty generic cloud service, not in my home or anything easily traceable to me.
      - zozbot123 8y ago
        Nope, you're thinking of this backwards. The people who actually have something illegal to hide might actually try to do what you're saying here, make it untraceable somehow (at non-trivial risk and expense, of course!). But if what you're worried about is more casual, warrant-less invasion of privacy by your government (that isn't motivated by something as blatantly illegal as the examples you chose), "just store it at home" is a no-brainer.
      - kjetilk 8y ago
        Right, but if you had data that were just that confidential to you, that's the easy part. Just encrypt it and don't let anybody look. I don't really have that kind of data, but I do have a lot of stuff that's just private, in the sense that I don't have anything to hide, but I close the door when I'm in the toilet. So, really private data, encrypt it, store copies in many safe places, you're done. That's not really what Solid is about. Solid is not just about me, it is about us. The stuff we do together. The sharing we do, but we share not just with anybody, but with someone we trust. It may be something really trivial: I share my grocery shopping list with my wife. It is not sensitive by any means, but it is also nobody else's business. Those are data used on my terms. Nobody should be peeking into my life to map me, as I go along with my daily business, but my daily business consists of interacting with a lot of people, and I do share and I want to share, but I want personal data control. Now, personal data control is really the key to permissionless innovation. So, we're not just doing it to protect from snooping, once people have their data then you get a level playing field were there can be competition for the best user experiences.
kodablah 8y ago
/me goes to sandstorm.io, click install, skip past the paid version on to self-host, see it only works on Linux, close tab ^ That is your expected reaction by normal desktop users. I mean literally download an exe and up pops up your feed ready to add your friends, or favorite businesses, news sites, link aggregators, etc given their onion ID (yes, onion ID is annoyingly large, especially v3, but discovery/identity comes later, don't let it hold up the system). I'm not convinced you need a "home server" in the traditional sense. Just accept what you lose, uptime, if you use your laptop or phone to do the hosting. You can share between them too given a synced private key which is the software's job, not the user's. Still, an ephemeral self-hosted-on-desktop social network can go a long way (and again, people will let the need for uptime drive their always-on desktop decision). This stuff requires such little resources to start, a cheap Raspi w/ a install/reach-from-other-device would work just fine if they don't have a home computer and want one just for this. Large storage can come later. I do agree the privacy difference is minimal.
- MentallyRetired 8y ago
  Truth. This stuff needs to be EASY. If I'm capable of setting up but too lazy, my mom stands zero chance.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I think the ideal use case for Sandstorm is either the service model or best-case the "your family computer guy runs it for a ton of people you know". If I stand up a Sandstorm server at home this year (which is likely), I'll probably allow any friends or family to use it. The "normal desktop user" should probably not be running their own self-hosting setup, because they will fail at backups and reliability and performance.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Or, one proposes a system with redundancy built into it, so that a machine going down or getting soda poured on it doesn’t take out the whole network.
losvedir 8y ago
Is sandstorm still around? I was a big fan of the idea and mission, but then I thought kentonv kind of wound it down when he joined Cloudflare.
- kentonv 8y ago
  Yeah unfortunately it's basically on life support now. For the first year after the company folded, I was still hacking on it frequently on weekends, but these days I mostly only push the monthly release to update dependencies. It's just that Cloudflare Workers is, well, successful, and it's... more fulfilling... to work on a successful project. :/
ndnxhs 8y ago
The apps on sandstorm are super out of date. When I checked a few months ago the gitlab version was from 2016

bennofs 8y ago

I've found secure scuttlebutt (www.scuttlebutt.nz) really impressive. By using public servers called pubs as meeting point they can ignore lots of issues like NAT punching and discovery. I don't like that it seems to be based on an immutable log but it showcases well how much is possible with offline first, sync when possible software (just like syncthing)

blacksmith_tb 8y ago
I have been meaning to try SSB, I have had some success using DAT[1] to transfer large files between friends. 1: https://datproject.org/ https://datproject.org/

amelius 8y ago

One problem is still asymmetric upload/download speeds for many (most) home connections. Often upload is 10x slower than download.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
smhenderson 8y ago
Data caps on upload as well not to mention many ISP's have terms that prevent you from running services on your account. If you want that from them you need a business account which typically costs quite a bit more. At least that's how Comcast and Verizon are in my neighborhood...
- amelius 8y ago
  Perhaps the definition of net neutrality could be extended to cover this problem. I mean, if we want an internet where everybody is treated equally, then symmetric upload/download speeds are a basic requirement.
  - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
    The tricky thing is that ISPs have traditionally offered symmetrical service, but only as "business class". So they would protest that they already sell that, customers just need to pay (double, triple) to get it. That said, my (just residential) fiber connection consistently tests slightly faster upstream than down.
teleclimber 8y ago
And users expect their internet services to be fast. If every request involves leaving the backbone to go all the way into your home and then back out again, good luck with that. I think the better solution is to leverage cheap vms. At least performance stands a chance. It's just a matter of making cloud computers accessible and usable to non technical people.

sliken 8y ago

Back when mobile devices were rare, skype used p2p and was very popular and novel. But then an increasing percentage of nodes were mobile with limited power, limited bandwidth, and much less storage. Even being a member of a DHT (a nice way for distributed peers to keep track of each other) is a prohibitive from a battery life and bandwidth perspective for phones. So Microsoft moved skype to a centralized service and have been trying to monetize it since. The problem with decentralized servers isn't technical, something half as fast as your phone could easily handle distributed versions of popular websites. The arm based "wall warts" were plenty fast, and they are several generations old already. How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? If it is advertising, what's the benefit to users? Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized? It does seem that a modest arm based server that's silent, potentially integrated into a wifi router would hugely reduce the downsides of p2p networks. Free power, cheap bandwidth, and being part of a p2p network they would avoid long startup times for applications. Users on their phones would get instant access to their data while their local node did any proof of work, DHT tracking, earning the reputation necessary to use bandwidth, cpu, and storage from other peers. I don't see any technical barriers, just that users wouldn't care, and nobody would want to pay for it.

kodablah 8y ago
> How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist. > Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized? They wouldn't. And ideally, beyond the annoying hoops on initial versions (e.g. discovery/identity), they shouldn't. Your software needs to win on features. A self-hosted, subscribable Reddit clone w/ chat would be a very good start.
- the_duke 8y ago
  Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations. The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter. Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, or companies allow their developers to do so.

bluGill 8y ago

First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates. It needs to be like a thermostat from the 1950s - maybe it lacks the latest features but it still works just the same as new. I'll accept maybe it only needs to last 10 years, but that is the minimum time. I have family to think about: I don't have time to update my servers every time some new zero-day is fixed. I'd rather pay someone else to deal with those details. My five year old is growing up time with him is far more important that fixing security holes.

kodablah 8y ago
> First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates. Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. The software itself might evolve to an hands-off, evergreen-type of approach, but for now just a desktop daemon is fine. The reason keeping servers updated seems so non-trivial is that we visualize it in an ops sense like we're at work.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. As confirmed by the lack of complaints about auto update in Windows 10. I mean, its not like updates ever break anything anyways.
  - SpaceManiac 8y ago
    I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. Automatic security patches make a lot of sense in the current security climate, but once that infrastructure exists it is irresistible to use it for random feature creep and marketing.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      > I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. I disagree. I've yet to encounter a system where automatic updates didn't sometimes break things. It's a nice theory, but in practice things break when you change things they depend on even when you're trying not to, and a lot of developers don't try that hard. Not to mention, sometimes you're dealing with design flaws that cause API changes, or programs relying on behavior that wasn't officially part of the stable interface. Auto-updating causes more problems than it solves.

bilbo0s 8y ago

Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP? Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise. I also feel like people are proposing solutions based on technologies as they stand today. Chosen solutions to the decentralization issue need to consider realistic future cases. Just as a quick thought experiment, what happens in the near future, say, 3 to 5 years out, when a huge chunk of people are using 5g technologies as their primary connections? AT&T, or sprint, or verizon, or what have you will still get all of your traffic information in this, very plausible, future case. "It's encrypted." or "It's going through a relay." Is just not a sufficient response to privacy if you wish to have privacy from AT&T. I mean, think about it, chances are, the relay will be using AT&T too. Which brings me to the big problem with solutions like these, ie - inevitable recentralization. Google, or Facebook, (and now because of how this new decentralization idea works, even AT&T), are in an almost unassailable position to act as the "switchboard" for all of this non-indexed data. Need to know where your aunt, who just moved, is on this new decentralized network? Are you going to ask google? or "WeAreDecentralizationIdealists.com"? Oh, you're going to ask your own node? Sorry, her new information has not propagated to your node yet. Check back tomorrow. Oh forget it, just call your aunt and ask her to give you the new information so you can input it manually. No, she will need to be registered somewhere to seamlessly communicate changes to her node's connection information. And that "somewhere" will likely be a BigCo. If we want to replace the behemoths, we need to come up with solutions that are just as easy to use, (easier actually), and avoid any possible blocking or tracking. That requires some very creative people to think radically. Easily blockable in home network nodes I think, are not only not really solving the problems, but are also doomed to failure usability-wise when compared with google or facebook.

confounded 8y ago
> Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise. Putting an automatically configured VPN on such a box would be extremely easy, no?
kodablah 8y ago

hathawsh 8y ago

There should be a marketplace for apps running on home routers. It would change the Internet as we know it. Developers should be able to create router apps and submit them to marketplaces and users should be able to install router apps of their choice with just a few taps. Routers have a few key advantages over most other computing devices owned by the public: routers normally have a public (non-NAT) IP address, they're always on, and battery power is not a concern. If people could install a Tor implementation on their router with just a few taps, Tor usage could expand dramatically. Developers of decentralized social networks might finally get a foothold once the installation problems are gone. IMHO the best way to re-decentralize the Internet is by creating routers that host arbitrary apps, along with a marketplace of router apps. The way to bootstrap this idea seems simple: sell a new router with a thin margin, provide SDKs for free, let developers charge what they want for the apps, and take a 30% cut from app purchases. The plan seems so clear that I wonder why I haven't yet heard of anyone doing it. :-)

kodablah 8y ago
The obvious problem with in-home edge compute like that is the shittyness of router implementations, combined with the shitty software out there, combined with the lack of common interfacing with the router by a human just begs to open up a world of devices to botnets. Needs to be interfaced with by humans regularly.
- hathawsh 8y ago
  Right. Whoever does this needs to be competent at building a safe, stable, and usable router OS.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    OpenWRT/LEDE is a thing. But don't expect cheap home routers to be able to run useful services-- the cheapest hardware is truly bottom-of-the-barrel, even OpenWRT had to drop support for lots of devices.
  - sliken 8y ago

cordonbleu 8y ago

there is a "deprecated?" server software. i use it daily, its called Pichat, and so far it seems to be deleted from the internet. it is a chat server/webserver/fileserver. it comes in linux, and win version it is on horde as well as the SDK for it. Tell me if you would like to know more. this is not my software, if you [whomever that may be] are the person or part of the team that created this [pichat] please chime in.

kkarakk 8y ago
https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat is this not it?
- cordonbleu 8y ago
  i found that one on github on raspberry Pi, but thats not it. here is a link to my horde , its is http only for now so your browser may pop up a warning, ignore it , and please i am NOT as in no way trying to screw anybody with this link http://erebor.ftp.sh:8008/public/ http://erebor.ftp.sh:8008/public/ i think im rate limited right now so i cant get into any long back n forths right now :-) BTW the link leads to an instance of pichat.
- arunforthemunni 8y ago
  look at this persons -about in thier profile. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cordonbleu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cordonbleu this is handy as well. https://freedns.afraid.org/ https://freedns.afraid.org/

the_common_man 8y ago

Try Cloudron. https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html

kjetilk 8y ago

Actually, we've been chatting about this, and I think it would be great to start selling Solid servers on a OLinuXino board with a nice box around. Not because it would make us a lot of money, but to demonstrate that you, at least a bunch of nerds, can easily take complete control, from everything to the Open Hardware to the MIT-licensed server. I'm running Solid on my own box, and I can't see myself doing it any other way, but it was pretty hard to set it up. We need to change that.

gmax 8y ago

What if everyone had a personal always-on cloud storage like dropbox, or even their ISP, where data is encrypted and access managed via crypto keys exchanged directly between clients so that plaintext never leaves the client. This gets us around devices being offline and NATs. Clients communicate via these always-on cloud stores using them as store and forward network, along the lines of http://cweb-services.com/intro.html http://cweb-services.com/intro.html There are challenges like establishing initial connections, or push notifications, but these can hopefully be worked out.

deevolution 8y ago

>I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources This same thought has popped up in my mind as well before... I think it's a probable future only if these devices are discrete plug-in and forget machines and generate revenue for the owner.

zbentley 8y ago

> People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house. I think you radically overestimate the desire and ability of the average computer-user to consider their devices' uptime.