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Comment by obvio171 | Hacker News Reader

You know what a killer app for this would be? An "app store" of stupidly-simple-to-use server software.

Routers are most people's only always ON computer, and having the ability to run decentralized applications on them like media, backups, microblogging, chat bouncers, etc. as easily as one would install a smartphone app could really tip the scale back toward the edges and away from centralized services.

Money can't be ignored though. There has to be a (cryptocurrency-y?) way for people to voluntarily "subscribe" to recurringly give money to developers of these services, and it has to be so simple that it's almost easier than not giving.

Costs could be offset by the user by renting out cpu/bandwidth/storage in a similarly one-click way by running specialized apps that handle that.

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My Synology DiskStation has a nice set of packages for things like that. As does my OpenWRT router. Both are pretty awesome.

Something as nice as the App Store definitely requires some sort of revenue model. The Synology stuff is about an order of magnitude friendlier than the OpenWRT: the apps are more curated, better polished, etc. Which makes sense; polishing an app to consumer-grade UI levels and then properly cataloging it is a lot of work. Work that doesn't often happen in the open-source scratching-one's-own-itch context.

I think Sandstorm has a lot of potential in that area: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sandstorm-io-personal-clo...

Aren't you pretty much describing the MaidSafe project? Not exactly sure about the one-click functionality but everything else is spot on.

ISPs would hate this and the security implications of all of these routers running various services available to the internet is quite bad.

That would have to be thoroughly thought of to offer a simple solution, maybe even at the cost of defining stricter boundaries of what such services would be allowed to do.

But there's no reason why running servers should be so scary that only the powerful are able to run them. And "server" is not synonymous with "webhosting". There's a lot of p2p to be done if we want a decentralized internet.

I regularly run a Bittorrent "server" available to the internet and never had any problem. I also run a Ricochet "server" (also a p2p app), no headache either.

We have to get past the FUD and dig ourselves out of this hole.

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