Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

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> Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses?

Setup, updates, maintenance, tech support, and uptime guarantees, just to name a few reasons that "the cloud" is better. A service like Wordpress.com or Wix beats the self-hosted Pi on all of these counts.

I interact with a lot of non-technical small business owners and am "that tech guy" in their minds. A question I'm hearing more and more frequently is _why even bother with a website when a Facebook page is much easier and they can see people interacting with it._

Their reasons are not all that different from why many tech savvy HN readers are using a Mac instead of Linux: convenience; less shit to worry about.

Hosting anything on a Pi plugged into the wall goes in the exact opposite direction from what these people want. The centralized services are winning because they pay attention to what the market wants, they build it, and they make it easy to sign up.

I don't literally mean a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is the Apple 2 of what I'm imagining. I'm talking about some next generation stuff, picture a Firestick with a much more refined iteration of sandstorm, with distributed apps that have hardly even been conceived of right today in 2017.

If my roommate can plug a Roku into the TV, and knows how to use Ableton Live and Squarespace, there's absolutely no reason he couldn't use something like that.

And there's no reason that those non-technical people couldn't continue to pay you for helping them use stuff like that.

And there's no reason that people can't continue to use stuff like Facebook. But I have a feeling that people are going to be over that way of doing things by the time the next two decades are over.

But you still have all maintenance related problems? How do you upgrade a hard disk or memory, go to their home? What happens if their home net is down or slow, no one can visit the site? Back in the days I was running a few web servers from my office directly, and it's a lot of extra work that is just not worth it.

Why would you need to upgrade a hard disk or memory?

Have you ever worked in a datacenter.

How many datacentres does the average "small local business" have?

For the price of hardware we're talking about, it'd just get replaced.

There's still plenty of room for paid hosting services. But this lowers the bar in a major way.

If their home network is down, hopefully their office network isn't, or their business partners' networks aren't.

Also, these kinds of applications are practically begging for mesh networks. So what it means for a home network to be "down" could change a lot in the coming years.

Who cares?

The Internet is breaking all the time anyway. Every day at least one of the bigger / more important sites I visit has a temporary problem with something. Three days a week HN keeps returning CloudFlare errors to me. Even Facebook has some issues that break it every other week. The world isn't ending because of this, and it isn't going to end because the site I co-host with my other friend is down for the night.

As you grow to the point where close-to-perfect reliability matters, you'll be able to afford to get someone do handle the hosting for you, just like you do today.

Not denying you get these issues or errors with sites. But how come I never seem to have any issues with major sites. I do see cloudflare stuff. But never for a top 1000 site.

Let’s imagine a real path to market: some big 5 company offers a “Facebook accelerator” usb compute stick that you put on your network and it provides local access and resiliency.

You are trying to communicate a wonderful message with an extreme amount of vision to people who sling code and do devops all day. What many of them may hear is you are asking them to do a bunch of work. But if you think 10-20 years in the future, your server was running something like a Phoenix type environment, then scaling wouldn't be as much of an issue. There are ways that updates and other problems can be abstracted away in a non-cloud environment. There are ways of running lean technologies on commodity hardware for servers.

The bottleneck I see is bandwidth and government regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. If Amit Pai gets his way then what you are talking about will be much more difficult.

I have thought about this a bit lately. Social media can be a very convenient way to keep up to date with people, and to allow people to keep up to date with you. But it has real costs.

I abandoned my Facebook account many years ago and refuse to set up a new one. As a result, it is difficult for my children to interact with me. They post their lives on Facebook, but they don't open that up to the public. So only specific Facebook accounts get to see what they share. That excludes me.

I have to open myself to Facebook to see their content. Alternatively, they could set up non-Facebook websites and "blog" their lives there. But that is harder than just using Facebook, and gets really hard if you want to keep it viewable only by select people. And then I would have to set up an account on their server to be able to see their content. Multiply that by all the people I would have to set up an account with and it's obviously unworkable pretty quickly.

I still hate Facebook, and refuse to set up an account with them. But I recognize that the alternatives are not pretty.

Edit: typos

This is why to solve the Facebook / social media silo problem, we really need to solve the web identity problem.

The solution needs to allow identities which are "register once, use anywhere" across the web, and portable so that you can migrate to a different identity host/provider/implementation without losing all your accounts. Ideally these identities would also allow you to reveal as much or as little information about yourself as you want, and not force you to reveal some unique property which is correlatable between colluding sites.

Obviously that's not an easy thing to create, and may actually be harder than creating a viable rival to Facebook, but if we don't solve the web ID problem, then governments and corporations are going to "solve" it force us, and we'll all be the worse as a result.

I liked Mozilla's Persona (BrowserID) for the fact that it protected privacy from the 3rd party provider. You're asking for privacy protections from the site seeking identity authentication.

It's a fascinating idea to have some means of identity authentication where the party seeking to authenticate your identity doesn't have enough identity information to connect the dots, and the party providing authentication doesn't even know about the party seeking authentication.

Uptime guarantees? Would that be those 25% rebate for a single month if your business is down for 7hrs or more? I have never seen people talk about it other than as a joke.

Setup, updates, maintenance, and tech support is however a thing, but there is always the fine print. The cloud generally do not maintain and update a website, and attacks generally succeed today by targeting poorly updated websites rather than servers. That leaves setup and teach support, two things which the website developer will often provide while they create and maintain the website.

You can abstract away the Pi and updates as easily as the cloud abstracts away everything. 90% of AWS users can't even figure or don't care about out how to distribute across multiple availability zones, much less data centers. Two Pis would be fine for 99% of this 90%.

Seems like the future to me, it's just not in any big tech company's best interest right now as they fight over data centers.

I don't know why we keep gravitating to Raspberry Pi's for this. IPFS works just fine on Windows clients. (By which I mean, it's no less stable than on Linux, neither of which runs particularly well at this early stage.)

What if publishing to your blog was as easy as installing a Chrome web extension that now travels with you? Suddenly every computer you have that runs the extension can pin a local copy of the site, and your visitors help out by virtue of the protocol. This doesn't exist of course, but thanks to ipfs-js, it could, very easily. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach of course, but my point is that the "Hello World" of this kind of app could easily be much lower bar than setting up a Raspberry Pi.

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