I Do Not Want Your Stupid App
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aol.mobile...
Redecentralize all internet services!
Shameless plug ahead, I believe in this idea so much I co-founded a company to help spread the idea and see it through.
Every person should have their own domain name and have the ability to run arbitrary services in the cloud. The price of computing power and bandwidth has come down so much that it's completely practical to do this now.
Would love feedback/thoughts: https://portal.cloud?invite=hn (invite code is just there so free domain discount is applied).
The most important thing is that no company (including mine) should ever have the ability to dominate the internet the way Google, Facebook, and Twitter do today.
We should be able to move from cloud provider to cloud provider with very little friction. If we truly control our own domain names, apps, and data this isn't even hard to do.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter could be just apps we run (webmail, web search, photo sharing, status updates). We shouldn't have to give up our privacy and be locked into a service that feeds us a hundred ads a day just to be able to check our email, search the web, share photos, or post 140 characters to the web.
I think those are the kinds of people you're going to want to market to. Reasonably priced for sensitive documents and files, but more than conventional app solutions who don't really need the extra decentralized security.
You talk about "decentralizing" but you mention Google Apps for e-mail and Medium for a blog. If you want to decentralize, you should be running these things on your own server(s) that you control.
What am I missing?
Decentralized is for sensitive things with a need for "extra decentralized security," and that most conventional needs can be met more adequately, and cheaply, with the services 'everyone' already uses.
Basically, it's a philosophical difference, but the ideas expressed may give proponents of decentralization some insight into why we are currently in another centralizing phase of the internet.
Google Apps is $60/yr ($70/yr including a domain) but is pretty much just Google Docs and Gmail.
Right now with Portal, for $96 a year you have your own secure and private place in the cloud to run stuff. A domain name, IP address, SSL certificate, SSD storage, and 4-8 VMs running apps from any developer (not just the few apps Google offers).
Medium is free but doesn't let you use your own domain name. Most blog services that do have custom domains with SSL charge more than $100 a year for this alone (and they don't run your blog in a private VM). On Portal, a blog is just another app and may require ~20% of your $8 / mo server plan.
Also, although I'm a web-dev and have "insights" on most of the tech news/trends I would never recommend to host a blog on your own VM. It would be much better if it's a paid hosting service, specialised let's say in WordPress, than having this on your own VM shared with your e-mail service.
And what is your main difference, between having a DigitalOcean + Installed app versus Portal?
Preventing spam is a lot easier than it was a decade ago. The software is far better, and there are now things like SPF records that make it much easier. Email on Portal is a very basic Dovecot+Postfix server with Roundcube for webmail. It's not as good as Gmail but it works quite well.
Not so long from now we'll have something better than Gmail. There are a lot more developers outside of the Gmail team than inside of it. What's been missing is a platform for them to develop on.
DigitalOcean has "one-click" apps but they're really just installers that can be run once. Configuration and upgrades are completely manual after the first step. You still have to be a sysadmin to do almost anything. Portal doesn't require any sysadmin tinkering. Upgrades and configuration are automatic.
Every Portal app runs in a separate VM and they're are all mapped to your domain name. Every user has an SSL certificate and a dedicated IP address. Completely non-technical people can use it to run the kinds of things that only hackers run today.
We would like to see a world where companies like Automattic support self-hosted versions of their products. Kind of like desktop software companies support paid version of their products. That's not the case today, but there's no reason people in the future can't run their own server software, and have it be very reliable and 100% supported by the app developer.
Perhaps one should become a good example of an enjoyable mobile experience before one starts throwing stones.
That was before peope discovered mobile ads, access to phonebook/email etc pp.
Maybe it'll change.
It is possible that for a small team given the choice of one great web app or splitting time between Windows/OSx/iPhone/Android that the web app is superior.
Exactly. There are, what, a billion or so websites nowadays?
Obviously installing an app for even a tiny fraction of a percent of those is not going to happen. Sooner or later, site owners are going to have to accept this basic fact.
I recently made a webapp that works 100% as well as a native app (just as fluid & just as many features), but people wondered where the 'real app' was for Android and iOS.