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Comment by Chilinot | Hacker News Reader

What is their business model? How do they afford to host all this without selling data or charging money?

Exactly my thought. I'm getting sick entirely of this proliferation of free services that obviously can't scale without increasingly high funding.

There are free software for each of those services which can be stood up locally, takes more time but offers more guarantees in the long term for privacy and resilience.

These are mostly online sharing and collaboration type services, or have sharing features. That means running it on your server and sharing with others doesn’t solve the trust issue, your just requiring that other people using these services you host have to trust you.

If you’re just using the single user services then sure, if you have the technical skills and resources doing it yourself is more private.

Perhaps you could have a federated open docs (etc) platform? Maybe it could be built on Matrix? Probably tough to implement though.

NextCloud actually started implementing ActivityPub federation a while back. I don't use NextCloud so i don't know if it works, but for sure all selfhosted programs that have some notion of cooperation should be federated otherwise you end up creating new accounts for every service on every community and that's a UX nightmare.

See also a blogpost of mine on this topic, about federated forging: https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/

That's a great article. Note that there's renewed activity by the FedeProxy [0] project providing funding for federating Gitea [1] using ForgeFed [2] and ActivityPub protocols.

[0] https://fedeproxy.eu

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/16518

[2] https://forgefed.peers.community

I would be interested to read more about the Nextcloud ActivityPub features.

I know about ActivityPub related discussions back in 2018[0] which links to a blog post[1] from the author of the activity app[2] that is natively included in every Nextcloud installation. However this app does not currently implement ActivityPub.

Did I miss something?

[0] https://nextcloud.com/blog/activitypub-the-new-standard-for-... [1] https://www.schilljs.com/2018/01/10/nextcloud-2018.html [2] https://github.com/nextcloud/activity/

Great writing. Radicle is definitely promising, and ipfs has been growing. I think the UX makes all the difference for adoption, and once an incentive model comes up for many to offer their local resources as available serving peers we may see a great alternative to centralised services. I would offer my disk space and fast network if I could launch a process easily enough and get credit, to exchange for cash or simply equivalent hosting on other peers.

the companies behind it (like nextcloud) make money with enterprise services and supported and maintaiend deployments for paying organizations.

since most of the cpu time is used in your browser, not in the cloud, the free offer is a relatively very cheap entry level teaser for supported, maintained and potentially on-premise deployments.

This is how YouTube started and of course the promise is that ultimately it’s going to make tons of money. The problem just is that 99% of these sites fail to get to that stage.

And youtube wasn't promising a free platform, so it's okay. Here we have a company setting up libre services, vaguely explaining they fund the infrastructure, I just don't see what the future will hold since they aren't at least committing to a plan.

Charging for infrastructure is acceptable. I think libre initiative should rather charge from the get go, it reduces the risk that some day a VP joins the organisation and decide to monetise the sale of our data rather than offer a reasonable pricing model where the owner of the data is the consume, not personal data exploiters.

Not me. Right now everybody's worried about scaling and it's keeping them from trying any new models. It's like the world forgot how to experiment with the Internet.

We experiment, and eventually advertising or other worse forms invasions kick in. It's only fair to expect a plan. They say very little about storage limits and how they would fund exponential growth if/when it occurs.

The investment in adopting a service is consequent, with daily use the effort to migrate away keeps growing. So, no, we better not experiment with offers hosting our digital life.

According to this two years old press release [0], they earn money through sponsorship and advertisement.

[0] https://www.pressebox.de/inaktiv/hive-01-gmbh/Open-Source-pr...

This seems to be their way of making money - kinda like Patreon: https://www.pling.com/support (https://www.opendesktop.org/u/pling)

I'd like to know what their threat model is too. I've got most of the same apps (plus a few others) set up on my own server. Seems that the biggest risk of this setup is that your data is basically out in the open, on a server with a bunch of other people.

If you want to self host, thehelm.com is one that I know of. I also keep tabs on getumbrel.com which is a personal server (with built-in appstore-like package manager) on Raspberry-Pi.

I just learnt from your comment about the helm and umbrel. The second is only a cryptocurrency wallet according to their homepage. The first looks more interesting but the website is very light on details: there's pretty pictures and "buy" buttons, but i'm skeptical about their security claims.

Their public-IP-VPN model is directly derived from UX research from the yunohost.org project (https://internetcu.be/), except instead of using network-neutral community-operated ISPs (eg. from the ffdn.org federation) for providing the VPN all goes through Amazon. They also mention the possibility to use your own domain name, but according to the technical details blogpost you still need to use their primary nameserver (also on Amazon), rendering their claim about their gateway not being able to access your communications more than dubious, since they operate both the DNS zone and the public IP (so they can effectively transparently MITM your mails if they want to, and so can Amazon).

Also it appears to be a private for-profit company, and their Github linked on the footer has exactly 0 public repositories. But they have a referral system to encourage you to convert your friends. All in all, without knowing/judging the people involved, it looks like a typical PR stunt from a money-hungry corporation who would not contribute to a broader selfhosting ecosystem.

In my very personal opinion, i'd strongly recommend to take a look at established, community-run solutions in this field: yunohost.org, freedombox.org, libreserver.org... FreedomBox also has hardware boxes to sell, while Yunohost relies on a network of local communities to distribute their own (both based on free-software-friendly Olimex hardware). I believe LibreServer is entirely software and does not sell boxes. I'd be happy to elaborate on some technical/political approaches of these projects if you're curious.

> I just learnt from your comment about the helm and umbrel. The second is only a cryptocurrency wallet according to their homepage.

getumbrel, pretty much a source-available (not quite FOSS) two-developer effort, is going after the same market as thehelm and used "self-hosting" bitcoin (lightening) wallets as a wedge, because there is indeed an overlap between adopters of decentralized-tech such as cryptocurrency/defi and users who prefer self-hosting. See getumbrel's v04 release blog post: https://archive.is/xZEec

> All in all, without knowing/judging the people involved, it looks like a typical PR stunt from a money-hungry corporation who would not contribute to a broader selfhosting ecosystem.

Fair. Not sure if thehelm is a PR stunt, but the founders have successfully exited from at least one venture in the past (I believe, Rapid7).

> In my very personal opinion, i'd strongly recommend to take a look at established, community-run solutions in this field

Thanks for pointing me to FOSS alternatives. I responded to OP's What is their business model? How do they afford to host all this without selling data or charging money? by pointing out that there indeed are for-profit efforts in this space up and running, even if nascent.

> there is indeed an overlap between adopters of decentralized-tech such as cryptocurrency/defi and users who prefer self-hosting

I'm not really sure about that. If you have stats about the proportion of cryptocurrency/defi users actually selfhosted, i'm curious. On the other side, i've rarely encountered people in the selfhosting/privacy ecosystems who are interested in cryptocurrencies.

> I responded to OP's

Fair enough :)

I can't speak for "cryptocurrency/defi" culture but self hosting is definitely very strong on Bitcoin maximalist space. I think the idea spams from running your own node to search and validate transactions privately and without the need to trust anyone or leaking data that might associate that transaction to you. I guess the reason for that is that Bitcoin maximalism also overlaps with libertarian self sovereign ideals and censorship resistance.

And I think this is attested by the number of projects similar to Umbrel like Ronin Dojo, Raspiblitz, MyNode and even hardware vendors like Nodl and Start9. CryptoCloaks sells accessories like cases for RPis, a popular device for running Bitcoin and Lightning nodes. Some people might even go beyond and get their blocks from the Blockstream satellite transmission.

I'm not sure you'll ever get stats about that because those people like to remain hidden. Perhaps the growth rate of Bitcoin and Lightning network nodes operating on the Onion network might be a good starting point.

> Blockstream Satellite transmission

I had no idea this was a thing! Thanks for the reference.

Donations, community support, and patreon like subscription model helps OpenDesktop to sustain. I know there are not free lunches, but this is how it looks like. One must pay for someone else to keep the flow running.

opendesktop.org was owned by Hive01[0] but then bought by Blue Systems[1].

It sounds like Blue Systems is an IT company with no business purpose other than philanthropy.

I'm kind-of amazed at how much freaking out everybody's doing on this thread when instead they could just do a little looking.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems

it'd be interesting to run these services like p2p torrents - where you both serve, but also consume bandwidth. Popular services of course, will run better as there are more peers, and little used services will die out.

I dont know how this can work with a private documents model - presumably you don't want to share your data, but just the compute. May be IPFS or something of that nature...

There are sharing cloud setups that encrypt your data and store it on the sharing computers. I tried some of them 10-15 years ago but they were all written in Java and didn't work very well. But they do still exist. Think one of them were called SpiderOak.

For personal files hosting, the P2P implementation that comes to mind is tahoe-lafs. I've only used it briefly but it was a good experience, and i've heard only good things over the years.

Don't expect any GUI/WebUI though.

Donations probay

Doesnt seem very future proof. But looking around on their website that seems to be their (atleast publicly) only source of income.

If there is continuing value to a community, that community will likely continue to fund it. That seems more future proof than venture capital or corporate largesse.

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