4 ms·

It's really an economy of scale thing, and is not that surprising. The economy of scale is separately at the level of hardware procurement, security, interop,

It's really an economy of scale thing, and is not that surprising. The economy of scale is separately at the level of hardware procurement, security, interop, bandwidth, access to electricity, and probably other things. This isn't a normative claim. Simply that the tendency for these types of things to centralize as complexity and demand increases is natural. I think it's tough to say that it was taken away, or that there's anybody in particular to blame. The hardware market moves fast, the capabilities needed evolve fast, etc. It's still 100% possible to host your own stuff. Many people do, but it's obviously a vast minority. But it's not like there are licensure requirements to host your own website. Some things are disallowed by consumer ISPs, but you can also generally upgrade that allow it. It's worth noting that when it was simple and unrestricted, it was also vastly more expensive and far fewer people participated. Part of the reason why internet is so cheap now (on a $ / byte basis) is that new offerings were designed that restricted people on the now available cheap plans from doing things that are very expensive.

jalk 2y ago
Can you can give an example of what expensive things those cheap plans are restricted from having access to (IPv4 blocks?)
- lmz 2y ago
  A public IPv4 address for some, general restrictions against using it as a server / hosting any services in the AUP for others.
- protocolture 2y ago
  CGNAT tends to make your life very difficult. Lots of residential internet plans will block certain ports, even if you do end up with a public ip.
marcosdumay 2y ago
> It's still 100% possible to host your own stuff. It's absolutely not. A minority of people have direct access to a network that will let other people reach any service they want to host. You need to carefully select your location to get that. And a lot of people don't even have direct access to a public address. And that's not even going into the monopolized federated protocols like email, where you can only do anything if big-tech allows.
bee_rider 2y ago
I think I disagree… desktops are pretty inexpensive in the grand scheme of things. I mean most of us could host our stuff on a raspberry pi or something like that. It isn’t like we’d individually need to handle a ton of traffic. Rather I think the problem is that most server (software) was pretty poorly written, to the point where it requires professional administration and maintainence. Although, this did create a lot of IT jobs. I guess there isn’t anyone, really incentivized to architect things better.
- nine_k 2y ago
  You could run your blog off your machine at home, much like you (hopefully) run your home automation from a machine at home, not a cloud instance. Serving your collection of videos from home is a bit ore taxing, should anything become popular. And if you produce popular videos, you want to handle subscriptions and comments, accept payments, fend off spam, and weather the occasional DoS attack. Things quickly snowball into a full-time sysop job. This is to say nothing of businesses that need hundreds of boxes. Putting them all in the office building means you have really hard time moving, e.g. because you grow and need more space, even as we ignore the question of redundant power and internet links in the building. Datacenters most honestly deserve their place. They make life easier for many people, for many reasons. They are not the only thing that should exist, but very certainly they are not a mistake or aberration.
- latentsea 2y ago
  People don't do this for reliability reasons. All you need is a static IP, a machine at home and a internet connection. It's fine if you don't care about uptime, but people aren't running businesses that way for a reason.

jalk 2y ago

Can you can give an example of what expensive things those cheap plans are restricted from having access to (IPv4 blocks?)

lmz 2y ago
A public IPv4 address for some, general restrictions against using it as a server / hosting any services in the AUP for others.
protocolture 2y ago
CGNAT tends to make your life very difficult. Lots of residential internet plans will block certain ports, even if you do end up with a public ip.

marcosdumay 2y ago

> It's still 100% possible to host your own stuff. It's absolutely not. A minority of people have direct access to a network that will let other people reach any service they want to host. You need to carefully select your location to get that. And a lot of people don't even have direct access to a public address. And that's not even going into the monopolized federated protocols like email, where you can only do anything if big-tech allows.

bee_rider 2y ago

I think I disagree… desktops are pretty inexpensive in the grand scheme of things. I mean most of us could host our stuff on a raspberry pi or something like that. It isn’t like we’d individually need to handle a ton of traffic. Rather I think the problem is that most server (software) was pretty poorly written, to the point where it requires professional administration and maintainence. Although, this did create a lot of IT jobs. I guess there isn’t anyone, really incentivized to architect things better.

nine_k 2y ago
You could run your blog off your machine at home, much like you (hopefully) run your home automation from a machine at home, not a cloud instance. Serving your collection of videos from home is a bit ore taxing, should anything become popular. And if you produce popular videos, you want to handle subscriptions and comments, accept payments, fend off spam, and weather the occasional DoS attack. Things quickly snowball into a full-time sysop job. This is to say nothing of businesses that need hundreds of boxes. Putting them all in the office building means you have really hard time moving, e.g. because you grow and need more space, even as we ignore the question of redundant power and internet links in the building. Datacenters most honestly deserve their place. They make life easier for many people, for many reasons. They are not the only thing that should exist, but very certainly they are not a mistake or aberration.
latentsea 2y ago
People don't do this for reliability reasons. All you need is a static IP, a machine at home and a internet connection. It's fine if you don't care about uptime, but people aren't running businesses that way for a reason.