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Comment by iDemonix | Hacker News Reader

This article is garbage.

> So yeah, try feeling grounded with that. It's a miracle that it even works.

Just because something is too complicated for you to understand, doesn't mean it's no good. Is this guy going to decline machines/life support in hospital because he thinks he could build something simpler?

I self host some things, mainly websites, but trying to self host the amount of stuff in that article is a fools errand. You'll spend more time updating, patching, and failing to notice any gaping security holes. I'm quite happy to pay Apple about 79 pence a month to deal with all that for me.

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Yeah, one could make a similar argument with self-hosting: How the data is transferred physically through undersea optical cables, how internet routing works and the complexity of it down to how the hardware underlying his Nextcloud installation works. It is really a miracle that it all works, though.

I've been self-hosting my e-mail, and I'm thinking of switching to Google Apps, Fastmail or Protonmail due to the fact that sometimes my emails just go directly to spam. There's also the worry that my server might get hacked, and the maintenance that you often have to do. My time is orders of magnitude more than the few dollars a month all this costs.

There are privacy conscious alternatives to the expensive providers such as proton. Mailbox.org is the one I went with, but there are others. Many provide inbox encryption through gpg. I could be very wrong, which I often am, but I believe that proton is also inbox encrypting like you would with gpg and their service is some sort of wrapper around that.

The downside to proton for me was price and having to use their client. There is an “imap-bridge” that you can run, but that feels hacky and in the end if I really wanted all that I could also opt into using the aforementioned providers with gpg inbox encryption.

Please don't call an article "garbage" just because something is too easy for you. It doesn't mean it's no good.

Yeah the dismissal from the apple fanboys in the comments are really something. It's a really good thing he shared his experience, few do. Also his website seems to have no tracking (Ublock Origin has blocked zero on the page). Also see user sneak's comment below about iCloud backups.

How do you reason with the fact that the NSA (American govt) is plugged into all your data? Sometimes I really wonder when we as a society are going to start caring about this ‘surveillance capitalism‘ stage of capitalism

Author here.

Garbage! I hope not. I think you misunderstood my intentions when I explained the complexity of Apple Pay. It wasn’t to discourage complex systems, but to highlight the immense and necessary complexity for these systems. I never meant to imply that complexity is a bad thing, and instead said that true complexity must lie somewhere. And to answer your question, if given a choice between a life support machine that connects to systems in-hospital, compared to one that requires a constant connection to China, I would choose the locally managed one.

But the microdots!

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