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> The reason people don't want to run their own servers is because in most cases it's as expensive, or more expensive, than having someone else do it for you, a

> The reason people don't want to run their own servers is because in most cases it's as expensive, or more expensive, than having someone else do it for you, and requires a huge amount of skill and patience, not to mention risk tolerance. It very much depends on what do you need a server for, and may not always be true. However, IMHO primarily it's neither of these reasons you mention, nor any rational reason at all, but simply the fear of getting out of the comfort zone. The same reason why majority of people are not into DIY, but rather pay others to fix their plumbings or pour the concrete or change the lightbulb in a car. If you know nothing of it, running a server on your own sounds scary, you fear you'll screw up something, it's all stressful, and you'll rather pay to make it someone else's problem. But then you also have a not-so-insignificant number of people who really enjoy in DIY approach and love doing as much as possible themselves. So the author's counterargument IMHO is more about Moxie stating something as an absolute truth, while in fact it's more like "majority of people will probably not want to run their own servers, under the current state of affairs". However I'm old enough to remember the time when the same applied for Internet - majority of people were not interested in messing with modem drivers and PAP/CHAP scripts just to connect to some BBS to chat with people, the idea seemed as ridiculous waste of time if you asked my father. And yet here we are now just some 25+ years later, whole world is connected. So perhaps the centralized platforms can't be avoided, or perhaps we need to make running your own server easier? And maybe both ways can co-exist, because different people want different things?

brnt 5y ago
Napster worked perfectly fine without any config. Old Opera Unite showed a world where untrained users could start safe servers. Tools like Popcorntime show that such tech continues to work fine. People aren't given the choice, because there is so much more money in centralized, paid services. They've completely crowded decentralized tools out.
scroot 5y ago
A question that people in the computing field need to consider: is computing more like plumbing or more like reading and writing? It's an important distinction for many reasons. I would pay someone to do most of my plumbing. I wouldn't even think of outsourcing most of my writing. Should computing always remain a scribal practice as it is now? At the end of his review Moxie seems to indicate he feels this shouldn't be the case. I don't see how that aligns with re-defining what it means for "everyone to run their own servers"
giantrobot 5y ago
> However I'm old enough to remember the time when the same applied for Internet - majority of people were not interested in messing with modem drivers and PAP/CHAP scripts just to connect to some BBS to chat with people, the idea seemed as ridiculous waste of time if you asked my father. And yet here we are now just some 25+ years later, whole world is connected. There's a vast gulf between running a server on the public Internet and writing a modem script. When writing modem scripts was necessary to get online very few people actually bothered getting online even if they had a computer capable of doing so. Running a server of any type of the Internet is rarely a trivial exercise. Even when running one on a home system from a residential ISP you've got to poke holes in your router's firewall and maintain the server hardware and software. These are not things most people are even capable of doing let alone being interested in it. > So perhaps the centralized platforms can't be avoided, or perhaps we need to make running your own server easier? And maybe both ways can co-exist, because different people want different things? No matter how turn-key you make "running a server" there's going to be technical issues many people won't understand or be able to handle. We already live in a world where turn-key Internet connected devices are exploited en masse by malware. You're also ignoring one of Moxie's major points that a huge portion of the population gets online via mobile devices. Just the basic design of mobile OSes largely precludes long-running server software running in the background on them. They're also on CGNAT networks with varying IPs and roaming on and off various WiFi networks. The only meaningful way for them to serve content is to bounce it off of centralized servers that don't have the same limitations of power or network connectivity.
- enkiv2 5y ago
  Turnkey systems are a special case, because they specifically hide the configuration knobs that otherwise might be twiddled by even ordinary users (and thus keep the landscape from being a monoculture). This idea that you have to hide everything a user isn't expected to need to understand until they prove they already understand it, which seems to have originated with the Mac, is stupid & gets in the way of gradual & natural mastery. Systems that present configurability while having reasonable default behavior invite users to explore them at their own pace, and inevitably lead to ostensibly "non-technical" users gaining whatever specific technical knowledge and skill benefits them directly. Even if they end up making a misconfig, a million random misconfigs is very different (in vulnerability terms) from a single unfixable configuration hole deployed to a million black boxes.

brnt 5y ago

Napster worked perfectly fine without any config. Old Opera Unite showed a world where untrained users could start safe servers. Tools like Popcorntime show that such tech continues to work fine. People aren't given the choice, because there is so much more money in centralized, paid services. They've completely crowded decentralized tools out.

scroot 5y ago

A question that people in the computing field need to consider: is computing more like plumbing or more like reading and writing? It's an important distinction for many reasons. I would pay someone to do most of my plumbing. I wouldn't even think of outsourcing most of my writing. Should computing always remain a scribal practice as it is now? At the end of his review Moxie seems to indicate he feels this shouldn't be the case. I don't see how that aligns with re-defining what it means for "everyone to run their own servers"

giantrobot 5y ago

> However I'm old enough to remember the time when the same applied for Internet - majority of people were not interested in messing with modem drivers and PAP/CHAP scripts just to connect to some BBS to chat with people, the idea seemed as ridiculous waste of time if you asked my father. And yet here we are now just some 25+ years later, whole world is connected. There's a vast gulf between running a server on the public Internet and writing a modem script. When writing modem scripts was necessary to get online very few people actually bothered getting online even if they had a computer capable of doing so. Running a server of any type of the Internet is rarely a trivial exercise. Even when running one on a home system from a residential ISP you've got to poke holes in your router's firewall and maintain the server hardware and software. These are not things most people are even capable of doing let alone being interested in it. > So perhaps the centralized platforms can't be avoided, or perhaps we need to make running your own server easier? And maybe both ways can co-exist, because different people want different things? No matter how turn-key you make "running a server" there's going to be technical issues many people won't understand or be able to handle. We already live in a world where turn-key Internet connected devices are exploited en masse by malware. You're also ignoring one of Moxie's major points that a huge portion of the population gets online via mobile devices. Just the basic design of mobile OSes largely precludes long-running server software running in the background on them. They're also on CGNAT networks with varying IPs and roaming on and off various WiFi networks. The only meaningful way for them to serve content is to bounce it off of centralized servers that don't have the same limitations of power or network connectivity.

enkiv2 5y ago
Turnkey systems are a special case, because they specifically hide the configuration knobs that otherwise might be twiddled by even ordinary users (and thus keep the landscape from being a monoculture). This idea that you have to hide everything a user isn't expected to need to understand until they prove they already understand it, which seems to have originated with the Mac, is stupid & gets in the way of gradual & natural mastery. Systems that present configurability while having reasonable default behavior invite users to explore them at their own pace, and inevitably lead to ostensibly "non-technical" users gaining whatever specific technical knowledge and skill benefits them directly. Even if they end up making a misconfig, a million random misconfigs is very different (in vulnerability terms) from a single unfixable configuration hole deployed to a million black boxes.