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I 100% agree. Imagine if self-hosting was taught in schools. Would Facebook and GMail be this big? I'm dreaming of an alternate universe where you read your fr

I 100% agree. Imagine if self-hosting was taught in schools. Would Facebook and GMail be this big? I'm dreaming of an alternate universe where you read your friends microblogs through RSS, with the client and timeline algorithm of your choice. Everyone has his own mail server, with proper open-source spam filters. Open-source is a public service, receiving donations from governments. We were so close to this.

tehjoker 5y ago
The spam problem is still pretty tricky, but this would be a good step. Owning the means of communication gives a lot of power to natural persons over corporate persons. Removing dealing with NAT and complications like that makes things a lot simpler even if it's not the be all and end all.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I’m sure they would be. You ship your org chart, so large organizations that move quickly will ship bulky applications. It’s very hard to make those applications smaller without slowing development considerably. Moreover, it’s not like there was a dearth of system administration experience at Google around the time GMail was conceived.
- aftbit 5y ago
  I read the GP's "big" as popular, not bloated.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Ah, I hadn’t considered this possibility. Thanks for pointing it out.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
You are dreaming about “trust everybody” universe, which ceased to exist long time ago. This is still possible in an isolated bubble, but our society is closer to “trust nobody” at this moment, so regardless of the technology used your dream is just a dream. We were close to it only for a brief period of time, when the bubble was small and society within it relatively homogenous.
xwolfi 5y ago
We were never close to this. You have to accept we need nurses, hairdressers and farmers and these people cant be expected to do the work required to maintain a critical email server on top of everything else they have to do. Look I heard in the US some people even have several jobs, I suppose by end of your second or third shift of the day, the last thing you want to do is a log4j patch type upgrade... doubly so when it's christmas and the kids are noisy.
- necovek 5y ago
  Does that not make it obvious that the problem is in the distribution of software? I run my own server and I don't want to care if any of the installed apps I run depend on log4j somewhere in the chain. I so far trust my Ubuntu LTS package archive to give me sufficient security updates for stuff I install from main, and this is the reason I avoid non-main software, but even Ubuntu is moving away from this model to snaps and such.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Yes but why Ubuntu LTS, gmail is even better at it: you dont even need to learn what a package is and you can focus on breaking your back 16 hours a day to pay your credit card debts. You overestimate the time available to people and that's why google can shove its ads down our throats in exchange for a huge time gain for everyone. Fix that first, then tell people to update their mail daemon.
    - necovek 5y ago
      That's quite a difference: gmail does not provide strictly security updates, but might change the entire UI/UX on their whim (or get cancelled: Google has infamously done that a lot). But, I am not saying that even LTS approach is sufficient, but that we could work on improving it so it's trivial for anyone to do (people using laundromats probably have no idea what a "filter" is in a washer either: that's not a barrier for people to get one, though).
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.
- xbar 5y ago
  Geocities. Tripod.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Geocities was the centralised easy alternative to hosting your own website, that was what made it popular.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      Geocities was entirely static though. You could back up your FTP folder and move hosts overnight if you wanted to.
      - spurgu 5y ago
        Plus most people had an identical copy locally, effectively working as a backup.
- arnaudsm 5y ago
  Of course there's issues, that's why it didn't happen! But solutions do exist: open-source focusing on UI, standardisation, free static IPs, more open operating systems, etc
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    You're completely misunderstanding what I'm saying. The people/product problems are far larger than the technical problems. Why would people ever want to manage all of those things? A large part of the value proposition of Gmail and Facebook is that they are easy to use. Also, this: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1369098642171162625 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1369098642171162625

tehjoker 5y ago

The spam problem is still pretty tricky, but this would be a good step. Owning the means of communication gives a lot of power to natural persons over corporate persons. Removing dealing with NAT and complications like that makes things a lot simpler even if it's not the be all and end all.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I’m sure they would be. You ship your org chart, so large organizations that move quickly will ship bulky applications. It’s very hard to make those applications smaller without slowing development considerably. Moreover, it’s not like there was a dearth of system administration experience at Google around the time GMail was conceived.

aftbit 5y ago
I read the GP's "big" as popular, not bloated.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Ah, I hadn’t considered this possibility. Thanks for pointing it out.

ivan_gammel 5y ago

You are dreaming about “trust everybody” universe, which ceased to exist long time ago. This is still possible in an isolated bubble, but our society is closer to “trust nobody” at this moment, so regardless of the technology used your dream is just a dream. We were close to it only for a brief period of time, when the bubble was small and society within it relatively homogenous.

xwolfi 5y ago

We were never close to this. You have to accept we need nurses, hairdressers and farmers and these people cant be expected to do the work required to maintain a critical email server on top of everything else they have to do. Look I heard in the US some people even have several jobs, I suppose by end of your second or third shift of the day, the last thing you want to do is a log4j patch type upgrade... doubly so when it's christmas and the kids are noisy.

necovek 5y ago
Does that not make it obvious that the problem is in the distribution of software? I run my own server and I don't want to care if any of the installed apps I run depend on log4j somewhere in the chain. I so far trust my Ubuntu LTS package archive to give me sufficient security updates for stuff I install from main, and this is the reason I avoid non-main software, but even Ubuntu is moving away from this model to snaps and such.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Yes but why Ubuntu LTS, gmail is even better at it: you dont even need to learn what a package is and you can focus on breaking your back 16 hours a day to pay your credit card debts. You overestimate the time available to people and that's why google can shove its ads down our throats in exchange for a huge time gain for everyone. Fix that first, then tell people to update their mail daemon.
  - necovek 5y ago
    That's quite a difference: gmail does not provide strictly security updates, but might change the entire UI/UX on their whim (or get cancelled: Google has infamously done that a lot). But, I am not saying that even LTS approach is sufficient, but that we could work on improving it so it's trivial for anyone to do (people using laundromats probably have no idea what a "filter" is in a washer either: that's not a barrier for people to get one, though).

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.

xbar 5y ago
Geocities. Tripod.
- lmm 5y ago
  Geocities was the centralised easy alternative to hosting your own website, that was what made it popular.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Geocities was entirely static though. You could back up your FTP folder and move hosts overnight if you wanted to.
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Plus most people had an identical copy locally, effectively working as a backup.
arnaudsm 5y ago
Of course there's issues, that's why it didn't happen! But solutions do exist: open-source focusing on UI, standardisation, free static IPs, more open operating systems, etc
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  You're completely misunderstanding what I'm saying. The people/product problems are far larger than the technical problems. Why would people ever want to manage all of those things? A large part of the value proposition of Gmail and Facebook is that they are easy to use. Also, this: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1369098642171162625 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1369098642171162625