12 ms·

On the web today, we don't use servers, we use services

49 points by sodimel 5y ago

milkers 5y ago
Yes, indeed we are.
EGreg 5y ago
That's why we need open-source software like GitLab that you can self-host. For blogs there's Wordpress. For stores there's Magento. For files there's OwnCloud. Sadly, for communities and collaboration (Web 2.0) there isn't that much. Matrix, Mastodon? They are nowhere near the functionality of Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn et al. I spent 10 years reinvesting all our profits into building an open-source competitor to those centralized services, and it still needs some work to rival them: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ But I'll tell you something. Having your OWN servers and data is very attractive. That's why everyone moved away from America Online "keyword NYTimes" and towards hosting a web site on nytimes.com using the open HTTP protocol. Today, Facebook's "NYTimes" page is analogous to AOL Keyword NYTimes, Mark Z is analogous to Steve Case, and notifications are analogous to "You've Got Mail!" Nothing new under the sun... now we just need something like the Web to come along and disrupt them by letting everyone self-host their own stuff on a service that's almost as good. The Web Browser in the beginning only had Bold, Italic, etc. but publishers switched in droves, and users followed.
- burundi_coffee 5y ago
  I agree and I would like to recommend Nextcloud instead of Owncloud for anyone who needs more features than a NAS. Nextcloud has excellent support for calendar and contact synchronisation. There are a ton of other apps you can instal too: apps.nextcloud.com
- boplicity 5y ago
  > Having your OWN servers and data is very attractive. This is true for businesses that can justify the cost of self hosting for a variety of business reasons. This isn't true for most end-users, who just want reliable services. Hence, Wordpress.com vs. self-hosted Wordpress. I don't want to be personally responsible for my data; I want a professional organization to make sure it is safe.
  - sodimel 5y ago
    I think small businesses don't want to spend X days per year to manage a self hosted solution, it's cheaper to just use a gafam service. (and I think that's a problem, OSS softwares today are ~reliable enough for end users, but not really for companies)
  - theandrewbailey 5y ago
    If you aren't personally responsible for your data, does it really exist? Is it really yours? What if your professional organization says "we've installed some big data analytics", or "whoops we lost all your data"?
    - sethhochberg 5y ago
      When I give a dress shirt to a professional dry cleaner, I'm not personally responsible for it while they're cleaning it. Its still my shirt. I'd consider using a different dry cleaner if they started keeping notes on what they thought I did to make my shirt dirty. If they lost the shirt, I'm angry and may even get some compensation, but the shirt is still gone and someone else probably has it. I completely understand that the scale and scope of abuse in tech can be much higher than with other services due to automation, but I don't see how its reasonable to question whether my stuff is still my stuff because I've entrusted it to a third party.
      - bcrosby95 5y ago
        The laws around data are completely different, at least in the USA. In general, if someone else has "your" data, it's actually their data.
        boplicity 5y ago
        Source?
    - boplicity 5y ago
      > If you aren't personally responsible for your data, does it really exist? Yes. > Is it really yours? Yes, though obviously it depends on the service, and my agreement with them. Most of my photos, for example, are backed up in OneDrive, which works quite well for my purposes. > What if your professional organization says "we've installed some big data analytics", or "whoops we lost all your data"? Good question! My photos, for example, exist on my local computer, Microsoft OneDrive, and on Google Photos. The odds of losing them are, frankly, as non-existent as possible. Multiple storage locations, IMO, are a good way to mitigate the relatively low risk of losing cloud data. Also, almost no effort on my part is required.
- dpflug 5y ago
  https://zotsite.net/ https://zotsite.net/ or https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/ approximate Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn on features (ignoring network effects).
- tomc1985 5y ago
  After seeing how big of a hard-on business drones have for OpEx vs CapEx expenditures, I don't think the cloud is ever going away completely. Like we have an entire cloud "revolution" (note the mocking quotes) because of a bullshit accounting rule!
  - wahern 5y ago
    The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts (aka Trump Tax Cut) actually permits (or just increased limits for?) taking a full deduction, up to $1 million, for computing hardware, rather than following a depreciation schedule. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduc... and https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/new-rules-and-limitations-for-depreciation-and-expensing-under-the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/new-rules-and-limitations-for-d... We'll see if that catches on and makes a difference. Accountants, like software engineers and every other profession, tend to follow trends.
jasode 5y ago
>On the web today, [...] In order to submit an edit for this page, I hosted all my code on microsoft's servers.[...] I assume you're talking about people using Github instead of hosting their own server? But before Github, people also avoided hosting code on their own servers or paying $10/month for a datacenter VPS -- by using previous services such as SourceForge or Codeproject.com. If a bunch of people need to do activities <X> and <Y> but <Y> has higher priority in life, then some other service conveniently doing <X> will emerge. That's what Github is... it's a natural emergent phenomenon arising from people not wanting to mess around with running self-hosted Gitlab on a laptop, or Raspberry Pi, or on a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet, etc.
- sodimel 5y ago
  Agreed, perhaps the reason so many people use this service is because it may be because it solves a problem. But another approach (my point on the rant) is the "I don't want to know how things work, I just want them to work" approach, which I think more and more people are using these days (we can relate this to mechanics, where everything is getting more complex). Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. (ps: this exact txt file is self-hosted on a dell optiplex fx160 with 4GB ram and an old processor, bought $20 in 2017 on ebay)
  - simonw 5y ago
    I know exactly how to self-host - I ran Trac for years - which is why I keep all of my projects on GitHub now. I know full well how much work it is to keep something like that maintained and secure and properly backed up. I also know how many things can go wrong - including nasty things like missing billing emails when a credit card expires and losing the associated instance. "GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository across our three data centers to protect against failures at the server, rack, network, and data center levels" - I can't compete with that! https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-performance-on-github/ https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-perf...
XCSme 5y ago
In most cases, if you want to change something you can also send an e-mail with your desired changes, without registering on any platform.
jayd16 5y ago
Servers vs services is an odd way to frame this discussion. Seems like the specific problem is pull requests are not a core git feature in that they cannot be conveniently accomplished in a secure and decentralized way.
- megous 5y ago
  How did you come to that idea? Pull request is common feature for maintainers in the Linux world, and they don't use github to send them to Linus. And on top of that they are secure (signed tags) and decentralized (maintainer can publish them anywhere)
  - jayd16 5y ago
    And yet everyone uses the Github or Gitlab tools because it's still not convenient enough for most teams, sadly. It's an annoying problem because you need decentralized identity. Signatures handle that but the UX is not as nice as the centralized github/gitlab account. The design of decentralized PR hosting also doesn't play nice with the github/lab UX. If you were trying to create a PR to a github repo you'd have to handle authenticating the github pull from where-ever you hosted. If the repo isn't public that seems very cumbersome even if it was supported. It's just much easier to do this entirely inside github/lab, annoying as that is.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I think the interesting question is: what really qualifies as a service? IMHO, a service is just a program someone else manages running on a server, that I can use remotely with a REST API. In college, in the 80's, I used the symbolic math program Maple on an MTS mainframe. Is Maple a service? I say no, only because services tend to be web related, they have a REST API accessed with HTTP. But if Maple supported a REST endpoint, bam, its a service. In this OPs example, the "service" API is email, not HTTP. But it achieves the same goal. What I think the OP misses is: who the heck wants to log on to the server and tweak the site content from the unix prompt when there is an API?
- sodimel 5y ago
  I think it depends. For small, fast-writtent rants, txt files are great (my crap-computer-that-is-running-next-to-my-box didn't even burned when the post reached the front page of hn). I really see the point in not having to manage a whole big ecosystem by ourselves (I use gitlab, sometimes github). The rant was about using an interface on another website (not the email API) in order to submit a PR or an issue for updating a website. It's a standardized way of doing an edit (and it can be painful when you don't know github), and more and more websites are using it.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    > the rant was about using an interface on another website oh, i see. i overlooked that. thanks.
- fragmede 5y ago
  That's a very specific definition for service. What's going to happen to that definition when technology eventually moves past using REST APIs? A program running on your school's mainframe that you access via some sort of terminal is a computing service from before the Internet. Plenty of people use a Unix prompt to access both local and remote computers. That its not your preferred method is fine, but there are people out there that prefer it! If those command line tools are hitting the same API (eg using curl), what then?
shitRETARDSsay 5y ago
"On the web today, we don't use protocols, we use applications"
pnathan 5y ago
I had a choice a few years ago. I could have 5-8 NUCs/RPis, install a slew of conventional services I was curious about, and consider things like power, cooling, cables, storage. _or_ I could pay GKE for a k8s cluster, install most of the things I was curious about, and avoid dealing with, e.g., corruption of the SD card. Or the cat knocking the desk-rack of NUCs off. since rack, stack, and on-prem issues are not what I was wanting to sort out, I chose to deal with what I wanted to learn, rather than rat-hole down data center admin issues. I've been doing this work for years and years and years. I was scrounging boxes from the CS department for research 15 years ago (or more). Servers are a fundamentally flawed unit of reliability and development. Moving to a design world where you design for someone to knock over the box and _the computation keeps going_ is paradigmatically better. When you deal with forward looking people in the server-centric world and you show them a service / "keep going" world, their mind is blown and they want it IME.
- antihero 5y ago
  I will say that in the most part I agree with you. It is better to live in a civilisation, pay tax, have the litter collected, the roads paved, rather than trying to roll your own. However, being able to, to varying degree, opt out of said civilisation when it runs counter to your ideals or becomes to authoritarian or means that existing within it could compromise what you believe in, is important. The cloud is great, but we must strive to have the skills to be self reliant so it is truly a choice to participate in it to the extent that we do.
foolzcrow 5y ago
Avoid centralized services like with crypto.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
If you wanted to submit a change to a page back in the day, you e-mailed someone a patch. That required "signing up" for an E-mail account (unless you were a weirdo who telnetted to an smtp port and hand-crafted a mail delivery) and using someone's e-mail service, after you used a local application to craft the patch. The big difference today is that we don't use native apps, so we have to have accounts, to use somebody else's apps for free, because they want to track us and make money from us. On the web today, we don't use apps, we generate revenue for others via their apps.

49 points by sodimel 5y ago

Yes, indeed we are.

That's why we need open-source software like GitLab that you can self-host. For blogs there's Wordpress. For stores there's Magento. For files there's OwnCloud. Sadly, for communities and collaboration (Web 2.0) there isn't that much. Matrix, Mastodon? They are nowhere near the functionality of Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn et al. I spent 10 years reinvesting all our profits into building an open-source competitor to those centralized services, and it still needs some work to rival them: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ But I'll tell you something. Having your OWN servers and data is very attractive. That's why everyone moved away from America Online "keyword NYTimes" and towards hosting a web site on nytimes.com using the open HTTP protocol. Today, Facebook's "NYTimes" page is analogous to AOL Keyword NYTimes, Mark Z is analogous to Steve Case, and notifications are analogous to "You've Got Mail!" Nothing new under the sun... now we just need something like the Web to come along and disrupt them by letting everyone self-host their own stuff on a service that's almost as good. The Web Browser in the beginning only had Bold, Italic, etc. but publishers switched in droves, and users followed.

burundi_coffee 5y ago
I agree and I would like to recommend Nextcloud instead of Owncloud for anyone who needs more features than a NAS. Nextcloud has excellent support for calendar and contact synchronisation. There are a ton of other apps you can instal too: apps.nextcloud.com
boplicity 5y ago
> Having your OWN servers and data is very attractive. This is true for businesses that can justify the cost of self hosting for a variety of business reasons. This isn't true for most end-users, who just want reliable services. Hence, Wordpress.com vs. self-hosted Wordpress. I don't want to be personally responsible for my data; I want a professional organization to make sure it is safe.
- sodimel 5y ago
  I think small businesses don't want to spend X days per year to manage a self hosted solution, it's cheaper to just use a gafam service. (and I think that's a problem, OSS softwares today are ~reliable enough for end users, but not really for companies)
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  If you aren't personally responsible for your data, does it really exist? Is it really yours? What if your professional organization says "we've installed some big data analytics", or "whoops we lost all your data"?
  - sethhochberg 5y ago
    When I give a dress shirt to a professional dry cleaner, I'm not personally responsible for it while they're cleaning it. Its still my shirt. I'd consider using a different dry cleaner if they started keeping notes on what they thought I did to make my shirt dirty. If they lost the shirt, I'm angry and may even get some compensation, but the shirt is still gone and someone else probably has it. I completely understand that the scale and scope of abuse in tech can be much higher than with other services due to automation, but I don't see how its reasonable to question whether my stuff is still my stuff because I've entrusted it to a third party.
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      The laws around data are completely different, at least in the USA. In general, if someone else has "your" data, it's actually their data.
      - boplicity 5y ago
        Source?
  - boplicity 5y ago
    > If you aren't personally responsible for your data, does it really exist? Yes. > Is it really yours? Yes, though obviously it depends on the service, and my agreement with them. Most of my photos, for example, are backed up in OneDrive, which works quite well for my purposes. > What if your professional organization says "we've installed some big data analytics", or "whoops we lost all your data"? Good question! My photos, for example, exist on my local computer, Microsoft OneDrive, and on Google Photos. The odds of losing them are, frankly, as non-existent as possible. Multiple storage locations, IMO, are a good way to mitigate the relatively low risk of losing cloud data. Also, almost no effort on my part is required.
dpflug 5y ago
https://zotsite.net/ https://zotsite.net/ or https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/ approximate Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn on features (ignoring network effects).
tomc1985 5y ago
After seeing how big of a hard-on business drones have for OpEx vs CapEx expenditures, I don't think the cloud is ever going away completely. Like we have an entire cloud "revolution" (note the mocking quotes) because of a bullshit accounting rule!
- wahern 5y ago
  The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts (aka Trump Tax Cut) actually permits (or just increased limits for?) taking a full deduction, up to $1 million, for computing hardware, rather than following a depreciation schedule. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduc... and https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/new-rules-and-limitations-for-depreciation-and-expensing-under-the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/new-rules-and-limitations-for-d... We'll see if that catches on and makes a difference. Accountants, like software engineers and every other profession, tend to follow trends.

jasode 5y ago

>On the web today, [...] In order to submit an edit for this page, I hosted all my code on microsoft's servers.[...] I assume you're talking about people using Github instead of hosting their own server? But before Github, people also avoided hosting code on their own servers or paying $10/month for a datacenter VPS -- by using previous services such as SourceForge or Codeproject.com. If a bunch of people need to do activities <X> and <Y> but <Y> has higher priority in life, then some other service conveniently doing <X> will emerge. That's what Github is... it's a natural emergent phenomenon arising from people not wanting to mess around with running self-hosted Gitlab on a laptop, or Raspberry Pi, or on a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet, etc.

sodimel 5y ago
Agreed, perhaps the reason so many people use this service is because it may be because it solves a problem. But another approach (my point on the rant) is the "I don't want to know how things work, I just want them to work" approach, which I think more and more people are using these days (we can relate this to mechanics, where everything is getting more complex). Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. (ps: this exact txt file is self-hosted on a dell optiplex fx160 with 4GB ram and an old processor, bought $20 in 2017 on ebay)
- simonw 5y ago
  I know exactly how to self-host - I ran Trac for years - which is why I keep all of my projects on GitHub now. I know full well how much work it is to keep something like that maintained and secure and properly backed up. I also know how many things can go wrong - including nasty things like missing billing emails when a credit card expires and losing the associated instance. "GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository across our three data centers to protect against failures at the server, rack, network, and data center levels" - I can't compete with that! https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-performance-on-github/ https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-perf...

XCSme 5y ago

In most cases, if you want to change something you can also send an e-mail with your desired changes, without registering on any platform.

jayd16 5y ago

Servers vs services is an odd way to frame this discussion. Seems like the specific problem is pull requests are not a core git feature in that they cannot be conveniently accomplished in a secure and decentralized way.

megous 5y ago
How did you come to that idea? Pull request is common feature for maintainers in the Linux world, and they don't use github to send them to Linus. And on top of that they are secure (signed tags) and decentralized (maintainer can publish them anywhere)
- jayd16 5y ago
  And yet everyone uses the Github or Gitlab tools because it's still not convenient enough for most teams, sadly. It's an annoying problem because you need decentralized identity. Signatures handle that but the UX is not as nice as the centralized github/gitlab account. The design of decentralized PR hosting also doesn't play nice with the github/lab UX. If you were trying to create a PR to a github repo you'd have to handle authenticating the github pull from where-ever you hosted. If the repo isn't public that seems very cumbersome even if it was supported. It's just much easier to do this entirely inside github/lab, annoying as that is.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I think the interesting question is: what really qualifies as a service? IMHO, a service is just a program someone else manages running on a server, that I can use remotely with a REST API. In college, in the 80's, I used the symbolic math program Maple on an MTS mainframe. Is Maple a service? I say no, only because services tend to be web related, they have a REST API accessed with HTTP. But if Maple supported a REST endpoint, bam, its a service. In this OPs example, the "service" API is email, not HTTP. But it achieves the same goal. What I think the OP misses is: who the heck wants to log on to the server and tweak the site content from the unix prompt when there is an API?

sodimel 5y ago
I think it depends. For small, fast-writtent rants, txt files are great (my crap-computer-that-is-running-next-to-my-box didn't even burned when the post reached the front page of hn). I really see the point in not having to manage a whole big ecosystem by ourselves (I use gitlab, sometimes github). The rant was about using an interface on another website (not the email API) in order to submit a PR or an issue for updating a website. It's a standardized way of doing an edit (and it can be painful when you don't know github), and more and more websites are using it.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > the rant was about using an interface on another website oh, i see. i overlooked that. thanks.
fragmede 5y ago
That's a very specific definition for service. What's going to happen to that definition when technology eventually moves past using REST APIs? A program running on your school's mainframe that you access via some sort of terminal is a computing service from before the Internet. Plenty of people use a Unix prompt to access both local and remote computers. That its not your preferred method is fine, but there are people out there that prefer it! If those command line tools are hitting the same API (eg using curl), what then?

shitRETARDSsay 5y ago

"On the web today, we don't use protocols, we use applications"

pnathan 5y ago

I had a choice a few years ago. I could have 5-8 NUCs/RPis, install a slew of conventional services I was curious about, and consider things like power, cooling, cables, storage. _or_ I could pay GKE for a k8s cluster, install most of the things I was curious about, and avoid dealing with, e.g., corruption of the SD card. Or the cat knocking the desk-rack of NUCs off. since rack, stack, and on-prem issues are not what I was wanting to sort out, I chose to deal with what I wanted to learn, rather than rat-hole down data center admin issues. I've been doing this work for years and years and years. I was scrounging boxes from the CS department for research 15 years ago (or more). Servers are a fundamentally flawed unit of reliability and development. Moving to a design world where you design for someone to knock over the box and _the computation keeps going_ is paradigmatically better. When you deal with forward looking people in the server-centric world and you show them a service / "keep going" world, their mind is blown and they want it IME.

antihero 5y ago
I will say that in the most part I agree with you. It is better to live in a civilisation, pay tax, have the litter collected, the roads paved, rather than trying to roll your own. However, being able to, to varying degree, opt out of said civilisation when it runs counter to your ideals or becomes to authoritarian or means that existing within it could compromise what you believe in, is important. The cloud is great, but we must strive to have the skills to be self reliant so it is truly a choice to participate in it to the extent that we do.

foolzcrow 5y ago

Avoid centralized services like with crypto.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

If you wanted to submit a change to a page back in the day, you e-mailed someone a patch. That required "signing up" for an E-mail account (unless you were a weirdo who telnetted to an smtp port and hand-crafted a mail delivery) and using someone's e-mail service, after you used a local application to craft the patch. The big difference today is that we don't use native apps, so we have to have accounts, to use somebody else's apps for free, because they want to track us and make money from us. On the web today, we don't use apps, we generate revenue for others via their apps.