The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never come back if we are still expecting people to manage servers like it’s 1985.

I think part of the problem is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that is not fun. It’s that boring middle layer between the OS and apps. Compounding the problem is the fact that the people who know that layer well feel no personal need to fix its usability issues.

Programmers want to work on AI and distributed systems and games and other sexy things. Even people who work in the middle layer would rather work on sexy problems there like hyperscaling with Kubernetes and architecture as code.

Making regular old systems easy to use for boring not-hyperscale uses just isn’t sexy so open source devs don’t do it. The economic model for commercial stuff only incentivizes the leveraging of this problem for vendor lock in or to move people into SaaS where data can be mined and rent can be charged forever.

At this point the whole industry is herding everyone into SaaS walled gardens because that’s the only working economic model in software. I don’t see this changing without a movement similar to open source in its heyday in the 90s, but to steal fire from the nerds and bring it to the masses.

I’m not optimistic because nobody seems to care. It might take a whole cycle in which all freedom and privacy is completely lost. Experiences like Twitter just aren’t cutting it. People are stuck on either “woke Twitter was bad” or “pilled Elon bad” instead of realizing that the problem is intrinsic to walled gardens. All cloud spies on you and all social media is manipulating discourse for someone. No exceptions.