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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

Kind-of alluded to in the article, but if you’re going to unbundle AWS, you’re going to have to figure out how to get the bandwidth 0-rated. One of amazons biggest moats (imo) is that they can realize monumental cost savings on bandwidth while making it very pricy to other service providers. So if you need to architect bandwidth-hungry or “high scale” applications, going outside of AWS becomes way too expensive. Even privatelink tacks on bandwidth charges.

You’d have to look at DB providers like Elastic to see how to do this, I think. But it’s going to involve a very complex and high touch deployment & support environment. This effectively “prices out” certain classes of applications as too expensive for value returned. Again I could be looking at this very wrong, and figuring out how to build profitable unbundled AWS services would be a great business, but it’s hard to see how to successfully execute.

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You can do what snowflake did and actually build on top of AWS

Same is true for databricks and others as well

I think the Cloud is a result of a gradual move towards centralization of networked software built by software developers living in countries where DSL and cable broadband was rolled it early. It was a bit like mainframe developers back in the day. I remember people discussing “fat clients” vs “thin clients”.

We forgot what it’s like to have dialup, and the innovative generation of decentralized software protocols (IRC, Usenet etc) faded into obscurity. Even Email and the Web are now centralized!

Well the companies won and now we have a feudal kingdom again where we are the data-serfs. We have been well-trained like pavlov’s dogs using notifications and rewards (likes, comments) to till the datafields and plant fresh crops, use our social capital to reshare articles etc. And you know that you’re a serf when that notification lights up on your master’s device and you pause talking to your girlfriend, wife or child to look at it and maybe act on it.

And of course governments love having a central place they can implement censorship and spy on everyone.

This has got to stop. It’s not just a technological topology problem, it’s become a sociological problem and even a problem of democracy and society. THE SOLUTION IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that will disrupt the landlords of the Web (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) as much as the Web once disrupted the landlords of the Internet (AOL, MSN, Compuserve).

The first HTTP browsers weren’t better than AOL at anything except one thing... ANYONE could permissionlessly host a web browser.

What realistic alternatives do we have to Facebook today? Google Docs? That anyone can easily host and share stuff with friends to easily collaborate? It would have to have people’s identity and contacts stay consistent across domains, without owning them and storing them on centralized servers like Facebook.

I know a few attempts. Diaspora, Solid, Mastodon and Matrix. I also liked Sandstorm a lot, and OwnCloud was ok. They have not reached mass adoption. Scuttlebutt is slightly better in that it can interoperate with everything. The biggest winner in the last few years has been the DID standard, although it solves one problem only.

There is also an innovative project called MaidSAFE which raised around $10M and spent 12 years so far building this back-end. I have high hopes for it once it is released and plan to make Qbix Platform interoperate with it. Check it out: https://maidsafe.net/

We will eventually replace the idea of a startup running a database that has to scale, with an open source startup that releases software that anyone can pay any hosting company to run and makes money via tokens. That was the dream of cryptocurrency. The first kind of startup extracts rents via a SAAS model and forcibly bundles infrastructure management (Slack, Salesforce, Twitter, Etsy, you name it). The other doesn’t care about cheaper “cloud” costs so much, because anyone can host it (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal etc.) and the hosting costs are miniscule for each individual client business. Wordpress and Magento and Drupal are all valued in the billions, as open source companies. Maybe people on HN should strive for this rather than “Zero to One” “competition is for losers” “build a monopoly and extract rents” Peter Thiel style facebook startups.

Do we need something like this? Or am I just ranting?

EDIT: why whenever I post this subject, it is heavily downvoted with no actual replies or explanations showing me why my position is wrong? Is there a coordinated effort to downvote this position without further engaging with it?

yep, we sure need this stuff...small stuff is a lot easier to manage too... also while not very related, I love the SQRL login idea, which is also decentralized, and also not in any final stage yet (but would allow kinda anonymous login, as in, no identifiable usernames, and would be able to also for example optionally open page on desktop, auth with phone by scanning a qr code, and as such avoid any keyloggers and potentially network sniffers, even (and the app shows info, so can't fake the code either, and even then that'd only hijack a single session, unlike passwords))

You are missing the biggest key to everything: The network effect doesn't happen if people have to install software. FB and twitter et all are so pervasive because the 90% of the population that is tech illiterate can use it by just signing up. When you talk about things people can pay any host to run, you've already lost the argument. Aside from the need to install, now people also have to pay for hosting, which is a huge negative.

I disagree, because Wordpress powers 34% of all websites in the world. Surely that is an example of adoption? Showing it’s possible for non techies to own their own stuff?

What about the Web? Why did people install web servers instead of hosting on AOL? Because web Browsers existed, and let you consume that data. Couldn’t you likewise argue that no business would want to mess around with hosting their own website and a bevy of competing hosting providers would never displace AOL?

> I disagree, because Wordpress powers 34% of all websites in the world. Surely that is an example of adoption? Showing it’s possible for non techies to own their own stuff?

This is a very bad example since most of them are insecure, out of date, and not actually run by the non-techies. Most people just contract it out, once to someone who said he could setup a Wordpress site for cheap, and then they just pay them or someone else to make any major changes. If it isn't that, it's another company, or Wordpress itself hosting their instance, again, the software isn't being run by the "non-techie".

> Why did people install web servers instead of hosting on AOL?

I don't think a lot of people did, again, they paid someone else to host it. Shared web hosting was, and still is, a very large market.

That’s what I said. There are companies which are in the business of hosting and they compete unlike the monopoly on hosting Facebook.

People pay them to take care of hosting. But they have a choice.

> The network effect doesn't happen if people have to install software

Plenty of people installed the facebook, twitter, and instagram apps on their phone - and in many cases don't even use the web interfaces. Local software installation is not an issue when it's as streamlined as the current mobile experience.

I generally agree, and I think there are often business and security cases to be made for why buying into the centralized cloud paradigm are bad or might have long term hidden costs. The problem is that so many people either hear everyone else push it and jump on the bandwagon, often due to professional peer pressure, and another factor is that lets be honest, those of us who remember those days are getting older and there are techies working in the industry who haven't known anything different.

A big fear of mine is that many of the younger hackers have lost or were never trained in that cypherpunk-phreak-hacktivist attitude that many of us had and learned on/with in our and the internets younger years. I know they still exist, but the sheer number of users drowns that type out as a much smaller percentage of the net... but it was largely that group that fought for the rights of users and major holdouts that influenced the patterns that made the internet what it is today. I suspect the increase in types who downvote topics like you bring up are just that majority, middle of the road, corporate placation user type, and it has gotten noticeably worse over the last few years on hn.

I didn't down vote you but I did find your post shrill and confronting thanks to your use of crazy capitalization.

> THE SOLUTION IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that will disrupt the landlords of the Web (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) as much as the Web once disrupted the landlords of the Internet (AOL, MSN, Compuserve).

Using capitals like this implies to me that you are not making a reasoned argument, otherwise your points would stand on their own rather than BEING BLASTED INTO MY FACE.

Reasoned arguments can involve EMPHASIS. It’s only a choice of typography how to express it.

You are the one who asked about downvotes.

By all means use all bold, comic sans font, and flashing red text. But don't be surprised when people react negatively to it.

I dislike that this meme from IRC became so commonly repeated. I did not agree with it 20 years ago when just a few people repeated it, and I do not agree with it now.

Capitals were wonderfully used by Pratchett as the voice of one of the characters in written text. And the late Christopher Lee did a wonderful interpretation of that character.

Cyrillic letters for example resemble capitals in that they have a constant height and are generally more square and if anything that doesn't make them more difficult to read, just different.

Actual shouting hurts my ears. It is about a thousand times more annoying than reading capital letters.

I think the real equivalent of shouting in a text media is the hated blink tag. With some bright neon colours. On black background. In a dark room.

I think it's not about readability but rather about context and the audience.

On HN all caps is uncommon and, I would venture, considered somewhat aggressive/rude. IMO HN is somewhat of a bastion of courtesy and reasoned debate, a rarity on the internet today. Long may it remain so.

Most of the people in hn work for these monopolies. Of course you're downvoted.

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