4 ms·

the cloud is a failure of the internet originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. the

the cloud is a failure of the internet originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. then the industrialists went full-cloud on this idea. and the 'intelligence' got concentrated in a few gigantic industrial warehouses. but it sure feels more orderly this way. why spread the load when you can focus it and centralize it?

digitalsushi 3y ago
I'm terrified. I'm someone who used to learn skills but now I learn products. I am not sure I can get to the end safely if everything in my professional toolbox is something I rent.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports. In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood. The lack of that basic infrastructure and demand for always connected devices meant hosting at home was never an option for the broad populace, and so the market never had an opportunity to deliver those solutions.
- blacklion 3y ago
  I've lived in country where symmetric Ethernet connection is norm for ~15 years (yes, 15 years ago it was something like 10/10 Mbit/s and now it is 100/100 or even more Mbit/s) and white, unfiltered, static IPv4 costs about +$2/month as option. Yes, it is for big city, but even small ones have something comparable, maybe slower like "3 years ago in big city". Typical ISP firewall for these IPs are "Port 25 is closed". And it's all. One problem - typically you can not get good PTR record, your back-resolve will be something like "ip12-45-67.pool34.isp.tld", which is pity for SMTP, but irrelevant for all other protocols. Unfortunately, this country has started bloody war, and now I'm living in civilized 1-st world country with crappy DOCSIS connection and without static IP :(
- dijit 3y ago
  This is the norm in Sweden, aside from Port 25, which you shouldn't be using anyway.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    The connection is, but nobody’s using it to host local servers.
    - dijit 3y ago
      *Nobody?* ahem; https://git.drk.sc https://git.drk.sc is hosted in my home office.
  - tpush 3y ago
    Why shouldn't you be using port 25? You need that if you want to receive email on your own mail server.
    - dijit 3y ago
      25 is plaintext. 465 is TLS, and is not blocked.
- akho 3y ago
  > fiber to the home I used to self-host while I lived in an apartment with a proper Ethernet connection. Now I have GPON with all the implications vis-a-vis a crappy provider-provided router and shitty service due to their monopoly position, so no real external access for me. My stuff is now tunneled through a VPS; it works fine, but I’m still salty.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
iammjm 3y ago
If everything is in your closet, how do you want to provide reliable auto-scale, redundancy, backups etc? I have friends in Ukraine, where shit literally blows up on a daily basis. And if this example is too extreme for you, I also have friends in Germany, where overflowing rivers remove whole houses once a year. There are services that need to be reachable all the time and you simply need replication in different geographical places to achieve that. for me decentralization = resilience
- rc_mob 3y ago
  Managed bare metal hosting?
  - noirbot 3y ago
    Does that actually mitigate the issues people have with Cloud stuff though? It's still "someone else's computer" at the end of the day. You're still having to deal with the eccentricities of whatever management layer they have on top of the computer to be able to rent it out to you. The fact that you're not buying it from Google or Amazon doesn't really make it less "cloud" in the "it's not local-first" sense.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Sure. Bittorrent-like tech has answers for you here.
- itronitron 3y ago
  Services that need to be reachable all the time tend to not be connected to the internet.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  i don't? I just wanna have physical ownership of the photos I upload into the cloud if my shit goes down, only me is to blame and only me has a problem if my house get's blown over by a river, I have bigger problems than streaming music from my own personal server and backing up my own photos in a more ideal world, I have some replication on 'friends' servers. but nobody runs their own shit.
moffkalast 3y ago
It's also a failure/the greed of ISPs, who cut upload speed from average consumers so they can sell it to datacenters and firms at a markup, making sure that a local server will always be slower than a cloud instance unless you pay extra.
pphysch 3y ago
It's working as intended. Conway's Law applied to the global context.
ilc 3y ago
Why not some of both? ... why does one exclude the other? I used to host my own e-mail. I decided that I couldn't give it the time and effort it deserved, and moved myself and my users to a provider. The best option is choice. Not forcing one or the other.

digitalsushi 3y ago

I'm terrified. I'm someone who used to learn skills but now I learn products. I am not sure I can get to the end safely if everything in my professional toolbox is something I rent.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

> originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports. In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood. The lack of that basic infrastructure and demand for always connected devices meant hosting at home was never an option for the broad populace, and so the market never had an opportunity to deliver those solutions.

blacklion 3y ago
I've lived in country where symmetric Ethernet connection is norm for ~15 years (yes, 15 years ago it was something like 10/10 Mbit/s and now it is 100/100 or even more Mbit/s) and white, unfiltered, static IPv4 costs about +$2/month as option. Yes, it is for big city, but even small ones have something comparable, maybe slower like "3 years ago in big city". Typical ISP firewall for these IPs are "Port 25 is closed". And it's all. One problem - typically you can not get good PTR record, your back-resolve will be something like "ip12-45-67.pool34.isp.tld", which is pity for SMTP, but irrelevant for all other protocols. Unfortunately, this country has started bloody war, and now I'm living in civilized 1-st world country with crappy DOCSIS connection and without static IP :(
dijit 3y ago
This is the norm in Sweden, aside from Port 25, which you shouldn't be using anyway.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  The connection is, but nobody’s using it to host local servers.
  - dijit 3y ago
    *Nobody?* ahem; https://git.drk.sc https://git.drk.sc is hosted in my home office.
- tpush 3y ago
  Why shouldn't you be using port 25? You need that if you want to receive email on your own mail server.
  - dijit 3y ago
    25 is plaintext. 465 is TLS, and is not blocked.
akho 3y ago
> fiber to the home I used to self-host while I lived in an apartment with a proper Ethernet connection. Now I have GPON with all the implications vis-a-vis a crappy provider-provided router and shitty service due to their monopoly position, so no real external access for me. My stuff is now tunneled through a VPS; it works fine, but I’m still salty.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

iammjm 3y ago

If everything is in your closet, how do you want to provide reliable auto-scale, redundancy, backups etc? I have friends in Ukraine, where shit literally blows up on a daily basis. And if this example is too extreme for you, I also have friends in Germany, where overflowing rivers remove whole houses once a year. There are services that need to be reachable all the time and you simply need replication in different geographical places to achieve that. for me decentralization = resilience

rc_mob 3y ago
Managed bare metal hosting?
- noirbot 3y ago
  Does that actually mitigate the issues people have with Cloud stuff though? It's still "someone else's computer" at the end of the day. You're still having to deal with the eccentricities of whatever management layer they have on top of the computer to be able to rent it out to you. The fact that you're not buying it from Google or Amazon doesn't really make it less "cloud" in the "it's not local-first" sense.
jrm4 3y ago
Sure. Bittorrent-like tech has answers for you here.
itronitron 3y ago
Services that need to be reachable all the time tend to not be connected to the internet.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
i don't? I just wanna have physical ownership of the photos I upload into the cloud if my shit goes down, only me is to blame and only me has a problem if my house get's blown over by a river, I have bigger problems than streaming music from my own personal server and backing up my own photos in a more ideal world, I have some replication on 'friends' servers. but nobody runs their own shit.

moffkalast 3y ago

It's also a failure/the greed of ISPs, who cut upload speed from average consumers so they can sell it to datacenters and firms at a markup, making sure that a local server will always be slower than a cloud instance unless you pay extra.

pphysch 3y ago

It's working as intended. Conway's Law applied to the global context.

ilc 3y ago

Why not some of both? ... why does one exclude the other? I used to host my own e-mail. I decided that I couldn't give it the time and effort it deserved, and moved myself and my users to a provider. The best option is choice. Not forcing one or the other.