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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 k

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
    That last part is only true if the fundamental feature set meets some minimum requirement for whatever they're trying to do. All these companies competing on polish have confused the issue (perhaps because meeting that minimum is often quite easy).
  - gompertz 5y ago
    People are larger than the technical problems indeed, but I think that would have been a good thing in the "self hosting" world the parent commenter desired. People willing to put in the proper energy are likely those worthwhile to listen to. With the "easy to use" nature you pointed out, it has brought everyone and their dog to the thunderdome babbling their nonsense daily.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    I have no use for Facebook, and Gmail is not easy to use because it doesn’t do what I want. I need real email.
  - arnaudsm 5y ago
    I entirely agree. But OSS maintainers could have product vision too. We just need the right incentives, like better business models.
- adventured 5y ago
  It didn't happen because the masses of people absolutely do not want to do it. That will never change. This is why decentralized thing will rarely do anything other than fail. Consumers don't want to do it. They're tired. They want to sleep. They want to watch TV or Netflix or TikTok or YouTube or listen to Spotify. They want to turn off their brains in most cases. Maybe spend time with their kids. Or go to the grocery store, or football practice, or holiday shopping, or browse Amazon or eBay, or fret about bills, or prepare their taxes, or fix the sink, or mow the lawn, or play with the dog. They want someone else to be responsible for the thing. They want a central entity to blame, or complain to, and to pay to take it all off their plate. They just want to send Netflix $14 / month and click a button and never have to think about running their own systems. That's what they want. That's what they will always want, so long as the price is even slightly reasonable. No amount of wishing by techies is going to change that reality. Nothing you mentioned alters the fundamental problem: consumers don't want to do it, they're never going to want to do it. They're also not going to suddenly want to do all of their computing by bash. They're not all going to run out and teach themselves JavaScript. They don't want to run their own email servers. They don't want to run their own media servers. They don't want to take total control of their privacy and run their own decentralized social software. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, and that's all there will ever be, slivers of exceptions. They want to be able to walk away from Facebook or Instagram or YouTube for three weeks or three months and not worry about whether the server ate itself, or needs updates, or a new power supply, or has a critical security vulnerability - those things all become the consumer's responsibility. If they use Facebook they can shake their fist at Zuckerberg on the rare occasion the service is down; he's to blame for X Y Z; and it costs them nothing whether they use it once per day or once per year (yeah but privacy, they're the product; right, well, step into the average consumer's mindset and out of your mindset). The majority of consumers could change their own oil too. They don't want to because it's a big hassle to them. They don't even want to sew their own clothes, imagine. Bring back decentralized clothing. I'm endlessly baffled by the inability of most techies to put themselves into the shoes of the average consumer and just get it, get their point of view, grasp their mindset. It's extraordinarily easy to do. Just try it sometime, with practice it gets easy, I promise. No matter how many decades go by, none of this changes, and yet the techies persist with the decentralized fantasies. One day human nature will change, just you wait!
addicted 5y ago
The obvious question is why should these things be a pain in the ass.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  If you want everything to be decentralized it will always be a pain in the ass and have way more friction compared to a centralized alternative even if it's pretty easy in absolute terms. The problem is psychological, not technical.
  - necovek 5y ago
    You could say the same thing about laundry. While US has a plethora of laundromats and buildings get dedicated laundry rooms, in Europe (at least), even the tiniest apartments in apartment buildings have their own washing machine. While there is some overhead (if it breaks, you have to find someone to fix it; you need to clean that filter...), people have happily accepted the decentralization since the benefits outweigh the overhead. Same can be done with any other tech if we focus on streamlining it.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      The fact you compare this to laundry means you don't really understand the problem. Adding any sort of friction to an onboarding flow severely reduces conversion. The tech and it's benefits don't mean anything if there is too much friction before the user realizes the benefits, and it doesn't take much friction to dissuade people. See these tweets from a founder who built a social app startup and sold it to Facebook for 8 figures: - https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1273437328866832384 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1273437328866832384 - https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1339278829571854336 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1339278829571854336 - https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1324354709201711104 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1324354709201711104 Consumers won't adopt a decentralized solution because there is way too much friction. The only reason people use crypto is because there is a monetary incentive, and even then it's pretty damn fringe. This comment explains it beautifully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709446.
leephillips 5y ago
I do all those things now, and so do many other people. There is a parallel universe just like this. It’s here now, and has a large and happy population. Not a pain in the ass, but a pleasure.
- zepto 5y ago
  > It’s here now, and has a large and happy population. Happy maybe, but large no.

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
  That last part is only true if the fundamental feature set meets some minimum requirement for whatever they're trying to do. All these companies competing on polish have confused the issue (perhaps because meeting that minimum is often quite easy).
- gompertz 5y ago
  People are larger than the technical problems indeed, but I think that would have been a good thing in the "self hosting" world the parent commenter desired. People willing to put in the proper energy are likely those worthwhile to listen to. With the "easy to use" nature you pointed out, it has brought everyone and their dog to the thunderdome babbling their nonsense daily.
- leephillips 5y ago
  I have no use for Facebook, and Gmail is not easy to use because it doesn’t do what I want. I need real email.
- arnaudsm 5y ago
  I entirely agree. But OSS maintainers could have product vision too. We just need the right incentives, like better business models.
adventured 5y ago
It didn't happen because the masses of people absolutely do not want to do it. That will never change. This is why decentralized thing will rarely do anything other than fail. Consumers don't want to do it. They're tired. They want to sleep. They want to watch TV or Netflix or TikTok or YouTube or listen to Spotify. They want to turn off their brains in most cases. Maybe spend time with their kids. Or go to the grocery store, or football practice, or holiday shopping, or browse Amazon or eBay, or fret about bills, or prepare their taxes, or fix the sink, or mow the lawn, or play with the dog. They want someone else to be responsible for the thing. They want a central entity to blame, or complain to, and to pay to take it all off their plate. They just want to send Netflix $14 / month and click a button and never have to think about running their own systems. That's what they want. That's what they will always want, so long as the price is even slightly reasonable. No amount of wishing by techies is going to change that reality. Nothing you mentioned alters the fundamental problem: consumers don't want to do it, they're never going to want to do it. They're also not going to suddenly want to do all of their computing by bash. They're not all going to run out and teach themselves JavaScript. They don't want to run their own email servers. They don't want to run their own media servers. They don't want to take total control of their privacy and run their own decentralized social software. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, and that's all there will ever be, slivers of exceptions. They want to be able to walk away from Facebook or Instagram or YouTube for three weeks or three months and not worry about whether the server ate itself, or needs updates, or a new power supply, or has a critical security vulnerability - those things all become the consumer's responsibility. If they use Facebook they can shake their fist at Zuckerberg on the rare occasion the service is down; he's to blame for X Y Z; and it costs them nothing whether they use it once per day or once per year (yeah but privacy, they're the product; right, well, step into the average consumer's mindset and out of your mindset). The majority of consumers could change their own oil too. They don't want to because it's a big hassle to them. They don't even want to sew their own clothes, imagine. Bring back decentralized clothing. I'm endlessly baffled by the inability of most techies to put themselves into the shoes of the average consumer and just get it, get their point of view, grasp their mindset. It's extraordinarily easy to do. Just try it sometime, with practice it gets easy, I promise. No matter how many decades go by, none of this changes, and yet the techies persist with the decentralized fantasies. One day human nature will change, just you wait!

addicted 5y ago

The obvious question is why should these things be a pain in the ass.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
If you want everything to be decentralized it will always be a pain in the ass and have way more friction compared to a centralized alternative even if it's pretty easy in absolute terms. The problem is psychological, not technical.
- necovek 5y ago
  You could say the same thing about laundry. While US has a plethora of laundromats and buildings get dedicated laundry rooms, in Europe (at least), even the tiniest apartments in apartment buildings have their own washing machine. While there is some overhead (if it breaks, you have to find someone to fix it; you need to clean that filter...), people have happily accepted the decentralization since the benefits outweigh the overhead. Same can be done with any other tech if we focus on streamlining it.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    The fact you compare this to laundry means you don't really understand the problem. Adding any sort of friction to an onboarding flow severely reduces conversion. The tech and it's benefits don't mean anything if there is too much friction before the user realizes the benefits, and it doesn't take much friction to dissuade people. See these tweets from a founder who built a social app startup and sold it to Facebook for 8 figures: - https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1273437328866832384 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1273437328866832384 - https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1339278829571854336 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1339278829571854336 - https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1324354709201711104 https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1324354709201711104 Consumers won't adopt a decentralized solution because there is way too much friction. The only reason people use crypto is because there is a monetary incentive, and even then it's pretty damn fringe. This comment explains it beautifully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709446.

leephillips 5y ago

I do all those things now, and so do many other people. There is a parallel universe just like this. It’s here now, and has a large and happy population. Not a pain in the ass, but a pleasure.

zepto 5y ago
> It’s here now, and has a large and happy population. Happy maybe, but large no.