3 ms·
The big expense is time and the third way is that we scale up by having sysadmins and developers create services that are significantly easier to use and mainta
by michaelbuckbee 5y ago
The big expense is time and the third way is that we scale up by having sysadmins and developers create services that are significantly easier to use and maintain as a whole.
If you're looking for a solid example of this look at Instagram which at the time of it's sale had 13 employees and ~10 million users.
Even if all 10 million of those folks had the expertise to run their own server, keep it updated and secure, keep backups, etc. it's still just wildly more efficient to have it centralized and hosted for you.
- ivanhoe 5y agoBut we're not talking about people running big websites, we talk about people running stuff like pi-hole and mastodon instances. It's all very rough around the edges right now, but the idea of distributed platforms is not to eliminate big sites run by big companies, that will always exist, but we could also have people running micro services for their own needs right on the devices they already use (phones, tables, laptops, nfs boxes), without needing any extra expertise for that, just like they run a phone app right now to check email or weather.
- kelnos 5y ago> It's all very rough around the edges right now It's rough around the edges for someone who is technically skilled and has some experience in system administration. For others (the vast majority of internet users), it's a nigh impossible task. I feel like everything in this space is perpetually "rough around the edges", and has been that way for decades. I don't have confidence that it'll be any different this time.