4 ms·

I feel like what hurts this the most is lack of brand recognition - half of the people in the comments are asking why they should trust them and rightfully so.

I feel like what hurts this the most is lack of brand recognition - half of the people in the comments are asking why they should trust them and rightfully so. When you look at the individual components, like Nextcloud, you know that the company behind that project is interested in making it work. You know that Nextcloud, GitLab and others make money through their enterprise offerings and probably aren't too interested in selling their users' data or finding other alternative ways of monetizing their platforms. When a seemingly random company pops up and just rehosts a number of these FOSS platforms, you tend to be skeptical of their motivations or offerings, seeing as they make bold claims about otherwise insignificant platforms, especially given how often you hear untrue statements about privacy nowadays and even moreso if you don't know or care about their history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org Personally, i applaud their efforts and attempts at popularizing these tools and platforms (as someone who self hosts OpenProject, Nextcloud, GitLab, Rocket.Chat and many other pieces of software that i use myself), however i fail to see where their target audience lies: the majority of people who don't care about their privacy will simply stick to the larger cloud offerings of Google or Microsoft office components and something like GitHub for their code, whereas the more privacy conscious folk are more likely to self host software or will need lots of time to build trust with them. I do hope that they have a sustainable existence and a net positive impact on the industry, though!

brabel 5y ago
I don't know... just created an account with them and found this extremely nice! All those projects you mention seem awesome, but I've just never had the patience to setup all those things by myself... looks like using opendesktop.org, I get all those things working in seconds by just having an account (which took me 2 minutes to create). For people asking how they make money: looks like they give you, for example, 5GB of file storage for free but after that you have to have a paying account to get more, which is something I am interested in as I hope they will be much cheaper than Apple/Google offerings, while being compatible with open protocols like WebDAV. EDIT: actually, I don't seem to be able to become a paying customer?! They only seem to have "become a supporter" which is more like for donations to Pling?! How do I actually pay to get , say 1TB storage??
- alias_neo 5y ago
  You're somewhat unusual then, in that those who don't care, are happy with FAANG (et al) and wouldn't sign up for this due to no need. On the other hand there are people (like myself) who are privacy focused, and the first alarm bell is who the heck are these people? They're a random company I've never heard of, hosting free software which I can (and do) host myself and offering to store all of my private, personal and/or important information for me. Although they may very well be perfectly legitimate and caring people, how do you know their goal isn't to get as many people's data as possible and sell it off to <insert your worst nightmare here>? This is the issue with the brand recognition problem, and I'm not sure what that target audience is that you fit into.
  - brabel 5y ago
    You seem far more unusual than me, to be honest. Setting up your own self-hosted servers and application protocols, no thanks! Also, you can easily find out who they are as they have an "About Us" on their website which has a "Contact" link that goes to https://www.opendesktop.org/contact https://www.opendesktop.org/contact Hive01 GmbH Am Speksel 10 33649 Bielefeld Germany Contact: contact@opendesktop.org They are also on Wikipedia and seem to have been around since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org There, you find out that this project was started by Frank Karlitschek and is heavily involved on the KDE project, which is widely known in the Linux community. The reason you think they have no brand recognition is that they don't have the marketing of the big cos you know about like Google and Facebook... it doesn't mean they are no-ones that cannot be trusted as you seem to be implying.
    - tashbarg 5y ago
      Located in Bielefeld, you say? Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy
  - thayne 5y ago
    I've considered self hosting services like that, but don't really know where to start. What do I self host it on (assuming I don't have my own data center or even a static ip), how do I make it secure, etc.?
maqp 5y ago
>half of the people in the comments are asking why they should trust them and rightfully so. Exactly. The problem isn't only "will they sell my data via B2B", or, "Do they hand out data to governments via classified programs like PRISM?" The question is "how is this yet another centralized trove of data protected". Governments and organized crime both hack servers. The real question is "how protected is data when that happens?" The reason self-hosting is so nice, is you can harder the hell out of your own server, you know it's up to date, and you know compromising it is low priority. So my take is this: Any cloud service promoting itself as libre, without using end-to-end encryption for all communication, and client-side encryption for *everything* else, is indistinguishable from malicious companies. You're supposed to know what you can do for the user, and you're also supposed to actually implement those best practices. Also, since the effectiveness of web based crypto has been discussed ad nauseam, and debunked by major names like Arcieri and Kobeissi, I'm just going to state "you better deliver FOSS native clients for your cloud, otherwise it's not going to matter".
- thayne 5y ago
  On the flip side, hardening your server is hard, and unless you have both a lot of technical skills and time to maintain it, and actually put some effort into it, your self hosted server could very well be less secure.
dpweb 5y ago
Is there some kind of organization or entity that could indemnify these services against bad things happening, even an insurance company? I'm a happy user of Microsoft/Google/Apple but there needs to be some alternatives.

brabel 5y ago

I don't know... just created an account with them and found this extremely nice! All those projects you mention seem awesome, but I've just never had the patience to setup all those things by myself... looks like using opendesktop.org, I get all those things working in seconds by just having an account (which took me 2 minutes to create). For people asking how they make money: looks like they give you, for example, 5GB of file storage for free but after that you have to have a paying account to get more, which is something I am interested in as I hope they will be much cheaper than Apple/Google offerings, while being compatible with open protocols like WebDAV. EDIT: actually, I don't seem to be able to become a paying customer?! They only seem to have "become a supporter" which is more like for donations to Pling?! How do I actually pay to get , say 1TB storage??

alias_neo 5y ago
You're somewhat unusual then, in that those who don't care, are happy with FAANG (et al) and wouldn't sign up for this due to no need. On the other hand there are people (like myself) who are privacy focused, and the first alarm bell is who the heck are these people? They're a random company I've never heard of, hosting free software which I can (and do) host myself and offering to store all of my private, personal and/or important information for me. Although they may very well be perfectly legitimate and caring people, how do you know their goal isn't to get as many people's data as possible and sell it off to <insert your worst nightmare here>? This is the issue with the brand recognition problem, and I'm not sure what that target audience is that you fit into.
- brabel 5y ago
  You seem far more unusual than me, to be honest. Setting up your own self-hosted servers and application protocols, no thanks! Also, you can easily find out who they are as they have an "About Us" on their website which has a "Contact" link that goes to https://www.opendesktop.org/contact https://www.opendesktop.org/contact Hive01 GmbH Am Speksel 10 33649 Bielefeld Germany Contact: contact@opendesktop.org They are also on Wikipedia and seem to have been around since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org There, you find out that this project was started by Frank Karlitschek and is heavily involved on the KDE project, which is widely known in the Linux community. The reason you think they have no brand recognition is that they don't have the marketing of the big cos you know about like Google and Facebook... it doesn't mean they are no-ones that cannot be trusted as you seem to be implying.
  - tashbarg 5y ago
    Located in Bielefeld, you say? Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy
- thayne 5y ago
  I've considered self hosting services like that, but don't really know where to start. What do I self host it on (assuming I don't have my own data center or even a static ip), how do I make it secure, etc.?

maqp 5y ago

>half of the people in the comments are asking why they should trust them and rightfully so. Exactly. The problem isn't only "will they sell my data via B2B", or, "Do they hand out data to governments via classified programs like PRISM?" The question is "how is this yet another centralized trove of data protected". Governments and organized crime both hack servers. The real question is "how protected is data when that happens?" The reason self-hosting is so nice, is you can harder the hell out of your own server, you know it's up to date, and you know compromising it is low priority. So my take is this: Any cloud service promoting itself as libre, without using end-to-end encryption for all communication, and client-side encryption for *everything* else, is indistinguishable from malicious companies. You're supposed to know what you can do for the user, and you're also supposed to actually implement those best practices. Also, since the effectiveness of web based crypto has been discussed ad nauseam, and debunked by major names like Arcieri and Kobeissi, I'm just going to state "you better deliver FOSS native clients for your cloud, otherwise it's not going to matter".

thayne 5y ago
On the flip side, hardening your server is hard, and unless you have both a lot of technical skills and time to maintain it, and actually put some effort into it, your self hosted server could very well be less secure.

dpweb 5y ago

Is there some kind of organization or entity that could indemnify these services against bad things happening, even an insurance company? I'm a happy user of Microsoft/Google/Apple but there needs to be some alternatives.