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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Operating some server software on the wimpy VPS is very different different from having everybody's daily-use computers be fully networked with other computers. Also, you likely already have an Internet connection so the marginal cost is zero. And you don't need a credit card to do it.

To get network effects, it's all about low friction and low barriers to entry.

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I agree with you and the grandparent to this (my) post. So: I think the way to go is in some server-side OS suitable for daily-use by ordinary folk.

That is pretty much exactly what we try to solve a https://cloudron.io

There is still a long way to go to make it work for your grandparents, however I think we already made quite some progress. The act of getting a domain and a server itself is still something most people might not be comfortable with though.

In the end I think there are only technical issues to be solved to get to a state where having a server and installing apps, just like most people now do with mobile apps on their phone, is entirely viable.

Several projects are trying to achieve this: freedombox, yunohost, cozy cloud, sandstorm.io, ...

fwiw, sandstorm is not a business anymore.

Here's the announcement, they moved back from being a for profit startup to an open source community effort. Most of team is now working at cloudflare.

https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-03-13-joining-cloudflare

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