alt Hacker NewsFuck the cloud (2009)
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I'm surprised people are advocating self-hosting as a viable solution. It takes a lot of knowledge to do sync and backup yourself, most of it implicit knowledge that people here don't realize we have and so for us it seems very easy.
There was a comment in another post on the front page about how anyone "remotely technical" can set up a docker container, and I think this is a good example because the mechanics of it are simple (edit a couple text files, run a couple commands), but half the world couldn't tell you what a terminal is and they're focused on other things in life instead of learning how computers work. Cloud succeeded because cloud is easy (at least in the beginning), it's that simple.
If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough for the average 7-8 year old to do it without struggling. One promising way forward is with local-first E2EE sync and backup. The only good implementation I know of personally is Obsidian Sync, which has a UX that I adore, and hope to see more of in the future. There's other good options too, but none that I'd feel comfortable trusting a seven-year-old to execute correctly first try.
The irony of this is hilarious
> Resource Limit Is Reached
> The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
As it appears to be hugged to death, archive link: https://archive.ph/qsdc3
The idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cloud provider to another is a huge endeavor these days.
I am big fan of internet 1.0 https://speculumx.at/blogpost/vom-archiv-zur-ablenkung
I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
We've gone full circle from Mainframes (1980s Cloud) and back again !
I've taken to buying the occasional CD and DVD. While I still use spotify more than physical cds, I still have my old CD collection and the sound quality is so refreshing. And soundtracks aren't on Spotify. With movies it's hard to rewatch favourites because they don't stay on the streaming services. Again it's much more satisfying to own them yourself.
The reliability, speed and internet connectivity makes local first more appealing. Honestly - i host my own webpage, file server, and some compute locally.
17 years on, no value created, trillions extracted and used for stock buybacks. Destabilizing the economy, raising borrowing costs and making the feds print print print. In the 90s there were 8000+ publicly listed companies doing real business. Now there are ~3600, 10 years from now there will be at most 1000.
Gambling and endless consolidation feel good for monkey brains. Governments are supposed to step in, but we have a heckin' Cheeto in the White House.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
The sequel to Kiss the sky
Anyway, I love how well GDPR demonstrated this:
> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era.
2020s, people are going offline to have fun.
Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.
Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.