Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

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> There’s definitely closed platforms both hard and soft but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available... The romanticized “old web” was just a product of massive selection bias that still exists. If you want that experience it is still out there.

Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a misnomer. You're correct that you can decide to host your own Mastodon instance if you like. But on what?

If the open web really depends on general purpose computers, then it's somewhat disingenuous to suggest that people should just spin up instances on some cloud provider, because that locks people into that cloud provider. The old web didn't have that property - if you used a colocation provider and wanted to switch, you drove down, picked up your hard drives, and left.

The real reason why the internet centralized was because decentralization was never truly feasible. ISPs almost never granted static IP addresses to residential customers. Today, even residential fiber connections often don't offer symmetrical speeds. And why not? Because regulators never required it of residential ISPs. You can't sell a networked appliance that preserves user ownership and control on a remote-access featureset if your market doesn't have access to ISPs that will permit that! Is it any wonder that most "smart home" appliances and gadgets connect out to a central remote service to offer access outside the home?

The old web may have seemed decentralized, but it was never democratic. It had many "centers" that were non-corporate (and so, never aspired to reach the size of Facebook etc.), and with a strong selection bias for people willing to deal with colo-providers and shared hosting. Forget the decentralized web - we will never have a democratic web until people have been empowered to treat service hosting the way we think about our other rights secured under the Fourth Amendment - our persons (i.e. biohacking), houses (i.e. home appliances), papers (i.e. our personal data), and effects (i.e. wearables, automobiles).

> The real reason why the internet centralized was because decentralization was never truly feasible.

…in the U.S.

> ISPs almost never granted static IP addresses to residential customers.

…in the U.S.

> Today, even residential fiber connections often don't offer symmetrical speeds.

…in the U.S.

Well, as the U.S. goes, so does much of the rest of the world. If a home networking appliance doesn't make sense for the American market, it's much less likely to be built in the first place for a smaller, non-American market.

Residential customers get static IP addresses here.

Where are you? Also, are they IPv6 or IPv4 addresses?

Eastern Europe. IPv4.

> If the open web really depends on general purpose computers, then it's somewhat disingenuous to suggest that people should just spin up instances on some cloud provider, because that locks people into that cloud provider. The old web didn't have that property - if you used a colocation provider and wanted to switch, you drove down, picked up your hard drives, and left.

Same now, easier in fact. If I want to migrate from linode to digital ocean I simply restore my backup image. Indeed I do this automatically -- I have a site running on an AWS lightsail instance, which is backed up nightly to a linode server, and that backup is restored automatically onto linode with a minor script that changes the URLs from my production site to my test site.

It's far more accessible than running my own server in a colocation.

Right, it's not that it's technically impossible, you just pay for data egress. And data egress is expensive precisely to lock you in. I used the colo example because removing hard drives from the colo premises doesn't involve data egress charges.

I don't know how much data you have on your websites, but my daily backup tar is under 3GB, or under 100GB a month. My $5/month lightsail server comes with 2TB a month, and linode 1TB.

So probably the number one home usecase would be to manage social media, emphasis on media. Not just your photos and videos, at very high quality (4k+) at that, but also saving any photos or videos of others that are shared with you and that you wish to save (or share further).

This is not to mention that, if you really own your data, and you control it in your house, then really you should be able to store Big Data at home. Everything from the telemetry of the things you own, to your medical data (a link to which, in standard format, you can discreetly share with a doctor you authorize) and your home security controls (which serve you and aren't dependent on some cloud provider). CCTV isn't cheap to store on the cloud.

A couple of terabytes wouldn't be nearly enough.

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