Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks".

I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.

If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.

Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks.

Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.

If you decide to foster an online community, then you might end up being the tech support to that community. For many of us, that is not an appealing choice.

I've heard this idea in several forms, and it's not what I think most people want.

I don't want to live in a world where everything is trackable to a stable identity. Since the stable identity is ultimately trackable to your socual security number, this is essentially a world in which all of your online activity is trackable to your SSN.

You can see why this is valuable to some people. And if you want to monetize everyone's data it's an important first step.

But it's firmly in the authoritarian camp where everyone is monitored and tracked. And that I think is still contrary to how most people want to live their life.

Having controlled by the user public-private key pair instead of multiple accounts on a variety of platforms doesn't bring self-sovereigninty by itself. Whatever you post/publish must also be discoverable by other people - and that's where we go back to centralized platforms/services of today.

This is when I head to an LLM to summarize the key take-aways. If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it. That said, I certainly agree with the summary! :P

But I think both of these articles gloss over the fact that end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people. Key management is a completely unsolved problem.

If you don't have e2ee, with current tooling most people will need someone they trust to run their server. But then you run into a privacy paradox: most people have more content they would rather have google looking at/training on than someone close to them looking at, than the other way around.

Personally I think the next step forward is improving software to be more turnkey so everyone can run their own as a GUI app on an old laptop or phone.

That said, we definitely need protocols for sharing stuff.

If you want a better future, make better self hosted apps, that are accessible, easy to set up, and don't lack features ordinary people ask for.

No fancy token ever beat an easy button. And no poorly built self hosting app is helping...

I know I would. I'm just not smart enough, nor have the correct kind of experience to start designing, building or evangelizing such solution, so I am stuck waiting for someone else.

A good example is ForgeFed, which I can't wait to mature enough to be usable.

If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected pieces of data that require storage in a relational database, then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead of just returning a self-contained blob.

Why not post the prompts, it’ll be a shorter read with presumably the same amount of new information.

I really wish this was as easy as talking about it is.

Christ, the ISP's here need to learn about QoS. ISP's everywhere need to learn how to keep their DNS running well.

We have not yet solved the basics. Of course we cannot solve the hard stuff.

Thus that in itself fails an idea of sovereignty: that choosing to be identified uniquely is your choice.

Barking down this alley, while useful from the perspective of NFTs, does not add much to the concept of actual sovereignty.

DID with ZK human proof on blockchain… Is this possible?

Nice idea, but that alone is not enough.

The POP3/SMTP protocol is still a server-client based model, and such model naturally gravitates towards centralized systems which leads to the problem we're facing today.

In my opinion, to encourage self-sovereignty, a protocol should decouple the creator and the publisher. The information created by the creator can be published on multiple publisher platforms selected/directed by the creator.

And ideally the creator should be able to directly sharing information with other creators too, like a P2P system. This should also help reduce the risk of information leaking thus more secure.

The protocol also needs to be flexible enough that it can adopt the needs of more modern users too, otherwise you'll found yourself back at the start line few years later.

P.S. If you think this comment is very empty, that's because it is. I've observed quite a few P2P based protocols over these years failing to gain popularity... this is one of the things really hard to get it right. I don't know how to do it, and many way smarter people also failed to do it. So, yeah, that's why this comment is so empty. But hey, if you can get it right, maybe they should give you a Nobel or something.

names and phone books

How does that work? I want to see the pictures of my friends, and they want to see mine. And I also want to see the pictures of some influencers.

What's the self-hosted Instagram setup that makes this work, while all the involved parties are self-hosted?

The future is not self-hosted

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175

Mesh only works in a post-quantum world.

The ideological approaches to these problems always seem to result in adding more technology to the problem, which introduces more attack vectors, more control points and more complexity, all of which are difficult to understand and manage. The real problem is you should not need to identify yourself all the time. And the best way to do that, contrary to the SaaS culture on here, is not to hand over your stuff to someone else where you need to identify yourself to get it back or even involve yourself in "services culture".

So over the last 2 years I unpicked all my dependencies and moved to a reductionist and disposable model. The "minimum happy subset" is pretty much a domain with an IMAP box still, as it was 20 years ago. The IMAP box is dumb enough to be moved around. And your stuff should be in simple files, with well-documented formats, on the computer that you own and control. An average user can self-manage this with minimal effort. Everything else I have found to be 100% disposable.

This incidentally lines up 1:1 with the non-technical friends I have who just don't care and do it that way anyway. Perhaps we care too much.

Also can we just get some plain old HTML presented like a 50 year old book next time.