alexlazar97

Information overload is prevalent. Too many tweets, too many newsletters, never ending reading lists.

People write pages to say what could be said in paragraphs... Paragraphs to say what could be said in sentences.

This browser extension fixes it. "The Gist of It" uses ChatGPT to provide instant, intelligent summaries of any selected text.

It's most definitely a "wrapper", but it provides a nice micro-optimization of something we have to do daily: skim long-form content to figure out if we want to read it more attentively.

You can add it to your browser (and see a demo) here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/the-gist-of-it/okgj...

And you can see the code here: https://github.com/mauricedesaxe/the-gist-of-it

I know this is self-promotion, but the app is free and will stay free. It's just me giving a small nugget of value to the world.

I hope you try it, enjoy it and (why not?) make an open-source contribution to it if you think it could be better.

Compared to that, yes, I agree. But it's way easier than it used to be and I think it's within the skill set of most computer literate people.

Really any cloud provider that supports easily deploying Docker already does this. And, truth be told, hosting Docker apps is damn easy.

> The relative cost will determine and control the market, I believe.

I agree there.

> Hosting is very complicated

But not here. Docker, imho, and cloud providers that make deploying Docker apps easy are making it very easy.

I don't really know what you mean by "decentralised" options though. Using an existent SaaS is far from decentralised imho.

I self-host Nextcloud, a personal finance app called Expensio + all of my websites (personal and commercial). Maybe about ~8 or so things in total.

I only really spend time on maintaining them when I want to update them which is usually just a git pull and a docker compose command.

I agree. Big co and VC funded startups will find it hard to do the self-hosted model.

But small software companies or "indie hackers" (like me) can make it make sense. It's also a good way for us to differentiate ourselves and have an angle in the bigger markets.

If I and 5 other devs go and make Dropbox, for example, you won't look at us. Dropbox will be much better. But if we offer a self-hosted version, we might just be able to carve a small portion of the market for ourselves through that angle.

That's an interesting take and I have thought about local-first a lot too. There are tradeoffs, the core cons I find are: - complex code, complex architecture vs traditional web apps - hard(er) to update app versions across users

The core selling point (hiding latency) is big I think. But, if you self-host, the user/business can put their server very close and reduce latency to unnoticeable levels.

I think local-first is cool, really cool and makes beautiful apps. But I think it's only worth it for a small subset of software, far smaller then self-hosted.

I think any business where the owner/team can figure out how to host something like WordPress can also figure out how to throw a Docker app in one of the many providers that just auto-deploy Docker apps, for example.

I agree with everything you said. If you're that small 1% or 5% of the world that is willing to figure out how to self-host, it makes a lot of sense. If you're the average non computer literate person, it's likely not for you.

From my experience, you don't have to value your time at zero to make it make sense. Some software/infra genuinely requires very little to no maintenance.

to be completely honest, i don't really think "self-hosted is the future" as in "it will take over SaaS majority", I just think it will be more of a thing because it's easier to deploy apps nowadays.

I have spent the past month building a marketplace for digital products (similar to Gumroad) that uses exclusively Bitcoin for transactions.