5 ms·

I would love for something like this to become mainstream, mostly from a privacy PoV. But, I think there are just too many different use cases, pitfalls, user p

by rft 4y ago

I would love for something like this to become mainstream, mostly from a privacy PoV. But, I think there are just too many different use cases, pitfalls, user problems and limitations. Something like a plug and play box could work for the very small intersection of "technically inclined and understands how to port forward and how to fix minor problems" and "not interested in tinkering with self hosting". As someone else already mentioned, a big part for people self hosting seems to be the tinkering aspect. For me tinkering and privacy are the main motivators. On the potential problem side you have far too much friction compared to cloud services. It starts with getting a public domain and IP for sharing data with other people. Then you need to setup port forwarding, need a somewhat stable network and internet connection, run into problems with upload bandwidth being usually far less than download. Once you have the connection side taken care of, what about user onboarding, password recovery ("just mount the partition and overwrite the password" will not work), backups? How do you make clear the distinction between my self hosted Spotify and someone else's? Why can they not see my music? Why is there a difference in the first place? I know all/most of this can be solved in some way, but it is hard. There is also never going to be a big (think billion dollar) company involved with creating such a solution as there is no monetization model. You can not go for a subscription (imo), because then you just pay someone to host something at your home using your power and bandwidth. You could say you only pay for support and maybe a relay to workaround NAT, but how would the support look like? Full access via an admin account? Privacy just got downgraded. What happens if the company hosting the relay goes under? Enjoy your brick (local would still work, but the user experience would be far worse). Apart from all these software and user experience problems, we still need the hardware. It needs to be reasonably cheap (US and EU market maybe 200-300USD), but it needs to be reliable (it will live in the worst possible place, like a hot, dusty cupboard) and support some more advanced use cases. Of course >90% will only use it for some light file storage, music streaming and voice control, but 10% will make heavy use of transcoding, invite others to their services, store TBs of media, run their entire home automation on it. How do these 10% know they are in the 10% and need to buy different hardware? Why can the box not do automatic quality adjustment like Netflix does? Do you have a hardware migration path? And what about cross compatibility? In this thread alone you got multiple different systems. This just multiplies user support issues or will lead to vendor lock in, just a different kind. Lastly, you need marketing to bring this to the mainstream. And you need a big selling point to make people migrate from "free" cloud services to something they need to pay upfront. I hate to be this negative about this topic, but I just do not see this being viable outside a relatively small, interested community. Please, correct me here, I would love to see this become real and mainstream!

asim 4y ago
Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed response. All your points make sense and it's those things that have to be resolved one by one to make anything like this not just a viable product but an actual sustainable business. I do keep coming back to this idea mostly because unlike a lot of people here, I don't want to tinker anymore, I don't want to hand build something from scratch, those days are long gone. I'm happy and willing to pay for something that works and maybe even a subscription for a period of time (think mobile phone contract). Ultimately as you say privacy is the clear selling point. So much of what's in the cloud is now being exploited or hacked. Obviously the cloud is here to stay and we'll continue to rely on it for a ton of high compute, high bandwidth and high storage needs, but there's so much of what we do on a day to day basis that just doesn't require it e.g let's just say I need to talk to my family, leave notes between us, share sensitive documents, etc. All of that can very much be local in my house. All the things that we do in our physical houses we deem private, the digital should be the same. But we've shifted from the personal computer to public cloud services. There was big benefits but equally there will be huge benefits to going private once more. I can't say this problem will be solved anytime soon. Someone has to really want to solve the problem for themselves first. I'm hacking on a little toy that might manage DNS, email, web serving, file storage, etc as one binary but I'm not sure it will go anywhere, it's just an experiment.
joshka 4y ago
I wrote up a larger reply to this, but simplified it a bunch: 1. Hardware needs to be good enough. Raspberry Pi proved that. Ubiquity of common parts solves a bunch of issues. The main limiting factors here are likely transcode speed, ethernet speed, encryption speed. 2. Software needs a good modularization story. Linux in general suffers from the idea that everything is configurable and to configure everything you have to learn about how it interacts with everything. There's a lot of focus on how to do things rather than matching common use cases to profiles that just work. As a concrete example rather than selecting the "I'm at a coffee shop or airport" profile, I need to select that I'm on an insecure network that I don't trust with a specific password and a configuration for my VPN that forces traffic ... Addressing componentization via use case design seems lacking (and a good place to introduce standardization). A lot of the "tinkering" level software seems to start with "How" rather than "Why" as the impetus. 3. Security. We have security principles that are evolving to solve these sorts of problems (OAuth2 RAR, Passkeys). Invest in them. 4. Support. Common solutions for common problems breed easier conversations. There are consultants that do NAS support for small businesses because those NAS companies have gained enough market share. Secondly we need to spend more time to start with the why rather than the what. Software developers (myself included) obsess over the latter and build systems at that level that can answer (how fast is my connection) rather than systems that inherently answer the real need (why is my connection slow or intermittent). 5. Perhaps the answer is just build a better NAS company where the focus is on home server software rather than purely around adding server software to a bunch of disks in a box. Perhaps the answer is really embracing the idea of U in NUC? Perhaps this has been done elsewhere? Perhaps it's been done too many times to really work?

by rft 4y ago

asim 4y ago

Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed response. All your points make sense and it's those things that have to be resolved one by one to make anything like this not just a viable product but an actual sustainable business. I do keep coming back to this idea mostly because unlike a lot of people here, I don't want to tinker anymore, I don't want to hand build something from scratch, those days are long gone. I'm happy and willing to pay for something that works and maybe even a subscription for a period of time (think mobile phone contract). Ultimately as you say privacy is the clear selling point. So much of what's in the cloud is now being exploited or hacked. Obviously the cloud is here to stay and we'll continue to rely on it for a ton of high compute, high bandwidth and high storage needs, but there's so much of what we do on a day to day basis that just doesn't require it e.g let's just say I need to talk to my family, leave notes between us, share sensitive documents, etc. All of that can very much be local in my house. All the things that we do in our physical houses we deem private, the digital should be the same. But we've shifted from the personal computer to public cloud services. There was big benefits but equally there will be huge benefits to going private once more. I can't say this problem will be solved anytime soon. Someone has to really want to solve the problem for themselves first. I'm hacking on a little toy that might manage DNS, email, web serving, file storage, etc as one binary but I'm not sure it will go anywhere, it's just an experiment.

joshka 4y ago

I wrote up a larger reply to this, but simplified it a bunch: 1. Hardware needs to be good enough. Raspberry Pi proved that. Ubiquity of common parts solves a bunch of issues. The main limiting factors here are likely transcode speed, ethernet speed, encryption speed. 2. Software needs a good modularization story. Linux in general suffers from the idea that everything is configurable and to configure everything you have to learn about how it interacts with everything. There's a lot of focus on how to do things rather than matching common use cases to profiles that just work. As a concrete example rather than selecting the "I'm at a coffee shop or airport" profile, I need to select that I'm on an insecure network that I don't trust with a specific password and a configuration for my VPN that forces traffic ... Addressing componentization via use case design seems lacking (and a good place to introduce standardization). A lot of the "tinkering" level software seems to start with "How" rather than "Why" as the impetus. 3. Security. We have security principles that are evolving to solve these sorts of problems (OAuth2 RAR, Passkeys). Invest in them. 4. Support. Common solutions for common problems breed easier conversations. There are consultants that do NAS support for small businesses because those NAS companies have gained enough market share. Secondly we need to spend more time to start with the why rather than the what. Software developers (myself included) obsess over the latter and build systems at that level that can answer (how fast is my connection) rather than systems that inherently answer the real need (why is my connection slow or intermittent). 5. Perhaps the answer is just build a better NAS company where the focus is on home server software rather than purely around adding server software to a bunch of disks in a box. Perhaps the answer is really embracing the idea of U in NUC? Perhaps this has been done elsewhere? Perhaps it's been done too many times to really work?