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Our age gap is less then 10 years but here's my two cents: laziness/convenience. Back in the 90's and 2000's, you had to be ready to spend a lot of time fiddlin

Our age gap is less then 10 years but here's my two cents: laziness/convenience. Back in the 90's and 2000's, you had to be ready to spend a lot of time fiddling with setups and maintenance as well as some MAJOR early days security flaws(think the IRC days). Corporate-owned ecosystems solved that problem: you log in and forget about it. They won with what some people call user experience. The lower the entry barrier, the quicker something picks up. Back when I was in school I was the biggest Nokia fanboi and even then I acknowledged that downloading a shady jar file and installing it on my phone was iffy. At a later stage when I was a bit older and could afford it, I got my first Android phone and the existence of a marketplace was a breath of fresh air. The problem is that few people(annoyingly even now) fail to realize or admit that those types of centralizations put handcuffs on your wrists the moment you say "OK, that works for me". Whether that's social logins, cloud providers, services or anything else - it's all the same. For example, if today, OpenAI decided to close off their API's for good, I recon tens if not hundreds of thousands of "AI" startups will collapse immediately since they fully rely on OpenAI's API's. Same with AWS, GCP, Azure or any other provider. And as we see with the current fiasco with twitter, tiktok and bambu labs just to name a few from the past two days, it is abundantly clear that people are in dire need of backups. As much as I used to find google drive and docs convenient, I've personally moved away and self-host everything now. The only thing I rely on(and only as a backup plan to access my home network) is a VPN I host over at Hetzner. But again - this is my backup. Whether the corporations saw that as an opportunity at an early stage or they were at the right place, at the right time, I can't say. I'm more leaning towards the latter since I've worked at corporations and success in those environments is most commonly a moderately-educated gamble.

ryanhecht 2y ago
Yeah, I think it's clear that laziness/convenience is the answer. You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on. I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure. Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start
- axegon_ 2y ago
  I think there are two aspects to this: * The software: different open source solutions have very different requirements at a high level: language, platform or even system requirements. Say you want to take messaging off centralized platforms: you need to host something like Matrix, which is very well made and polished but takes a lot of resources to run. Alternatively, you could use Jabber, which scales like no other but is an absolute hell to setup and maintain. Same can be said about music, videos, movies and all other things * Operations: probably simple if you ask someone on HN, but you still need to understand networking, operating systems and file systems. I started using Linux when I was 11 in the distant 2000, and even now I'm not very enthusiastic if I have to make some changes to my zfs. You also need to consider backups and security and resources. Say you wanna run openstreetmap(which we recently started doing at work). Awesome but that requires an ungodly amount of fiddling in addition to an astonishing amount of time needed to unpack, even on enterprise hardware. If you are in the tech world, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great place to start. But if you want to make it simpler... Idk... A lot of people would need to put in a lot of effort, as in build a linux distro around this idea, along with "recommended hardware", one click install(a very dumbed down equivalent of portainer), and some backup and alerting mechanisms built into the system. It's a tough question and frankly I don't have the answer.

ryanhecht 2y ago

Yeah, I think it's clear that laziness/convenience is the answer. You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on. I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure. Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start

axegon_ 2y ago
I think there are two aspects to this: * The software: different open source solutions have very different requirements at a high level: language, platform or even system requirements. Say you want to take messaging off centralized platforms: you need to host something like Matrix, which is very well made and polished but takes a lot of resources to run. Alternatively, you could use Jabber, which scales like no other but is an absolute hell to setup and maintain. Same can be said about music, videos, movies and all other things * Operations: probably simple if you ask someone on HN, but you still need to understand networking, operating systems and file systems. I started using Linux when I was 11 in the distant 2000, and even now I'm not very enthusiastic if I have to make some changes to my zfs. You also need to consider backups and security and resources. Say you wanna run openstreetmap(which we recently started doing at work). Awesome but that requires an ungodly amount of fiddling in addition to an astonishing amount of time needed to unpack, even on enterprise hardware. If you are in the tech world, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great place to start. But if you want to make it simpler... Idk... A lot of people would need to put in a lot of effort, as in build a linux distro around this idea, along with "recommended hardware", one click install(a very dumbed down equivalent of portainer), and some backup and alerting mechanisms built into the system. It's a tough question and frankly I don't have the answer.