- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The future is community-hosted
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I agree with the premise that selfhosting is not something the layman can or want to do, but the assumption that self-hosters only host software that serve themselves is very, very dumb, and clearly comes from the mouth of someone who self-hosts out of hate for corporate services (same, though) and not for the love of selfhosting.
He complains that the software he uses can’t handle multi-users, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. His solution is to make his government give him metered cloud services. What he actually wants is software that allows multi-users. What he wants, by extension, is federated services.
The bulk of users on the fediverse are on large, centrally/cloud hosted instances, but the vast majority of instances are self-hosted, and can talk to the centrally hosted instances, serving usually more than the 1 user who’s hosting the instance in their attic.
The author conflates self-hosting with self-reliance, and I understand why, but it’s wrong. If you’re part of this community, you’re probably not some off-gridder who wants nothing to do with society, self-isolating your way out of the problems we face. If you’re reading this, you already know that we don’t have to live on our own individual and isolated paradise islands to escape Big Tech. Federation is the future, but selfhosting is fundamental to that, and not everything can or should be federated. Selfhosting is also the future.
That’s an interesting point…
I’d like to share some (holiday) photos with my friends & family, so I can put those onto Pixelfed / Friendica / etc… I don’t necesarily want to share all the photos…
And that’s using the cloud.
Job Done. The self-hosting + federated cloud future is here!
Rejoice.
The photo sharing complaint I don’t understand, unless immich doesn’t have the option to provide public or password protected share and upload links, which would be a real shortcoming for such app.
Immich indeed has that option, I use it frequently. Password protection and upload option
I’ve not looked into it properly yet, but - considering this is still free software - I don’t believe that level of granularity exists.
So, if I wanted to share my holiday photos from last week with 1 friend, and the photos from someone’s party to different friends… nope.
I’d love to help community host stuff, but I’m terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.
Zero-knowledge hosting solutions should help with that, but I’m unsure how the tech and UX has been going for that on FOSS as of yet.
If you do not have physical access, it is not yours. Trust absolutely no one.
This guy didn’t want to do the leg work of emailing his photos to his friends, and declares self-hosting isn’t the solution to a social net? I totally see the point in community hosting, in fact I’m all for that.
But really? You don’t have to make your servers public facing, you just white-list the people you want to see your stuff and make sure to organize your drives with public and private pages.
He went through all that and didn’t take it far enough.
emailing his photos to his friends
that’s sometimes difficult, e.g. when you have thousands of photos, and emails have a size limit of 20 MB per email. using matrix chat or sth is also not ideal since the other side will have to download images one-by-one. sending a zip file might work, but the matrix protocol might have a size limit for attachments.
an FTP server might work. also consider that you want to store the images somewhere, not just send them once. how do you do that with messaging services?
Synology shared folder, separate user accounts, accessible through tailscale is how I share media with my friends and family outside my network.
The future is P2P
Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
Has anyone ever worked with them IT wise?
I do so in four different EU countries and know people who do in the US and Canada. And…well…there is a reason local governments often went towards the cloud services. Do people think Joe Admin in Bumfucknowhere can operate what basically becomes a MiniDC? And who controls that?
Sorry. Either go “host at home” and only fuck up things for oneself. Or do it properly with a proper DC. Colocate if you want. But that? I know it sounds appealing, especially for someone entering selfhosting (like the author did a few weeks ago). But there is a reason hosting is a business once it comes to other peoples data.
I can easily host vaultwarden, trillium, docker-mailserver, jellyfin, borgbackup and syncthing instances for my 5 neighbours. Everyone who’s even slightly good with computers can do that for their neighbours. That’s what I think when I hear “community”. Not online fandoms.
Yeah. And I am sure you won’t do anything bad.
But we all know how many that will not be the case. There were countless cases of school IT staff being malicious, of healthcare IT staff being malicious. Do you think that won’t be happening regularly on a small community scale? And that goes both ways: What happens when your neighbour suddenly accuses you of stealing passwords from you?
Don’t get me wrong - I am also providing services to my friends and family. But I absolutely do refuse to do so for any vital or financially debilitating services (which I consider vaultwarden for example). And I am seeing large issues with promoting this model as a solution - which need to be addressed.
I trust my neighbour more than I trust Big Tech.
With Big Tech we know full well they’ll completely legally, ethically and anonymously harvest us, profile us, manipulate us, encircle us and enslave us in their digital slaughter house. I’ll take my chances with 10 million community organizers and the occasionnal small time crook instead of the certainty of a Big Tech Panopticon Mega DystopiaYeah,big US tech is cancer - but I am fortunate enough to not live in the US and there are enough mid size companies that fall under reasonable laws and governmental oversight (in the good way,not the bad way) that I can choose from. People always seem to think it’s “selfhost or big tech” but there is a shitton of solutions between them.
Mailbox.org, Infomaniak(but I would be cautious on them due to the changing legal framework), posteo,Mullvad,Photoprism,Passbolt,Hetzner Storage Space,Ionos, Deepl, etc. are all a sane middle ground for most people and
I much rather have people do that than fall into the arms of their neighbourhood asshole (and let’s face it,there are a lot of difficult characters in IT). Because first of all it’s people’s lives who are at stake - You can wait for the first creep who will use access to his neighbours photos (Immich,Photoprism,etc.) for some uncanny purposes. Who will use the WiFi&Device passwords saved to get access to someones CCTV system to spy on his neighbours. Etc. Etc. And, and this is as much of an issue,it will only take a few of these people to drive people away from all open source products, right back into BigTech.
Lastly: It’s okay,that you see it that way. But people need to be informed that these are the risks. If you would take those risks (and don’t think from an IT role but from your neighbours perspective here), go for it. I wouldn’t, we can absolutely agree to disagree. And I don’t think many would once someone tells them the truth: “Yeah, BigTech can absolutely access your files and possibly your passwords with enough efforts. If you let Joe over here host your files and passwords he can,but BigTech can’t.” I am not sure how people would decide.
I think the issue is more that large tech firms can absolutely deal with external security in their applications. The amount of times gmail or Microsoft 365 has been hacked and leaked a bunch of client data is statistically zero when looking at their attack area.
Joe Dirt self hosting a mail server for his neighbors on a salvaged rack server is 1000x more likely to get hacked or lose a ton of his neighbors’ data than a big tech firm.
That is kind of the trade off for community hosting. There are very very few backup and security-literate people in communities.
Big Tech is what we need security from !
Prison are very safe, for the guards.
Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
I trust my local community more than i trust Amazon, that’s for sure.
Communities might be incompetent with IT (today), but maybe they just need a while to catch up. It could work in 10 years from now, and we gotta work towards that point.
Also, note that “local community” doesn’t have to mean municipality; it can also be your local nerd working part-time at your local library.
And this is somehow better?
There is a lot of room between “BigTech” and “Joe Average” doing it for his neighbours. Mailbox.org, etc. (see my other post here)
The future is federated.
I would say the future is in pooling resources.
Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.
Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.
All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.
But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.
And global cryptographic identities.
Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.
I’ve thought of all these, but what I’m describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you’d have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.
Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.
The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything
He proposes the cloud be owned by communities, so in a way by everyone. That’s not the same everything being owned by private companies.
In fact, that model (conceptually, though not technically) is how most fediverse software already work
So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?
Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.
Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn’t usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you’re going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences. We’re talking massive fines and/or jail time.
Edit: I should clarify that I’m not talking about services here, but content itself.
The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
Every city should host main public web servicies for its citizens, each one as an instance of a complex system, that’s how anarchy works.
Hi! This is what I’m trying to do with tucson.social. Wish the city would get back to me. I don’t want to own/operate Tucson.social alone perpetually. Lol.
It would allow me to expand to a lot more community services outside of social media, chat, and Meetup platforms.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
That quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons. The city residents pay for it but how do you verify “citizenship”?
If you mean citizenship as being associated to the city whose hosting services you are using, yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence should be able to do that. Now, if you want that plus anonimity, the only practical option I can think of for a city-wide physical campaign is some sort of GPG Signature Meetup (“signature party”).
yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills. Renters are usually two levels away from the actual owner. Then there are all the people who live and work in cities but aren’t official renters.
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills.
In my country it’s illegal for the landlord to include utilities in the price.
It’s the responsibility of the tenant to subscribe to those services in their name.
It’s done to prevent landlords from cutting utilities on a whim or to pressure late payments.
Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet’s inception.
False. They came along after the fact and sullied the waters, then lobbied to make it illegal to tinker with the DRM locks, then got richer than God.
And thus whatcom.social was spun up.
Thanks for the inspiration @[email protected] !
Something that’s always given me trouble is sharing my music.
If I hear a cool song and want to send it to a friend I have to go to YouTube.
And many of my friends send me Spotify tracks. The share feature of Navidrome has been incredible for this.
I can send them a link and have a listen party with them and then erase the link when were done.
It’d be nice to have this feature in more of the self hosted apps.
I’ve had the same problem with audiobooks until I found the soundleaf app - it connects to my self-hosted audiobookshelf server and makes sharing with freinds super easy without having to use mainstream services.
I wish more services adopted the service Tidal uses that sends 1 link that then points to YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, and Apple music.
It looks like you can self host Navidrome.
I’ve just been using Jellyfin for my music. Is there a big advantage to this over it?
Yeah that’s what I’m doing. Its been great
The future (and the past) is piracy.
Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I worry that quickly this will follow this path:
- Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
- Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
- Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
- The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
- They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.
Wouldn’t a zero-knowledge hosting solution (you provide hosting, but you can’t see what’s into it past a stream of binary) help with that?
Software suggestions?
This is really cool. And I would say a good replacement for current cloud setups. Since it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to self-host. Although I think this could only really be a cost saving measure since there are already services like protondrive that offer end 2 end encryption. And I would probably trust the reliability of proton drive over the community hosting my stuff.
