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Many of the nas's get pretty close too this... but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. "Whats a domain? Can just put whateve

Many of the nas's get pretty close too this... but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. "Whats a domain? Can just put whatever like?" Etc etc.. even if you baby people through all of that, you still end up with a device that needs to be backed up, isn't available when the powers out at home etc.. Not knocking the nas's btw, I really like them because they do make it relatively simple to do a whole swathe of the common services, but it's only simple to me because I know how to do it by hand. A non technical person won't even understand the terminology. That said.. I did wonder whether the deployment of solar and batteries to many homes might eventually also enable the deployment of edge services to per home servers. Right now the power draw prob makes in unworkable, as do maintenance costs.. but won't someone think of the reduced latency?

ineptech 6y ago
> but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous. I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes. edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.
- deleted 6y ago
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- rolisz 6y ago
  I have a Synology NAS at home and it has apps that let you do exactly what you said: it has apps to automatically backup photos from phones and then you can easily share them in a pretty nice interface. And one of their photo organization apps, Moments, also automatically clusters all faces and runs object detection on your pictures, locally, on the NAS. And it just works.

ineptech 6y ago

> but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous. I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes. edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rolisz 6y ago
I have a Synology NAS at home and it has apps that let you do exactly what you said: it has apps to automatically backup photos from phones and then you can easily share them in a pretty nice interface. And one of their photo organization apps, Moments, also automatically clusters all faces and runs object detection on your pictures, locally, on the NAS. And it just works.