6 ms·

They used to be really popular, back in the ancient times when I was young and full of excitement for all things compute, almost all software was local-first, a

• qzx_pierri 1y ago
  > what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ? FOSS
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit, there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? I worked on a somewhat well-known (at the time) product that used on-site hosting. One of our biggest customer complaints was that we didn’t have a cloud hosted option. Many companies didn’t want to self-host. They’d happily pay a premium to not have to host it. I think HN underestimates the demand for cloud hosted solutions. Companies don’t want to deal with self-hosted if they can pay someone else a monthly fee to do it.
  • rkomorn 1y ago
    I can't imagine wanting to self-host something like Jira, GitHub, or some wiki product unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment. Otherwise it seems like I'm just spending time and effort achieving the exact same result.
    • nightfly 1y ago
      I work in an org with 8ish FTEs, a handful of student workers, and like 200 volunteers. Almost every service wants $5 or more per user per month, that's $1,140 per month per service. We selfhost open source solutions for everything we can and sometimes have to write something in-house to meet our needs.
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        That sounds an awful lot like, to you, that is the "very big financial cost difference" I mentioned.
    • friendzis 1y ago
      Good luck finding vendor that supports isolation of tenants with sensitive data.
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        I'm not going to spend time trying to fix problems I don't have. Obviously if your constraints are different, do what works for you.
    • account42 1y ago
      That's short-term thinking. By making your business dependent on cloud solutions you are agreeing to future disruptions from forced changes and price increases that you can't foresee and won't be able to do much about when you learn about them.
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        That factors into financial incentives, doesn't it? There are also products that still have licensing costs even when you self host. I've worked at a large company that self-hosted Atlassian products that were a big part of a full-time team's job. I've worked at a large company that built virtually all their internal tooling in house. I've worked at a large company that used cloud-based vendors. They all had tradeoffs. One of those companies even forced a migration from cloud based CI to internal CI for cost reasons then stopped us halfway through because they couldn't scale up our hosted CI to keep up fast enough. I could argue your answer is just as short-term thinking when your critical tools end up costing you more hardware, data center, and salary opex than you planned for (which I have seen).
    • palata 1y ago
      Have you ever checked the cost of GitHub runners? Quickly offsets self-hosting ones.
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        Runners? Yes. There are definitely some compute/resource heavy things that are more efficient to self host. Until you run out of capacity and getting more capacity involves something like having go buy more hardware and data center space (which I've had to do, though not for CI reasons specifically). GPU-heavy tasks were also heavily in favor of buying hardware and self-hosting at the time I was making purchasing decisions at my job. Not everything falls in that bucket and the examples in my comment don't (GitHub isn't just runners). Edit: I'll also add a question: what part of "unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment" did you think would not cover "have you checked the cost of GitHub runners?"
        • palata 1y ago
          I didn't say you were wrong, I was just mentioning that I was absolutely amazed when I discovered how much my startup was spending in GitHub runners.
          • rkomorn 1y ago
            For sure. Everything metered on time scales up shockingly quickly (cost-wise). In general, I do prefer fixed costs, so self-hosting resource-intensive things makes sense.
    • raxxorraxor 1y ago
      I think Gitea is superior to Github to organize your repos. I deploy it in the corp I work for too and everyone is very happy with it. It is blazingly fast running on a small virtual machine. Granted, this is a business that needs on-premise infrastructure anyway because we have inhouse production. So we have a domain controller that can be used for everything auth. We use a combination of that and Entra (shitty name). I wouldn't want to host Jira because I don't like to work with it. Our wiki is self-hosted as well. Sadly, we also buy into MS infrastructure and use SharePoint and co. It is soo incredibly slow to work with... While you can be cloud only, it isn't an environment I would like to work in. Local alternatives are almost maintenance free these days and the costs are so much less for a faster service.
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        For me it's just a question of where I would want to invest my org's time. For example: how much time do I want us to spend looking after a task/ticketing system? About zero. How much time do I want my org to invest in DR planning for our self-hosted wiki? About zero. So unless there's a convincing difference (cost, features, etc), cloud-hosted SaaS would be my choice there. The answers also probably change a lot based on how the company operates. Would I have been comfortable with a self-hosted wiki when I worked at Facebook and we had a pretty damn good team providing DBs as a service? Yes. Would I have wanted to do the same when I was the sole infra person in my group at another job? No.
        • raxxorraxor 1y ago
          I think some time investment is very sensible for any form of decision about infrastructure. Today we have companies complaining about their software dependence, software license costs have heavily increased. Also, an experienced admin can setup a repository server in a day. This is probably even less time investment than getting offers for solutions. In my opinion the maintenance amount isn't less with SaaS at all as most maintenance work is integrating data. We do have a self-hosted wiki. We don't even need to think about it if we want to integrate document search or analysis. We own our data completely here and I would argue that data is quite an important chunk of wealth for a company. Some SaaS companies know that as well and they basically take your data hostage. And as a plus, as many things are on a local network, any access to that data is pretty much instant. To save time on infrastructure decision overall is a mistake in my opinion. You wouldn't do that for your ERP or CRM solutions either.
  • account42 1y ago
    That's a different situation than with offline first software though. With on-prem hosted solutions you'll have someone whose job it is to maintain that hosting and of course they'll want to push that work off to some service provider.
  • seec 1y ago
    Yes because its a responsability and generally those are costly. If they don't have real upsides you don't want them. So if you can get the same software utility with none of the management responsability you are very much willing to pay a bit more.
• jonahx 1y ago
  > there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ? That argument flies in the face of basic economics. The problem is that the people don't seem to care about being screwed. If they did, it would very profitable to provide the non-screwing, and lots of people would. The optimist in me believes this is a just a problem of education, understanding, and risk-assessment (ie, the screwing is hidden to them). But even if we grant this, that turns out be a very hard problem to solve.
  • Eisenstein 1y ago
    I think you say 'basic economics' but actually mean 'ideal free market'. Economics is the science of economies, which do not have to be free or market based. The problem with people's basic understanding of free markets is that it is heavily simplified. We are looking at it from the perspective of 'what if human nature wasn't ever a problem, everyone was always perfectly rational, and everyone had all of the information they needed to make a rational decision'. Those criteria do not and have never existed, which is why the free market fails sometimes at doing some basic things. Don't get me wrong, it is a great idea and it solves all sorts of problems and we should keep using it -- but don't come to the conclusion that because it all works out in the theory part, then if something in the real world is a certain way then we have to accept that it is efficient and inevitable.
    • jonahx 1y ago
      You've made a general argument that shows not all theoretical economic theories about free markets can be trusted. Fair enough. But my claim is much narrower. It merely relies on the love of money of real people in our current economy, and the premise that there is enough information flow that, if people cared, they would find and pay for products that don't screw their privacy, control, etc. I think both those premises are undeniably true.
      • Eisenstein 1y ago
        So you are saying that because people are being screwed in the current market that is undeniable proof that people are OK with being screwed by the market? If I misunderstand you please correct me. If that is what you contend, then you have no addressed whether or not the market allows them to do otherwise. You take for granted that the market is free and that people are willingly choosing this outcome with perfect knowledge and without any incentives or forces which would compel them to act despite not wanting to be screwed. For instance, if you do not have bargaining power with a company over your contract, you have no choice but to accept it. Can you enter into negotiations before agreeing to a EULA? There are forces that are not free market forces which constrain actions, there is human tendency to prioritize immediate needs over long term benefits, etc which all play a role. The fact that: 1. The market exists 2. We have a conception of how the market should work in an ideal 3. People act in a certain way do not all combine to make it true that 'people prefer it this way'. That's the point I am making in counter to your assertion.
• pnathan 1y ago
  I personally have needed to sync something between 3 and 6 devices over the past 5 years on a daily/weekly basis. I invite you to figure out how to algorithmically figure this out in a general case without needing Git Merge levels of complexity for data structures far more complicated than lines of code. Peer to peer device merging of arbitrary files for n > 2 conflicts. The answer - the algorithmically simple and correct answer - is to have a central hoster and the devices operate as clients. And if you have a central hoster, you now gave yourself a job as sysadmin with requisite backup/failover/restore with data management responsibility handling the decade+ case. Or I could hire a central cloud company to manage my tiny slice of sysadmin needs and _not_ have a part time job at home just dealing with file management and multifile merges. All models that are "I have a laptop and a backup hard disk" are _broken_.
• throw10920 1y ago
  > But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit Citation needed.