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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

> This is all just some nerd’s out of touch pipe dream.

Yes, though only because it's a lot of trouble to set up today.

If it were completely commoditizated -- imagine one more button when setting up a new phone ("Choose where your data resides: Apple, Google, Facebook, Self hosted") and it was completely transparent then it would be used much more, especially if that's complemented by one of the nerds setting up e.g. a neighborhood sync server and everybody around knowing it and using it.

So yes, you are not wrong but the situation can change dramatically if ergonomics are improved. Which sadly most of the nerds never work on.

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I used to think this. The Google, Apple, and Facebook options are the improved ergonomics solution. It just never pans out for these open solutions. I've been waiting decades for it things to get to that level, but it always ends up the same way - fiddling with servers.

You are restating that the self-hosted options are not as ergonomic yet which I already acknowledged.

As for waiting, yeah, sad story, but most of us don't want to be on the computer for 16-18h a day anymore. I implore any of the more privileged programmers -- people with job security, $200K+ annual salary, a lot of social safety nets -- to open their eyes and stop fucking around with the one millionth LISP interpreter and just start making non-corporate-controlled tech already.

understood. I am only extending that to say that virtually all software is built with the headspace of "some amount of maintenance" is to be expected. To overcome this, it needs to be delegated to someone. That someone will cost money. It's unclear to how this cycle will ever be broken unless the entire solution is somehow also controlled and produced with uniform open source hardware.

Sure, I don't disagree with that, though I think that we the "nerds" should _really_ stop churning tech and versions of stuff so hard, but that's sadly outside of your control and mine.

In other words, if you built one nice Golang / Rust program and only update the server once every 3 months, you can go quite far without touching it too much. Likely 3-5 years.

So, say you choose the "self hosted" option. I really hope you have at least a RAID10 with 2-drive failure, and regular off-site and off-line backups as well. Choosing "self hosted" is a very risky option, because most people have no clue how to protect their data from loss. I'm sure you'll explain next that some hack0r will figure out how to do redundant backup self-hosted for very little cost that even the stupidest human could use, but I just don't see that being an option in my lifetime, if ever. Okay, so then "self-host" in the cloud? Well that's not really "self-hosted" is it?

I will agree that nerds work far too much on pointless pursuits.

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