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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources. For the majority of use cases, we don't need distributed storage, compute, etc. Just start making these self-hosted "servers", "data pods", etc as easy to install as desktop software and make it clear that they are inaccessible when the computer is off. People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house. Modern societies have reasonable upload speeds and electricity/network uptime to support it. Sure, things like ISP firewall/NAT and dynamic IPs are a bit of a barrier, but you can have volunteers help with relays.

For example, I can easily fire up a Tor onion service on my never-turns-off home desktop computer and reach my stuff from anywhere. Why can't I reach my friends' stuff the same way? Because, to use business-speak, there's nothing "turnkey". It's something I've been pondering and working on. Sure, the bigger players may have to be in DCs, have more stringent uptime requirements, and distribute their bandwidth/workload more. But for most of us, desktop software and web-of-trust style connections could go a long way so long as the front of the software has a FB feel (e.g. a feed, messages, etc). We can tackle discovery, searching, aggregation, offloading, etc later.

View on HN

Back when mobile devices were rare, skype used p2p and was very popular and novel. But then an increasing percentage of nodes were mobile with limited power, limited bandwidth, and much less storage. Even being a member of a DHT (a nice way for distributed peers to keep track of each other) is a prohibitive from a battery life and bandwidth perspective for phones.

So Microsoft moved skype to a centralized service and have been trying to monetize it since.

The problem with decentralized servers isn't technical, something half as fast as your phone could easily handle distributed versions of popular websites. The arm based "wall warts" were plenty fast, and they are several generations old already.

How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how? If it is advertising, what's the benefit to users?

Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?

It does seem that a modest arm based server that's silent, potentially integrated into a wifi router would hugely reduce the downsides of p2p networks. Free power, cheap bandwidth, and being part of a p2p network they would avoid long startup times for applications. Users on their phones would get instant access to their data while their local node did any proof of work, DHT tracking, earning the reputation necessary to use bandwidth, cpu, and storage from other peers.

I don't see any technical barriers, just that users wouldn't care, and nobody would want to pay for it.

> Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?

Probably few, except those actively searching for it. And, especially with decentralisation, the inevitable outcome of being too popular is that it starts to become centralised again, to make things easier.

Besides that, I thought for a moment about Apple's tech. If you and a friend have an iPhone and you're both trying to connect to the same network (and have each other in your contacts, I think), iOS will allow you to automatically share the credentials and connect the other phone too.

I reckon that you'd see a lot of value in that kind of device integration, which is essentially peer-to-peer.

I don't know, if people could buy a 'personal cloud box' that is as user friendly as an iphone, for less than a 100 dollars, a substantial number of them might possibly do that.

A 'personal' cloud box is not enough. We need a 'social' cloud box which can talk to the equivalent boxes at the homes of our relatives and acquittances, and which are as easy to set up as logging into a centralized social network.

Mastadon meets Dropbox, with a content navigation interface thrown on top?

Yes, that's the thing. We know how it should be used because people are already using such systems. We need that no part of the system is owned by a single organization.

https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

This is what hubzilla can do, along with using the Zot protocol for distributed identity.The main issue really is having an easy wizard-based installation/configuration for new users wanting to host.

And the biggest issue of them all, keeping it absolutely secure while doing all that. It would be a killing blow to the venture if someone got their data stolen.

The existing centralized systems set a pretty low bar for that, to be honest.

I do not think current big centralized systems are a low bar, the attacks get more and more sophisticated, but mom&pop/volunteer/etc. systems still get exploited in the most banal ways possible.

I'm not certain we need to make this accessible to "the next billion". We like to dress up these actions in virtue but the truth is we hook people up because it's a business. Facebook devastated our social fabric. I don't think it should have been invented. But here we are with its nuclear fallout all because some young douche thought it was a good idea.

If everyone owned a personal cloud box, security procedures would quickly fall off a cliff, those people are now the new botnet.

Maybe leave people alone, stop sticking our fingers in all the places they might stick to money. Let the geeks take care of their little tribe.

I love my Synology NAS server :)

Though its not really simple enough for non-technical people to set up.

I also love my Synology DS-218+. I'm hosting my own Spotify (Airsonic [1]); music tagged to perfection with Beets [2]), an IRC bouncer because Matrix is still not ready, my own Netflix (Synology's Video Station [3]), and my own mailserver (Synology's MailPlus Server [4]). I've been giving out access to this pod to close friends. It's empowering and community-building. This is the kind of social network I desire: close-knit around the warm glow of a server.

It's really self-host heaven. I don't pay for Fastmail, Spotify, or video streaming anymore.

[1] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-airsonic

[2] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-beets

[3] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/video_station

[4] https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/mailplus

Sick, now turn this into a product that can be adopted by the masses!

I have an older Synology. It is already ready for the masses.

Why: You only need one one for a family and most of the time there's already a person in the family who does "PC stuff". And even if there isn't there's always someone who'll learn it if a friend has one.

The rest of this post is not targeted at you but rather on a whole attitude here at HN:

-------------------------------

Anyone who can operate a web browser, has any education in IT and knows enough English to read instructions in the box should be able to set up one.

In fact I think just being able to read the quick start instructions should be enough to install one with basic features.

Setting up websites in the 90ies - early 2000s were a lot harder. Same goes for using older PCs with DOS.

A major problem today seems to be learned helplessnes. In our well meant and to some degree profitable[0] effort to make sure anyone can use anything we have are creating a situation were people are more helpless .

Seriously: if app stores and walled gardens had been introduced first the web and email had been considered to complicated now. I can imagine HN: """You mean my siblings, parents and grandparents are going to install this "e-mail" thing? Even if they were able to configure "smtp" and whatnot they'd forget the "email address" or even how to start it before tomorrow."""

[0:]: if anyone doesn't catch my drift, your brightest customers might not be the ones who pays most ;-)

Edits: a number of them :-)

> most of the time there's already a person in the family who does "PC stuff". And even if there isn't there's always someone who'll learn it if a friend has one.

That's not true at all. Confirmation bias is rough when you're technical; you keep spotting other technical people.

Was about to disagree strongly with your conclusion but you have a point. Not everyone had a web site.

But I'm not totally convinced either: email has been huge despite the configuration needed, also with people who had to take it step by step twice and make notes while doing it. Some figured it out on their own (or more realistically using the step by instructions that came bundled with their first modem). Other had a son or a grandson who'd picked it up at school. Others got it at work.

My grandparents where the youngest group of people I can think of that didn't have access to email somehow.

And my wifes grandparents have/had access to mail and used actual mail clients too, not just Hotmail or Gmail.

The issue such devices have in practice is upfront cost, compatibility, the need for port forwarding, and the lack of redundancy so you don't lose your data. Among other problems but these come to mind. Centralization solves those problems because you can connect to a server instead of port forwarding, your data might be stored across 3 servers, the cloud storage might be as cheap as free, and applications are designed to work seamlessly with a small number of big cloud providers.

In the depths of my soul I would love to re-decentralize the web. I truly believe data centralization will cause people to suffer a lot. decentralized tech needs to solve so many problems before alternatives to centralization become viable. Centralized approaches also improve over time and are a moving target to keep up with.

IPv6 will help by eliminating NAT (and thus port forwarding problems). IPFS might help with redundancy. But yeah the cost and complexity are major problems. I think the biggest problem is making open standards that can evolve quickly. All the big chat platforms have switched to proprietary protocols so they can iterate and roll out changes on their own.

Basically all home routers block incoming connection because so many shitty IoT devices were built to trust anything that is able to connect to it. My router doesn't even have an option to turn off the block. Can only unblock ports 1 by 1

I guess the route around this would be for the maker of these devices to partner with router companies. Alternatively, they could also be routers. That would potentially make quite a lot of sense...

I can see a lot of value in routers becoming mini home servers + IoT device hubs. There should also be some standard way for devices to let the router know if they should have access to the outer internet so things like lightbulbs only have access to the iot hub and then the hub has access to the internet.

Doesn't UPnP already solve this? And it enabled by default on most routers.

But IPv6 routers will continue to block incoming traffic.

Which NAT/PAT/port-forwarding issues are you thinking of?

Dont forget about device maintenance, which is a huge burden. Users of centralized services never have to worry about upkeep.

These products have existed for a while and don't really make a dent.

I don't think I've encountered any super simple appliance I can plug into my home network and move data onto and then easily give online services I trust access to its data. Ever since I heard about Tim Berners Lee's new project, the Solid POD (Personal Online Datastore), I've been thinking about how to make it friendly enough to people that they'd actually use it in large enough numbers to gain traction. It always seemed like people would have to learn to start paying at least a little money to make privacy work without advertising dollars. I just Googled around for the latest and noticed that the MeWe social network (which emphasizes privacy) which Tim is working with offers a free tier on data but then charges above 8 GB. I wonder if their long game on being sustainable is to just make money on add-ons above the free tier. Here's hoping it catches on...

https://mewe.com/faq

> How could decentralized applications/services be sustainable funded? If not advertising, how?

How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist.

> Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?

They wouldn't. And ideally, beyond the annoying hoops on initial versions (e.g. discovery/identity), they shouldn't. Your software needs to win on features. A self-hosted, subscribable Reddit clone w/ chat would be a very good start.

Please, show me a list of self-sustaining open source projects that cover developer time and administrative overhead just in donations.

The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter.

Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, or companies allow their developers to do so.

> The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter),...

And even there, imho Bob (iirc) from the video was right - I hate font awesome 5, and always install either version 4 or "fork awesome" in my projects.

Why so?

I must thank you for your question, and must (embarrasing as it is) admit I was wrong.

I started a reply stating that one can no longer use <i> elements and must instead include svgs, but then I decided to double check - and found I was wrong all this time... Some minor details have changed, but mostly for the better. Their marketing is a bit annoying too, but that's the price of having a sustainable business model.

I obviously haven't checked version 5 in projects yes, but I guess I should now. So thanks for making me realise my mistake...

Those, then, would seem to be valid ways to organize such a project. Lord knows there is more than enough volunteer time available to achieve any project - if properly organized.

There should be a marketplace for apps running on home routers. It would change the Internet as we know it. Developers should be able to create router apps and submit them to marketplaces and users should be able to install router apps of their choice with just a few taps.

Routers have a few key advantages over most other computing devices owned by the public: routers normally have a public (non-NAT) IP address, they're always on, and battery power is not a concern. If people could install a Tor implementation on their router with just a few taps, Tor usage could expand dramatically. Developers of decentralized social networks might finally get a foothold once the installation problems are gone.

IMHO the best way to re-decentralize the Internet is by creating routers that host arbitrary apps, along with a marketplace of router apps.

The way to bootstrap this idea seems simple: sell a new router with a thin margin, provide SDKs for free, let developers charge what they want for the apps, and take a 30% cut from app purchases. The plan seems so clear that I wonder why I haven't yet heard of anyone doing it. :-)

The obvious problem with in-home edge compute like that is the shittyness of router implementations, combined with the shitty software out there, combined with the lack of common interfacing with the router by a human just begs to open up a world of devices to botnets. Needs to be interfaced with by humans regularly.

Right. Whoever does this needs to be competent at building a safe, stable, and usable router OS.

OpenWRT/LEDE is a thing. But don't expect cheap home routers to be able to run useful services-- the cheapest hardware is truly bottom-of-the-barrel, even OpenWRT had to drop support for lots of devices.

Ubiquiti makes decent hardware, and now has an upgrade to go from their flavor of linux to debian stretch.

I wonder if Ubiquiti would consider selling a "developer" module of the Edgeroute-X or similar with more ram.

Or maybe look for a raspberry pi clone with dual ethernet (not connected by USB). Add a 128GB microsd for $20-$25 to have some room for video, photos, email, chat logs, etc.

Please don't encourage router-makers to add more functionality that risks exposing my network traffic to the internet. I sympathize with the sentiment, but the people that make these devices have proven again and again that they are unable to execute on basic traffic security.

> routers that host arbitrary apps

Servers. You are describing servers.

Edit: upon reflection, rather a lot of people I know don't have routers, either; they use shared internet (e.g. xfinity) or only have mobile plans.

I think this is a very very interesting idea. The only problem that makes me nervous is telecoms/ISPs capping the line or requiring some propietary interface to it (something done this days to an extent) and quirks. If they feel they are going to lose control or similar. Just a thought, I don't really know if it could be a real problem though.

I've found secure scuttlebutt (www.scuttlebutt.nz) really impressive. By using public servers called pubs as meeting point they can ignore lots of issues like NAT punching and discovery. I don't like that it seems to be based on an immutable log but it showcases well how much is possible with offline first, sync when possible software (just like syncthing)

I have been meaning to try SSB, I have had some success using DAT[1] to transfer large files between friends.

1: https://datproject.org/

Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP?

Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise.

I also feel like people are proposing solutions based on technologies as they stand today. Chosen solutions to the decentralization issue need to consider realistic future cases. Just as a quick thought experiment, what happens in the near future, say, 3 to 5 years out, when a huge chunk of people are using 5g technologies as their primary connections? AT&T, or sprint, or verizon, or what have you will still get all of your traffic information in this, very plausible, future case. "It's encrypted." or "It's going through a relay." Is just not a sufficient response to privacy if you wish to have privacy from AT&T. I mean, think about it, chances are, the relay will be using AT&T too.

Which brings me to the big problem with solutions like these, ie - inevitable recentralization. Google, or Facebook, (and now because of how this new decentralization idea works, even AT&T), are in an almost unassailable position to act as the "switchboard" for all of this non-indexed data. Need to know where your aunt, who just moved, is on this new decentralized network? Are you going to ask google? or "WeAreDecentralizationIdealists.com"? Oh, you're going to ask your own node? Sorry, her new information has not propagated to your node yet. Check back tomorrow. Oh forget it, just call your aunt and ask her to give you the new information so you can input it manually.

No, she will need to be registered somewhere to seamlessly communicate changes to her node's connection information. And that "somewhere" will likely be a BigCo.

If we want to replace the behemoths, we need to come up with solutions that are just as easy to use, (easier actually), and avoid any possible blocking or tracking. That requires some very creative people to think radically. Easily blockable in home network nodes I think, are not only not really solving the problems, but are also doomed to failure usability-wise when compared with google or facebook.

> Setting aside the fact that most people would look unfavorably on yet another box in their homes, how does any of this help you avoid the blocking and tracking of the ISP?

Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on. But even without that, there is still value. The ISP tracking isn't much of an issue using an existing network like Tor. Software starts up, reads the locally encrypted Sqlite DB for your list of "friends'" onion IDs and connects to your friends gRPC services they are hosting on their machines as onion services. Maintains that stream, begin receiving fed data from these other servers (locally caching as you receive which is more ideal in an ephemeral world than live retrieval, but can be a mix of both depending on settings). All without the ISP knowing a thing except that you are connected to Tor.

> Which brings me to the big problem with solutions like these, ie - inevitable recentralization.

Yup. Can't get easily get around this. People are going to gravitate towards what's easier and what they want on the outside ignoring what's on the inside. It happens to most continually adopted standards, even if it's just a more trusted server w/ more uptime. And that's ok, I don't want to win some ideological battle at the cost of user happiness. I completely agree the software must be so easy you can't tell what's under it, but I don't think it requires that radical/creative thinking. Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos.

> Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on.

Doesn't exist anymore (often enough).

> Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos.

Things like identity management and data storage make these barriers pretty deep. “I can delete my post and it basically won't be accessible anymore” (there can be physical exceptions so long as they're legibly exceptions to the social reality), “I don't have to think about how big my images are and can just post as much as I want”, “I can lose any of my own hardware and everything will still be there because it's in the cloud”, and “I can tell who my friends are based on common knowledge within my circles of their unique name which is easy to remember and meaningful” are all things that heavily constrain what you can do “on the inside”.

Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient: a whole bunch of mostly-volunteer instances have sprung up, adopters have managed to make instance choice part of identity so that the domain-part isn't just a “meaningless extra thing to remember”, and federation remains reasonably strong; meanwhile, financial support for server costs has mostly leant toward the Patreon model, allowing a fraction of generous users to help support a bunch of free riders while not having to directly participate in administration. At the same time, despite Mastodon having almost exactly copied Twitter's model in terms of available user interactions, the zeitgeist has repeatedly suggested that users getting on board for the first time often had no idea what instances even could be, and had to have the very concept explained several different ways before it got real traction. Random instance death is also a problem that's tempering the mood nowadays, because keeping the server up requires enough motivation which sometimes runs out, and some instances have started having problems with media storage requirements, which, see above (though I'm told the internal architecture could use some optimization too).

There's something deeper in here surrounding the thorough conflation of type with instance in the popular side of the digital world; I feel as though something critical to the more literate concept of this didn't make it into the default folk model, such that only centralized services are legible. I have some hope that Mastodon and related ActivityPub-based federated services absorbing waves of people fleeing the abusive behavior of major social media (such as the recent Tumblr exodus) will make a dent in this and cause the appropriate concepts to reach critical cultural density.

> Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient

It seems to me that Mastodon gained traction in a way that wasn't much different from email. In both cases there was a communication network which anyone could add a node to pretty easily. Your node could have local moderation policies and you wouldn't have too many issues with getting blocked as long as you acted nice. For both email and Mastodon this enabled a few motivated administrators with some influence to onboard thousands of users quickly, and benefit from a network effect bigger than just their node.

The similarities to email end when you consider _why_ people migrated to the network in question. With Mastodon the waves have been culturally/politically motivated people running away from something (ex-Twitter users fleeing abuse, Japanese loli enthusiasts trying to avoid embarrassment, sex workers seeking an alternative to SESTA/FOSTA regulatory deplatforming). Whereas with email people were running _to_ something - the first free, global communications network of its kind.

It's also interesting to note that email nowadays has lost these advantages (running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others). Sure enough email is now on the decline.

I think email evolved when people had more digital-identity ties to their ISPs though. I remember having an email address tied to your university or your dial-up provider or whatever being pretty common in the 1990s, and pre-eternal-September the same protocols already existed among a more closed crowd (which is kind of like Facebook, now that I think of it).

Then “free email” providers on the early consumer Internet were able to compete on things like storage, because that was something it was still acceptable to expect people to pay attention to. One of GMail's original big draws was “lots and lots of storage”.

Email being in decline for social purposes feels partly related to changing feedback expectations and UI inertia, but I'd guess also some relation to a “mental association with uncool things” including both spam and stressful/boring transactional email; it's become more of a business thing. The spam side of that is related to the gradual federation lockdown, and something similar could happen to Mastodon, but at least there's some discussion about it happening in advance now.

I'm not sure what this all adds up to.

> running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others

Only true if you care about Gmail (a centralized service) getting your e-mail and delivering it to its users. You could just not care about Gmail and still interoperate with lots of mail servers - even lots of servers that do have Google's blessing.

> Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on.

I literally do not know anyone who owns a desktop computer any more.

Desktops are used by almost anyone doing gaming or serious video editing. Obviously not everyone but still common for a lot of people.

And yet, we continue to exist.

The point isn’t non-existence -it’s rarity. You cannot ‘just’ do something as a general solution when it only applies to one in a hundred.

a desktop that is already on most of the time or an upgraded router would work perfectly.

you've clearly not used any of the modern roaming-enabled encrypted overlay networks that people have been working on. one example is hyperboria. i connect to a handful of public relays (and one that i host myself) and no matter where i am my device is reachable at the same ip address. the address is an ipv6-encoded hash of the public key that is used for routing. its actually really neat, and you don't need to wait more than a few seconds for the routing tables to update if you change locations.

https://hyperboria.net/

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/

I haven't even heard of these things, and your description sounds like so much effort I'm not even going to be looking this tech up. If it's more than "install using an installer, not a terminal, and then it just works(tm)", it's not the kind of thing that's going to get people who weren't already on board, on board.

well, i didn't say this was a consumer-ready network. i'm just pointing out that the technical issue behind "how do i route to my aunt's network if she changes her location" is a solved problem. nobody is saying this stuff is ready for mass consumption. we are building and using these things so that they can eventually be easy enough to use that we can replace current-internet with future-internet.

Well the page actually mentions 'Just works' and 'Low barriers', but it goes off a few paragraphs later:

> This year the event will take place from 3rd to 9th August 2015 in Maribor, Slovenia

2015 ??

> Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise.

Putting an automatically configured VPN on such a box would be extremely easy, no?

First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates. It needs to be like a thermostat from the 1950s - maybe it lacks the latest features but it still works just the same as new. I'll accept maybe it only needs to last 10 years, but that is the minimum time.

I have family to think about: I don't have time to update my servers every time some new zero-day is fixed. I'd rather pay someone else to deal with those details. My five year old is growing up time with him is far more important that fixing security holes.

> First someone has to make a server that is perfectly secure and lasts for 50 years without any updates.

Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine. The software itself might evolve to an hands-off, evergreen-type of approach, but for now just a desktop daemon is fine. The reason keeping servers updated seems so non-trivial is that we visualize it in an ops sense like we're at work.

> Nah, your auto-updating desktop is fine.

As confirmed by the lack of complaints about auto update in Windows 10. I mean, its not like updates ever break anything anyways.

I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound. Automatic security patches make a lot of sense in the current security climate, but once that infrastructure exists it is irresistible to use it for random feature creep and marketing.

> I'd argue that it's the practice and not the principle of auto-updates which is unsound.

I disagree. I've yet to encounter a system where automatic updates didn't sometimes break things. It's a nice theory, but in practice things break when you change things they depend on even when you're trying not to, and a lot of developers don't try that hard. Not to mention, sometimes you're dealing with design flaws that cause API changes, or programs relying on behavior that wasn't officially part of the stable interface. Auto-updating causes more problems than it solves.

I don’t think it would be that hard to build an update system where not everyone gets updates at once, and you wait for consensus among early adopters before forcing it on the remaining users.

No amount of early adopters will ever have full coverage of what people actually have, in part because the people who need reliability are not likely to be early adopters in the first place.

You still need a company or foundation stable and competent enough to maintain it and not ruin it for 50 years...

I wish home appliances all used the same form factor for controller boards for these smart appliances. Like a socket for a raspberry pi (instead of a hat).

Had to replace my dishwasher because the controls shorted out.

A motor or the display could just as easily burn out, but this article is about software problems, which you could fix with a workalike board.

Worldwide, most people access the internet via mobile devices. They don't own or use desktops. Beyond that, many don't have internet to the home. They just use their phones.

One problem is still asymmetric upload/download speeds for many (most) home connections.

Often upload is 10x slower than download.

And users expect their internet services to be fast. If every request involves leaving the backbone to go all the way into your home and then back out again, good luck with that.

I think the better solution is to leverage cheap vms. At least performance stands a chance. It's just a matter of making cloud computers accessible and usable to non technical people.

> I think the better solution is to leverage cheap vms.

So...centralize many/most popular internet services on infrastructure that provides cheap, reliable VMs. At the risk of overdrafting my snark budget: that sounds familiar.

Data caps on upload as well not to mention many ISP's have terms that prevent you from running services on your account. If you want that from them you need a business account which typically costs quite a bit more. At least that's how Comcast and Verizon are in my neighborhood...

Perhaps the definition of net neutrality could be extended to cover this problem. I mean, if we want an internet where everybody is treated equally, then symmetric upload/download speeds are a basic requirement.

The tricky thing is that ISPs have traditionally offered symmetrical service, but only as "business class". So they would protest that they already sell that, customers just need to pay (double, triple) to get it. That said, my (just residential) fiber connection consistently tests slightly faster upstream than down.

Try Sandstorm.

Home servers are a very difficult sell (see $500 Helm) compared to VMs running in a data center and IMO the privacy difference is mostly illusory.

/me goes to sandstorm.io, click install, skip past the paid version on to self-host, see it only works on Linux, close tab

^ That is your expected reaction by normal desktop users. I mean literally download an exe and up pops up your feed ready to add your friends, or favorite businesses, news sites, link aggregators, etc given their onion ID (yes, onion ID is annoyingly large, especially v3, but discovery/identity comes later, don't let it hold up the system).

I'm not convinced you need a "home server" in the traditional sense. Just accept what you lose, uptime, if you use your laptop or phone to do the hosting. You can share between them too given a synced private key which is the software's job, not the user's. Still, an ephemeral self-hosted-on-desktop social network can go a long way (and again, people will let the need for uptime drive their always-on desktop decision). This stuff requires such little resources to start, a cheap Raspi w/ a install/reach-from-other-device would work just fine if they don't have a home computer and want one just for this. Large storage can come later.

I do agree the privacy difference is minimal.

I think the ideal use case for Sandstorm is either the service model or best-case the "your family computer guy runs it for a ton of people you know". If I stand up a Sandstorm server at home this year (which is likely), I'll probably allow any friends or family to use it.

The "normal desktop user" should probably not be running their own self-hosting setup, because they will fail at backups and reliability and performance.

Or, one proposes a system with redundancy built into it, so that a machine going down or getting soda poured on it doesn’t take out the whole network.

Truth. This stuff needs to be EASY. If I'm capable of setting up but too lazy, my mom stands zero chance.

The apps on sandstorm are super out of date. When I checked a few months ago the gitlab version was from 2016

Is sandstorm still around? I was a big fan of the idea and mission, but then I thought kentonv kind of wound it down when he joined Cloudflare.

Yeah unfortunately it's basically on life support now. For the first year after the company folded, I was still hacking on it frequently on weekends, but these days I mostly only push the monthly release to update dependencies. It's just that Cloudflare Workers is, well, successful, and it's... more fulfilling... to work on a successful project. :/

Could ellaborate why is illusory?

Data centers and (paid) cloud vendors don't look at your data and the police can get into your home as easily as your VM.

Nope, they can't. There are reasonably-strong legal protections against police entering your home, because it's the main place where you actually have a legally-acknowledged expectation of privacy.

Aren't there similarly-strong legal protections against police entering a data center and accessing servers?

Not really.

There are protections in both cases. But they are different.

For instance, in the USA, there is no requirement that you have a mechanism to provide information stored at home to law enforcement, even under warrant/court order. If you have one, they can compel you to use it, but if you don't they have no remediation.

But a cloud provider is legally required to have that mechanism, and when order if they don't exercise it, they are punished. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act.

Most people have no real reason to be concerned about police looking at their data, even if it does somehow happen (not in America, anyway). So as a need, it's a vanishingly small market, limited to people who actually have something illegal to hide - drug business, child porn, whatever. As a want is a different thing - people, convinced to be afraid of Big Brother, want to shield themselves. But that's still not a very large market, when it comes to people paranoid enough to actually do something about it.

If I had data that I legit feared the government finding, I wouldn't be protecting it with a home server - I'd protect it by encrypting the crap out of it and storing it on a pretty generic cloud service, not in my home or anything easily traceable to me.

Nope, you're thinking of this backwards. The people who actually have something illegal to hide might actually try to do what you're saying here, make it untraceable somehow (at non-trivial risk and expense, of course!). But if what you're worried about is more casual, warrant-less invasion of privacy by your government (that isn't motivated by something as blatantly illegal as the examples you chose), "just store it at home" is a no-brainer.

Right, but if you had data that were just that confidential to you, that's the easy part. Just encrypt it and don't let anybody look. I don't really have that kind of data, but I do have a lot of stuff that's just private, in the sense that I don't have anything to hide, but I close the door when I'm in the toilet. So, really private data, encrypt it, store copies in many safe places, you're done.

That's not really what Solid is about. Solid is not just about me, it is about us. The stuff we do together. The sharing we do, but we share not just with anybody, but with someone we trust. It may be something really trivial: I share my grocery shopping list with my wife. It is not sensitive by any means, but it is also nobody else's business. Those are data used on my terms. Nobody should be peeking into my life to map me, as I go along with my daily business, but my daily business consists of interacting with a lot of people, and I do share and I want to share, but I want personal data control.

Now, personal data control is really the key to permissionless innovation. So, we're not just doing it to protect from snooping, once people have their data then you get a level playing field were there can be competition for the best user experiences.

What if everyone had a personal always-on cloud storage like dropbox, or even their ISP, where data is encrypted and access managed via crypto keys exchanged directly between clients so that plaintext never leaves the client. This gets us around devices being offline and NATs. Clients communicate via these always-on cloud stores using them as store and forward network, along the lines of http://cweb-services.com/intro.html

There are challenges like establishing initial connections, or push notifications, but these can hopefully be worked out.

>I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources

This same thought has popped up in my mind as well before... I think it's a probable future only if these devices are discrete plug-in and forget machines and generate revenue for the owner.

Actually, we've been chatting about this, and I think it would be great to start selling Solid servers on a OLinuXino board with a nice box around. Not because it would make us a lot of money, but to demonstrate that you, at least a bunch of nerds, can easily take complete control, from everything to the Open Hardware to the MIT-licensed server.

I'm running Solid on my own box, and I can't see myself doing it any other way, but it was pretty hard to set it up. We need to change that.

> People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house.

I think you radically overestimate the desire and ability of the average computer-user to consider their devices' uptime.

Try Cloudron. https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html

there is a "deprecated?" server software. i use it daily, its called Pichat, and so far it seems to be deleted from the internet. it is a chat server/webserver/fileserver. it comes in linux, and win version it is on horde as well as the SDK for it. Tell me if you would like to know more. this is not my software, if you [whomever that may be] are the person or part of the team that created this [pichat] please chime in.

https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat is this not it?

look at this persons -about in thier profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cordonbleu

this is handy as well.

https://freedns.afraid.org/

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