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Maybe there are just certain things that we currently store in datacenters out of convenience which we shouldn't be putting there. Why should my personal commun

Maybe there are just certain things that we currently store in datacenters out of convenience which we shouldn't be putting there. Why should my personal communications be stored in cleartext on someone else's servers? (Aside from letting that "someone" mine them for personal information.) Why should my todo list live on someone else's servers? That file that I really just want to move from one computer in my house to another, but which locked-down mobile operating systems push me toward bouncing against a remote data center? Far too many applications and services will only function when attached to an irreplaceable centralized server someone else controls. If the cloud is just a supplementary resource where you back up or distribute opaque, encrypted files, or crunch an occasional workload, for a moderate fee, you could have your reliability without the lockin. I think mesh networking might be nice for a handful of applications, but it isn't even the core of the issue here: it's about whether your computers are glorified dumb terminals for someone else's computer, or whether your computers are machines that can function as islands when they need to.

theamk 7y ago
Well, full text search is really power hungry. Once you have few gigs of email, your phone's local full text engine is going to get too slow. This is a good reason to keep email on the remote server. That said, your personal communication will be stored on the servers encrypted if you use encrypted chat like Whatsapp or Telegram. I am not sure why you had to use cloud server when sending files over LAN. I've uploaded videos directly to iOS over ftp server, and Android has tons of apps to sync data back and forth, all locally. I am not sure why your TODO list needs a central server -- Simplenote does not require login, and it totally happy to keep everything locally. There are integrated note apps as well. So to summarize: everything is there already. But people prefer to choose a simple solution and use cloud-based service, instead of doing a little bit of work and creating "machines which can function as islands"

theamk 7y ago

Well, full text search is really power hungry. Once you have few gigs of email, your phone's local full text engine is going to get too slow. This is a good reason to keep email on the remote server. That said, your personal communication will be stored on the servers encrypted if you use encrypted chat like Whatsapp or Telegram. I am not sure why you had to use cloud server when sending files over LAN. I've uploaded videos directly to iOS over ftp server, and Android has tons of apps to sync data back and forth, all locally. I am not sure why your TODO list needs a central server -- Simplenote does not require login, and it totally happy to keep everything locally. There are integrated note apps as well. So to summarize: everything is there already. But people prefer to choose a simple solution and use cloud-based service, instead of doing a little bit of work and creating "machines which can function as islands"