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Lets do this. There's literally no reason not to. It could even be a small standalone appliance that you plug in. It could be no bigger than Mac charging brick,

Lets do this. There's literally no reason not to. It could even be a small standalone appliance that you plug in. It could be no bigger than Mac charging brick, and could even function as one. We have to divorce society from these abusive corporate cloud relationships. It made sense 20 years ago. It is actively poisonous today. We can easily make a turnkey opt-in peer to peer cloud using today's consumer grade open hardware and software, much of it default off the shelf.

nativeit 3y ago
I’ve been using Caprover (https://github.com/caprover/caprover https://github.com/caprover/caprover - think stripped-down Heroku on any given Docker box) for a few years, and it’s hardly consumer-focused, but has accomplished a good portion of what would ultimately be required for such a product. It’s always that last bit where the effort/risk/cost/[insert prohibitive factor here] becomes precipitously steeper and challenging. I think it’s a fairly natural thing, but also it’s got a lot to do with being not only more difficult, but also you’re then faced with tackling it under the full weight of every technical decision you’ve made up until that point, which can severely limit the plausible approaches. I’d be keen to work on a project to marry a PaaS like Caprover with networking using ZeroTier or Tailscale, packaged in such a way that it could be easily deployed onto most reasonably equipped platforms, or delivered as a service.
eternityforest 3y ago
I think the problem is there's very little overlap between people who are interested in this stuff, and people who are interested in what typical consumers want. People are really focused on privacy, and even opt-in integration with nonprivate hardware and services doesn't happen much. Convenience features gtt completely ignored, and worst of all, a huge amount of P2P stuff has no mobile support. Furthermore a lot of it involves a self hosted single point of failure. For me that's a complete deal breaker, it's not acceptable that a service could go down because something happened to a home server while I was away. And then on top of that, most p2p projects for about 10 years were completely impractical blockchain things that either cost money or huge amounts of bandwidth and compute. Self hosted, with decentralized identity not tied to a domain name, with automatic backup and redundancy to a selectable cloud provider via an open source protocol, with a very high quality mobile app, and smartwatch support, etc, would be amazing. But it seems like people these days aren't interested in feature rich commercial style zero maintenance apps, so I'll probably keep mostly ignoring the entire concept of self hosting until that changes.
eternityforest 3y ago
I think the problem is there's very little overlap between people who are interested in this stuff, and people who are interested in what typical consumers want. People are really focused on privacy, and even opt-in integration with nonprivate hardware and services doesn't happen much. Convenience features gtt completely ignored, and worst of all, a huge amount of P2P stuff has no mobile support. Furthermore a lot of it involves a self hosted single point of failure. For me that's a complete deal breaker, it's not acceptable that a service could go down because something happened to a home server while I was away. And then on top of that, most p2p projects for about 10 years were completely impractical blockchain things that either cost money or huge amounts of bandwidth and compute. Self hosted, with decentralized identity not tied to a domain name, with automatic backup and redundancy to a selectable cloud provider via an open source protocol, with a very high quality mobile app, and smartwatch support, etc, would be amazing. But there's not much interest, and it basically can't be done in a UNIXy way, since a lot of the value the clouds provide is in the tight integration of everything, with voice assistants and calendars and a million little things that are individually maybe not even worth setting up manually.

nativeit 3y ago

I’ve been using Caprover (https://github.com/caprover/caprover https://github.com/caprover/caprover - think stripped-down Heroku on any given Docker box) for a few years, and it’s hardly consumer-focused, but has accomplished a good portion of what would ultimately be required for such a product. It’s always that last bit where the effort/risk/cost/[insert prohibitive factor here] becomes precipitously steeper and challenging. I think it’s a fairly natural thing, but also it’s got a lot to do with being not only more difficult, but also you’re then faced with tackling it under the full weight of every technical decision you’ve made up until that point, which can severely limit the plausible approaches. I’d be keen to work on a project to marry a PaaS like Caprover with networking using ZeroTier or Tailscale, packaged in such a way that it could be easily deployed onto most reasonably equipped platforms, or delivered as a service.

eternityforest 3y ago

I think the problem is there's very little overlap between people who are interested in this stuff, and people who are interested in what typical consumers want. People are really focused on privacy, and even opt-in integration with nonprivate hardware and services doesn't happen much. Convenience features gtt completely ignored, and worst of all, a huge amount of P2P stuff has no mobile support. Furthermore a lot of it involves a self hosted single point of failure. For me that's a complete deal breaker, it's not acceptable that a service could go down because something happened to a home server while I was away. And then on top of that, most p2p projects for about 10 years were completely impractical blockchain things that either cost money or huge amounts of bandwidth and compute. Self hosted, with decentralized identity not tied to a domain name, with automatic backup and redundancy to a selectable cloud provider via an open source protocol, with a very high quality mobile app, and smartwatch support, etc, would be amazing. But it seems like people these days aren't interested in feature rich commercial style zero maintenance apps, so I'll probably keep mostly ignoring the entire concept of self hosting until that changes.

eternityforest 3y ago

I think the problem is there's very little overlap between people who are interested in this stuff, and people who are interested in what typical consumers want. People are really focused on privacy, and even opt-in integration with nonprivate hardware and services doesn't happen much. Convenience features gtt completely ignored, and worst of all, a huge amount of P2P stuff has no mobile support. Furthermore a lot of it involves a self hosted single point of failure. For me that's a complete deal breaker, it's not acceptable that a service could go down because something happened to a home server while I was away. And then on top of that, most p2p projects for about 10 years were completely impractical blockchain things that either cost money or huge amounts of bandwidth and compute. Self hosted, with decentralized identity not tied to a domain name, with automatic backup and redundancy to a selectable cloud provider via an open source protocol, with a very high quality mobile app, and smartwatch support, etc, would be amazing. But there's not much interest, and it basically can't be done in a UNIXy way, since a lot of the value the clouds provide is in the tight integration of everything, with voice assistants and calendars and a million little things that are individually maybe not even worth setting up manually.