The future is all about self hosting and/or peer to peer technology not controlled by a central authority.
People don't want to maintain a server, look after backups, deal with software updates, legal stuff, blacklists, ddos attacks, .... it never ends. People want to create some content, publish it and be done. This directly drives the future to externalizing these things to other companies.
Distance isn't an issue, economies of scale are huge. This means smaller companies cant compete with bigger ones. The internet causes big winner-take-all effects. This drives further and further centralization, until only a few oligopolies remain.
I liked the computing ecosystem of the 80s and 90s more than that of today. It was smaller, more comunal. I do have my own small server on the net, and enjoy it. But to be honest, that's a hobby.
Self hosting looks like it will end up like doing your own car maintenance, building your own radio, creating your own railway engine, smithing your own sword, ... A nice hobby for a smaller and smaller minority, but obsolete for more than 99% of the population
It isn't just "hosting" that's the issue, it's "publishing".
You can buy "hosting" for a few dollars a month from lots of companies. But that just gives you a place to park files. There's still a lot of other things you need to get to the point of "create some content, publish it and be done", which you correctly say is what people want, and "hosting" does not include all those things.
Various hosting providers will also sell you "publishing" or "content management" services of various types, but none of them are as easy to use as "edit my document on Google Drive" (or even, for that matter, "edit my markdown file and git push to my public repo on github", which is the techie version of "edit my document on Google Drive"), which is why virtually nobody uses them.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean we're doomed to a few oligopolies controlling everything that gets published. First, even if less than 1% of the population is able and willing to do the extra work to publish on their own site independently of the oligopolies (as you do, and as I do too), that's still not nothing. And we can still send links to our own sites via email, facebook, twitter, etc.
Second, while the oligopolies currently provide self-publishing capabilities that are easier to use than anything else, that's still not their primary business model; the only reason they provide them is to corral more users into their walled gardens so they can sell more ads. Since it's not their primary business model, they are vulnerable to disruption from someone for whom providing self-publishing capabilities is their primary business model. (Of course, to say this could happen is not to say it will happen, or that it's easy.)
I could repair my own car, except the last time I tried to change a tire, I couldn't as the garage used a pneumatic tool to fasten the screws inhumanly hard. Every so much km, the car starts flashing all kinds of warnings because some computer from the manufacturer needs to be attached to the odb2 service connector. Neither is insurmountable, but why would I spend more money on tools than I ever would on the garage? Why would I spend a ton of my time, and take the risk of screwing up the car I depend on? Only because I like it, i.e. a hobby.
In the computer world, you can still send email, but if 1/3th of the people have a gmail account, you better have configured the server exactly as they want it, and every few months they change the rules. Google has a near monopoly in directing people to your site. If they decide you get no visitos without amp, you use amp or you live without much visitors.
Look at github's popularity. Not that long ago, every open source project ran their own source control, bug tracker, wiki, etc... gitlab's integrated system made that extremely easy, and still the very software devs that should be the main demographic for running their own server have migrated in masses to github.
Regarding your second: It might be true. But in this case you just swapped a huge company/oligopoly for another one that is a bit smaller. You're still not self hosting and peer-to-peering in this model.
None of this is insurmountable, but all of it is a bother. So you'll only do it if you want to, i.e. as a hobby.
I dont want to looking at it as 'doomed'. Technology advanced, and previous methods are now obsolete. We probably lost something charming in the process, but we win other things. That's just the way progress works, both in IT or outside it.
What you are describing is not "the ecosystem"; it's trying to mix doing it yourself with letting third parties do it. I agree that often doesn't work well. I don't bother trying to repair my own car because I would need to do everything myself and I don't have either the skill or the interest where car repair is concerned. As you say, doing it yourself is a hobby, and car repair is not my hobby.
> In the computer world, you can still send email, but if 1/3th of the people have a gmail account, you better have configured the server exactly as they want it, and every few months they change the rules. Google has a near monopoly in directing people to your site. If they decide you get no visitos without amp, you use amp or you live without much visitors.
If it's just a hobby we're talking about, there's nobody I have to send email to that only has a gmail account, so I don't care what stupid stuff Google is pulling. Similarly, I don't have to have a ton of people using my site, so I don't care what tricks Google is playing with search. If there's a particular person I want to see the site, I email them a link. Or I text it to them, or use whatever channel I already use to communicate with them.
If you actually have to care about getting email through Gmail's byzantine rules, or getting Google search results to direct visitors to your site, you don't have a hobby, you have a business, and that's a completely different world. Now you have to balance the cost of dealing with Google's bullshit against the cost of routing around them, and compare with the respective benefits of each.
> in this case you just swapped a huge company/oligopoly for another one that is a bit smaller.
You're assuming that the "someone" is a single huge company trying to get everybody in a single walled garden. But the reason the current oligopolies are doing that, as I said, is not because it's the best business model for selling the capability to easily self-publish. They're doing it because it's the best business model for selling ads. There's no reason a company or companies (there doesn't need to be just one, and my use of the singular was not intended to imply that I thought there would necessarily be just one) whose primary business model is selling easy self-publishing directly to users would have to do the same things Google and Facebook are doing.
> You're still not self hosting and peer-to-peering in this model
That's because I agree with you that what the vast majority of people want is not self-hosting and peer-to-peering, but the ability to create content, publish it, and be done. So I don't expect self-hosting and peer-to-peering to ever be more than a hobby pursued by a small number of outliers.
Small tuning: I was thinking more of microsoft/azure and amazon than google than facebook as oligopoly player.
If you can afford to alienate 1/3 of population then you're either a big business or a government and can push your own standards. Nobody else can do that.
I don't see why. Software devs are specialists in developing software, not in server administration.
This is what we try to solve at cloudron.io. You can self host apps on your servers without being that mechanic/electrician/sysadmin.
disclaimer: am co-founder.
Most people don't, and get surprised when they find out the difference.
The issue that all centralized systems will inevitably face is the requirement to blanket apply overly restrictive policies in order to head off legal issues. You see this in every massive, centralized system. Google Drive deletes files that trip a bandwidth limit. YouTube has algorithms which ban videos for even speaking about a topic. There's a lot of nuance in moderating content; that nuance gets lost in systems of massive scale, and this inevitably causes these systems to "implode" on themselves.
In other words: the legal system has a ton of nuance. Nuance defines our legal system. Its alright to kill someone in self defense; its not alright to kill someone in cold blood. But, Google (et al) cannot apply nuance at scale. No one can. Its physically impossible. The issue is not Google; its the Scale.
There are two possible futures: One where we continue down the path of centralization, the draconian policies continue to get worse, and our right to speech is increasingly eroded by private companies; another where we move to more peer-to-peer moderation, which will probably be in a more peer-to-peer like system. There is no third option. People argue this point like there is a third option: There is not. Distributed networks may not happen, but you will not like the world we'll live in if they don't.
This doesn't necessarily have to be a strict Peer-to-Peer system in the technical sense. Reddit is, to some degree, a Distributed, Peer-to-Peer system, whereby the moderators of subreddits get primary control over the content in those subreddits. There's a relationship large products like G-Suite could have with their customers, whereby they delegate the moderation of the majority of their users activities to the customer/IT, while still being capable of stepping in and remediating issues with problem customers as a whole. This is, actually, pretty similar to the relationship AWS has with its customers, and it works! But, G-Suite does not have this relationship with their customers; they blanket apply the same personal account policies to enterprise customers.
But, I also truly believe that no one at Google even knows what their system is doing anymore. Its probably billions of lines of code, systems, policy enforcement, tripwires, and circuit breakers that have long since spiraled out of the control of anyone who actually may want to improve their relationship with enterprise customers.
Eventually the tradeoffs will be so minuscule that they will be a rounding error. But right now, that's not true.
There are tradeoffs, but it will happen, even if it's TXT records for a domain that point to IPFS links (namecoin aside). The future will make it easier, but it works today.
IPv6 could really foster a home network revolution, when it's finally in place 20 years from now.
It's always about convenience though. Nothing beats being able to access your files by visiting a website.
FYI I run my own mail servers as a hobby, but still have my main personal account on gmail.
Neither. My hosting provider is better than either me or Google at that, and there are other companies providing email services who are better still.
What Google is "better" at with GMail is providing email whose suckage is just short of the level of suckage that would make it worth its users' while to give up having to just go to one place, their Google account, for everything in order to have email services that were bearable.