[HN Gopher] The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
___________________________________________________________________
The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
Recent and related: _The future is not self-hosted_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175 (424 comments)
Author : robmao
Score : 189 points
Date : 2025-07-27 04:26 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.robertmao.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.robertmao.com)
| 12inchidentity wrote:
| Own yer identity. Equip yourself and others with the power of
| self determinism.
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| Forever free, forever sovereign.
|
| DID with ZK human proof on blockchain... Is this possible?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to
| embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0 gas
| fees.
|
| I don't really like crypto that much from a currency
| perspective given its history with scam but I like the
| technology just a little bit so I built it.
|
| If someone is interested on someway to monetize or I don't know
| just talk about it, I am more than happy to.
|
| Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail things that
| can allow you to prove an amazon transaction or tax reciept
| etc. which can prove human proof so yeah I think its possible.
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| > I have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to
| embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0
| gas fees.
|
| How is this possible? Is it something that EVM-based chains
| can support? Curious to hear more.
|
| > _Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail_
|
| Zkmail doesn't prove that you're a unique human. Worldcoin
| does, but it requires trusting a single company with
| everyone's iris data, which is quite dangerous, and
| completely undermines the goal of building a decentralized,
| trustless system.
|
| The future I hope for is one where our own devices handle
| this entirely. Imagine a VR headset or future phone using its
| iris scanner, combined with our social data, to generate a
| single, secure cryptographic proof. This proof would verify
| our uniqueness in the world without ever leaking iris data or
| any other sensitive information.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Its really complicated but I will try to sum it up.
|
| Basically nano cryptocurrency has no gas fees so if you can
| get even 10^-30 nano, you can technically do unlimited
| transactions forever (there is some caveat)
|
| You can get such nano from faucets and then you have
| basically an eternal source of doing transactions.
|
| What are transactions? Transactions are a way of sending
| money from A public key to B public key
|
| Now what if we actually take some data and parse it into
| chunks and then we can create a lot of addresses using some
| vanity generator whose seed we can know
|
| Then we got all the seeds of the vanity addresses whose
| lets say top 4 letters of the first address can form a
| word... now we do the transactions and then we take a
| transaction id and in the end we send money to original
| account
|
| by that transaction id or that special account we can
| actually see a loop of sorts and thus tada! we get some
| data that we can actually store in blockchain itself.. for
| 0 fees!!
|
| Now what was my use case! sounds really silly but I wanted
| to use worldoftext and I wanted to prove that I am the
| first person to write some text..
|
| Now so what I did was take a unique hash of text and then
| embed it into blockchain.., and since blockchain has some
| time, we have essentially timestamped some text and we can
| also prove that we are the owner of the account that
| created that text...
|
| Oh yeah, I have also created my own cryptocurrency which
| actually used algorand's vrf function with it to create a
| sort of way for randomness to be integrated in it too/ in
| sense create a cryptocurrency too with this usecase lol
|
| Side note: in order to improve the efficiency you could
| lose the 10^-30 nano to send to a completely different
| account which we don't control and since most faucets give
| like 10^-10 nano ish and like honestly, that is a more
| practical approach
|
| How is nano still alive? because for each transaction the
| person doing the transaction has to do some work function,
| I recommend the 2nd latter approach but I like both
| approaches. I have some bun code which can automate this
| whole thing too and Its all on github and uh my practical
| approach is with me T-T, I think I legit accidentally
| deleted it but uh yea I built it using claude and its kinda
| Ai slop but it works :/
|
| Someone gifted me the domain name for my work and some
| dollars too, Y'know.. I personally feel like the thing that
| I did was really innovative and I am the most proud of it
| but I personally feel like the decentralization aspect
| would never make me earn a single cent out of it and that's
| okay to me but I don't have too much money and I wish
| someday that I could work on such things without thinking
| about money :/
|
| Fun fact: nano cryptocurrency creator actually said on
| reddit that such behaviour is unintended and that's exactly
| what I like doing.. Doing unintended things to do something
| useful.
|
| I also created a whole youtube video and some other which I
| might share privately
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hHG8gOkZBE
|
| I will update my HN to show some contact info I guess too
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| This does sound interesting and very much show HN level.
| Do you have any shareable github/page where you discuss
| the idea in more detail?
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. The method of encoding data
| through a looping chain of transactions between vanity
| addresses is particularly clever. Truly a innovative
| idea.
|
| Hope to see more practical applications emerge. Please
| keep us updated should it unfold in the future.
| GianFabien wrote:
| The majority of folks are _consumers_ and unable and /or
| unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting, self-
| sovereignity, etc. They will gravitate to what is _free_ and
| _easy_. There are no incentives for the major vendors to
| implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising
| revenues.
|
| If you decide to foster an _online community_ , then you might
| end up being the tech support to that community. For many of us,
| that is not an appealing choice.
| rapsey wrote:
| Not just majority, vast majority. This article is really about
| 0.01% of the population who is into this.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| There are no incentives until you get screwed over yourself. As
| an entrepreneur and long term (almost 40 years) owner of
| running businesses, I have been screwed over by anything from
| banks to insurers to couriers to, let's just name names,
| Google, Paypal, Stripe etc. Without recourse. But PERSONALLY, I
| have also been screwed by the same services, without recourse.
| And for that reason, I (try to) use services that I can visit
| and sue which means they need to be inside country where I live
| aka sovereign. I know I can sue Google theoretically but if
| it's not about 10m euros+, the Dutch lawyers/courts are going
| to tell me not to do it as it's not possible to even get a
| 'sorry' from American companies. While if it's a Dutch company,
| I just walk into their office and the CEO is going to explain
| to me why they did what they did. And because they know this, I
| have had my accounts reinstated when blocked, always can pick
| up the phone to 'my' account manager and IF they screw me, I
| know my rights and I will get a 'sorry' + money back without
| laywers. The actual 'I'll be at your office in 30 minutes' is
| usually enough to make _anything_ happen.
|
| (also, sitting with the owner / ceo very often results in them
| learning about something they actually did not know; a few
| months ago I went with bol.com managers through some process on
| their site which they didn't know was completely broken because
| of 'anti-fraud AI' and they kept blaming me (not only me, just
| 'dumb users'), so seeing them trying themselves and failing was
| hilarious)
| crinkly wrote:
| Yeah been screwed here a couple of times. You have to treat
| all these companies as disposable. Use them until they piss
| you off. Do not build your entire universe on someone else's
| turf.
|
| It's cheaper and more convenient to fuck something off
| quickly than sue them.
| noirscape wrote:
| Cory Doctorow has a good term for what those big American
| tech companies do; rather than too big to fail, they're too
| big to _care_ [0]. Because they've muscled all their
| meaningful competition out of the way (or at least think they
| do), they instead start ignoring support requests and
| increasingly alienating customers.
|
| You'd think that eventually market forces would try to
| correct this, but in practice that doesn't happen because big
| companies can just buy out any entity that's an actual threat
| to them/cover so many areas that getting rid of them is nigh
| impossible. (There's some attempts to limit this from the EU
| and before 2025, the US as well, but a major part of the beef
| the US has with the EU is that they're trying to force these
| major tech companies to care again.)
|
| [0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-
| shruggie/...
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Completely agree about working with companies in the same
| country so you actually get support, I learnt the hard way
| and now try and avoid overseas companies for this reason.
|
| Calling out one company in-particular that we just got over
| an absolute nightmare of a messy divorce with, Freshworks.
| They are Indian-based, and their support in India treated us
| like we didn't have any consumer rights at all after signing
| their SaaS contract (you know, one of those 1000 page things
| you have to sign when starting any random SaaS) and starting
| sending us random ludicrous invoices and refusing to ie
| downgrade the number of subscription seats or switch from
| annual to monthly billing, claiming that because we didn't
| give them 60 days notice of reduction in seats we had to pay
| a whole year for the extra users blah blah blah, which might
| be legal in India, but is completely illegal in Australia.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Ah yes, Freshworks... I could write a book about them :(
| Stay well away.
| swader999 wrote:
| Is this same as freshdesk?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Freshdesk is one of their products.
| xp84 wrote:
| > There are no incentives until you get screwed over
| yourself.
|
| In B2B you have a point. In the consumer space this doesn't
| happen though. I know several people who have had big snafus
| with their data with Google, Apple, etc. but none of them
| moved to self hosting. I agree with the people who have said
| elsewhere that that's mainly a user experience problem that
| _could_ be solved - but I also agree the companies like
| Google and Apple will not provide any support to any
| standards which have the potential to commoditize or replace
| their strings-attached and corporate-controlled services.
| Meaning self hosting and avoiding those big companies' stuff
| will continue to be rather lonely and isolating.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Well.. It depends what they are. Social networks, obviously
| are an issue. But for personal email, photos, vids, content
| etc, that's not isolating; the self hosted versions have
| the same sharing / coop features as the google/ms ones for
| most / all personal needs. And setting up is just not very
| hard. It is a niche, I agree, but at least where I live,
| people are getting increasingly angry with the big corps
| and are asking how to avoid them. It won't make a dent in
| google revenue, but I won't have the frustrating experience
| myself or being asked to fix the frustrating experience for
| someone else.
| brewdad wrote:
| Until you can give consumers an AppleTV type box that
| they can buy at Walmart, plug in and maybe spend 5
| minutes setting up, then never have to think about again,
| you simply aren't going to get 90% of the population to
| self-host anything. Most don't have the knowledge to make
| it happen and won't be able to understand the
| documentation needed to acquire that knowledge. The rest
| simply can't be bothered with it.
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| It was also unthinkable that everyone would have their own
| desktop computer at some point. If we were able to make self-
| hosting be as simple as having a desktop, it might be possible.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| And these desktops today for 99% of people are just dumb
| terminals for the cloud where everything lives.
| chii wrote:
| > unthinkable that everyone would have their own desktop
| computer at some point
|
| it was unthinkable not because people didn't want it, but
| that it costed too much back then. Half a mil for a
| microcomputer that took up a room?!
|
| Current self-hosting requirements are similarly expensive -
| time and money. If someone were to sell an appliance for
| which you could just plug into the outlet, and you get it
| all, then it would be pretty good. Like a washing machine.
| nradov wrote:
| That hypothetical self hosting appliance would require
| constant system administration work, far worse than even
| the most complex "smart" washing machine.
| chii wrote:
| > constant system administration work
|
| why is that an inescapable truth? If the needs of such a
| self-hosted system is not changing, there's a theoretical
| argument that there shouldn't be any need to make
| administrative work.
|
| if the environment changes such that this need arises,
| like changing/new protocols, new services, etc, it stands
| to reason that the seller of this appliance would release
| a new version, or an update of sorts.
|
| Like mobile phones. You certainly don't constantly do
| "system admin" on your mobile do you?
| psychoslave wrote:
| No, but I don't host a mail server on it?
| xp84 wrote:
| One reason at least in my country (USA) is the dire state
| of broadband. A few people have awesome symmetric fiber,
| but it's about a single digit percentage. Most of the
| rest uses DOCSIS with wildly asymmetrical ratios (e.g.
| mine is 1000 down/100 up), dynamic IP, and some have
| unreliable connectivity.
|
| Getting people to self host without corporate
| dependencies unfortunately means dynamic DNS, revealing
| your home IP address, and means that when your home
| internet is down or degraded, it affects you even if you
| go elsewhere.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Dynamic DNS doesn't reveal your IP to anyone that doesn't
| know the domain name. Most self-hosted services also have
| offline modes. e.g. my finamp playlists are synced to my
| phone when I'm home and then play offline anywhere else.
| Within your home if your Internet connection goes down, a
| self-hosted service (e.g. streaming video) has _better_
| availability than cloud ones.
| brewdad wrote:
| For most people, keeping a desktop running securely and
| efficiently is beyond their abilities. Spyware and bloat and
| outdated, insecure software is the standard for most people.
| kragen wrote:
| The same reasoning shows that most people will never own their
| own nuclear reactor, airplane, rifle, automobile, computer,
| refrigerator, or house, or raise their own children. So, while
| there is some truth in it, I think it may be leaving out some
| relevant factors.
| MoreQARespect wrote:
| >The majority of folks are consumers and unable and/or
| unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting
|
| The majority of folks just want to text and call on their
| phones. They are unwilling to handle the complexity of having
| an entire computer in their pocket. -- 2006
|
| >There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement
| protocols that will threaten their massive advertising
| revenues.
|
| Right. And Yahoo didnt want to be a search engine. They wanted
| to be the home page of the internet.
| poisonborz wrote:
| > There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement
| protocols that will threaten their massive advertising
| revenues.
|
| In 1996 there were especially no incentives from corporations
| for a free operating system to exists, yet Linux was born on
| the back of a few hard working engineers and the whole industry
| catched up, it created a lot (if not the majority) of business.
| You can engineer ~free and easy self-hosting.
|
| I agree it needs to be personal, there are no appealing middle-
| man options.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| The weird thing is, LLMs do seem to create an environment, in
| which such shift is not impossible. By this I mean, I know I
| personally use search engines a lot less now ( and I suspect
| that here I am not that much different from other internet
| denizens ). If true, there is a possibility that the existing
| ad model will -- out of necessity -- have to adapt to a new
| venue. This did not seem to fully happen yet ( providers seem
| skittish and are trying not to alienate people ).
|
| I self-host some parts and I am currently in the process of
| adding some LLM layers in my setup. It seems like it can be
| made very personal..if one is so inclined. The question
| remains whether people will be inconvenienced enough.
|
| That I have no real answer for since I am not sure what
| enough here is. I wince when I see hulu ad on Disney+
| platform when I have their no ads tier, but did not drop them
| yet.
|
| It is not a perfect example, but lots people see it as: 'its
| not that bad yet'.
| lenkite wrote:
| ChatGPT: Certainly! While I organize answers to your query,
| please view the following product and service offerings by
| my corporate sponsors - the more you click, the more I can
| answer!
| XanSurnamehere wrote:
| >internet denizens
|
| The word netizens was right there! Still worked though.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Substantial part of population can't even manage their router
| or simple devices say NAS... And by manage keep them up to
| date.
|
| Now think of actually running something consistently. And react
| to changes in that... A task a few steps above.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model,
| but all opinions expressed are my own
|
| Why not post the prompts, it'll be a shorter read with presumably
| the same amount of new information.
| robmao wrote:
| The prompt is much longer and less structured than the blog
| post.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am not a writer and the blog posts I have built are really
| long and I am pretty sure that noone except myself have read
| them, but I really feel as if I use AI quite a lot to code
| some one off projects and nowadays a general overreliance on
| them too.
|
| I am pretty sure that sure, it might be more tedious to
| actually manage your thoughts into more structured format to
| present to a larger audience and you might think that AI is
| meant for such tasks but I personally feel as if there is
| something about using AI in writing that feels sloppy most of
| the times.
|
| Write bad but original. Maybe it won't get to the top of the
| HN, but you get the widest amount of freedom if you are
| really passionate about writing.
|
| (I am thinking of stopping to use AI / using AI to just teach
| me things if I find a need to create a project that I am
| genuinely curious to build myself)
| crinkly wrote:
| I disagree with this.
|
| The ideological approaches to these problems always seem to
| result in adding more technology to the problem, which introduces
| more attack vectors, more control points and more complexity, all
| of which are difficult to understand and manage. The real problem
| is you should not need to identify yourself all the time. And the
| best way to do that, contrary to the SaaS culture on here, is not
| to hand over your stuff to someone else where you need to
| identify yourself to get it back or even involve yourself in
| "services culture".
|
| So over the last 2 years I unpicked all my dependencies and moved
| to a reductionist and disposable model. The "minimum happy
| subset" is pretty much a domain with an IMAP box still, as it was
| 20 years ago. The IMAP box is dumb enough to be moved around. And
| your stuff should be in simple files, with well-documented
| formats, on the computer that you own and control. An average
| user can self-manage this with minimal effort. Everything else I
| have found to be 100% disposable.
|
| This incidentally lines up 1:1 with the non-technical friends I
| have who just don't care and do it that way anyway. Perhaps we
| care too much.
|
| Also can we just get some plain old HTML presented like a 50 year
| old book next time.
| vaylian wrote:
| The article argues for interoperability through standardized
| protocols. Freedom is achieved through the possibility to move
| one's own data to a different host when the current host becomes
| problematic. Either host can be a commercial service, a friend's
| computer or your own server. Self-hosting is only one option
| among several in this model.
|
| If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then
| this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected
| pieces of data that require storage in a relational database,
| then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because
| you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead
| of just returning a self-contained blob.
| pferde wrote:
| The good news is that every self-hoster will be more than happy
| to start using this hypothetical self-sovereign solution with
| their data, if and when it becomes available.
|
| I know I would. I'm just not smart enough, nor have the correct
| kind of experience to start designing, building or evangelizing
| such solution, so I am stuck waiting for someone else.
|
| A good example is ForgeFed, which I can't wait to mature enough
| to be usable.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Deeply disagree.
|
| Looking at the _current_ selfhosted landscape and saying "nice
| but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970
| and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them
| for tasks".
|
| I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan
| of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed
| immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and
| ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically
| targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena,
| before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened
| to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off
| to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.
|
| If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community
| hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky
| admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may
| change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-
| profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They
| will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that
| is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.
|
| Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder
| to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond
| basic/defeatable script attacks.
|
| Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues,
| they're not that hard.
| em-bee wrote:
| how are you disagreeing? self-hosting is not being ruled out.
| do you think me, my siblings, our parents and children, each of
| us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well
| just share one machine? we are going to trust each other. but
| why wouldn't we. it's easier to share our photo albums this
| way. it's that or facebook. pretty much.
|
| and again, self-hosting is not ruled out, it's still an option.
| what robert says is that regardless of the choice we need self-
| sovereignty. that is orthogonal. you are still free to self-
| host. but we have to face the reality that not everyone is
| going to do it. even if we have the tools to make self-hosting
| easy.
| poisonborz wrote:
| > each of us should self-host their stuff when we could
| perfectly well just share one machine?
|
| Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you
| don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all
| the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different
| needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so
| on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they
| take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for
| what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a
| single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet
| anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that.
|
| So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most
| independence and freedom. The only reason people think
| otherwise is because because of alleged technical
| infeasibility.
| em-bee wrote:
| it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal
| capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply
| can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i
| have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook
| (or something else like it).
|
| and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use
| but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other
| family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i
| see everything that is posted. if he needs different
| software he can still host that himself, that's besides the
| point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a
| platform for the family to use. a private facebook
| alternative.
|
| i don't know about your family relationships, but for me
| family means to support and stand by each other.
| poisonborz wrote:
| > it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time
| wise. some people simply can't do that
|
| That's just an usability issue that needs to be solved.
| In 2002 nobody could believe that even elderly and
| children could use smartphones 20 years later.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| And it turns out maybe children. _shouldn 't_ be using
| smartphones 20 years later.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Now you lost me. Expecting one server per person in a
| household is unrealistic. Even if software becomes perfect,
| what about the hardware aspect? Expecting a family of 5 to
| have 5 servers all available and reachable from anywhere
| sounds like a nightmare, and just a waste of electricity.
|
| Your whole premise is that self hosting software can become
| a one-click deploy, if they can achieve that I'm sure
| different settings per user is possible. If who is legally
| responsible about what your brother does with the family
| serve is really such a big question, then let's just accept
| widely adoption of self hosting is not going to happen.
| em-bee wrote:
| if the servers are all in the same house then the police
| is not going to ask who's server they can take, they are
| just going to take all of them. so if that is a concern,
| it would be lost. but GP is not talking about people
| living together, but not sharing with relatives who live
| elsewhere.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yeah, this makes intuitive sense too. You share lots of
| that potential IRL liability with live-in family members
| anyway.
| poisonborz wrote:
| A server could be a $30 silent soap-sized box hanging on
| the router consuming 5 watts, you plug it in and it sets
| up services and domains ready to access. Why would this
| be a nightmare? It is already feasible on all levels.
| Assuming the house has fiber, reliability shouldn't be
| much of an issue.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| A server could be a VM _taps head_
| xp84 wrote:
| "Hello, Metropolitan Police here. We have a warrant to
| seize... docker container ab38asdf8765jk on your home
| server. Go ahead and export its attached volumes and the
| image. We'll wait."
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Docker IDs are hexadecimal so that one is invalid. Sorry
| Met!
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| That sounds like a you problem, failure to comply will
| result in forfeiture and imprisonment...
|
| I wouldn't put it past them... capriciousness in UK
| policing is a feature not a bug.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| I'm gonna be doubly pedantic - that wasn't the container
| id, that was the actual container name. As a name, it is
| valid.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I actually did think of that so that's definitely the
| best kind of correct!
| akerl_ wrote:
| Why do you think this hasn't already happened?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| CGNAT (lack of ipv6), and lack of fiber, meaning lack of
| upload bandwidth.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| A 30 dollars box will replace cloud storage, photo
| storage, video steaming, and all the other services
| people expect to have? I don't think you have though
| through what exactly you're trying to replace, we're not
| talking about tech people wanting to host their static
| blog here.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you
| mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable
| power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We
| are not that far away from that.
|
| Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people
| do not host videos on Netflix.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and
| other important documents in a single drive, then at
| least double the price because you're not going to sell a
| raspberry kit to the general public but a polished
| product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it,
| because you're also going to need tech support and
| updates.
|
| And how are you going to reach your personal server? More
| and more people don't even get to have a public IP for
| their router anymore, and having every non-tech person
| punch a hole in their firewall to access their photos...
| I'm sure that's going to go well.
|
| And if you somehow manage to do that, how are you going
| to share your photos in your personal server with your
| friends? Because that's pretty high in people's needs.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| There is always a way to make things more complicated
| and/or expensive. That is not the goal of the exercise,
| though.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| What I listed is not optional, it's the bare minimum if
| you want to have a widely-adopted self-hosted solution
| for someone's digital life.
|
| If you're going to recommend your non-tech family store
| all their photos in raspberry with a single hard drive
| with no backup, that's kind of evil.
| em-bee wrote:
| a cheap virtual host with a reverse tunnel...
| smeej wrote:
| > The only reason people think otherwise is because because
| of alleged technical infeasibility.
|
| Some people think otherwise because they _trust each
| other,_ and understand that specialization allows
| efficiency and economies of scale.
|
| Even if it's stupid easy to run five servers at home,
| there's sure to be one person who likes maintaining them
| more than the other four.
|
| It's stupid easy to load and unload the dishwasher, but my
| sister didn't like handling the dirty dishes and I didn't
| like running around and putting them away, so I loaded and
| she unloaded, and we were both slightly but meaningfully
| better off on a daily basis because of it. Of course we
| _could_ each just load and unload our own dishes, but a
| slight reduction in independence and freedom (counting on
| each other to do our part) improves things for both of us.
|
| People often--I'd even say _usually_ --work together
| because they benefit from it, not just because they lack
| the technical chops to do otherwise.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| > The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for
| others.
|
| How is that the golden rule? I self host and somehow missed
| that. I think of it more as devolution, you can self host
| if you want to, or you can use a family hosted option, or a
| community. That way a balance can be struck between
| convenience and sovereignty such that as convenience
| naturally improves so does sovereignty. No need to let
| perfect be the enemy of good, is a soft gradient all the
| way down.
|
| Edit: I googled the 'golden rule of self-hosting' and all I
| could find the the parents comment but that seemed to be
| enough for google AI summary to accept it, so stating it as
| fact appears to have done so in so far as Googles AI is
| concerned.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for
| tasks"
|
| Very prescient indeed for someone in 1970 to predict the
| success of AWS
| harvey9 wrote:
| We had timesharing on mainframes. Everything old is new
| again.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| That's how computers were before the rise of personal
| computers
| Retr0id wrote:
| That was GP's point, it's just also how things are today.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| These things are cyclical. History doesn't repeat, but it
| does rhyme.
| loceng wrote:
| Until you understand how 1984 extrapolates with today's
| technologies - and the only defense against corrupt-captured
| state(s) and industrial complexes toeing the establishment
| line, in ever increasing consolidation of so-called power-
| control, is decentralized-distributed tech - and then where
| the centralization [especially physical infrastructure]
| becomes their major weakness; yes, there is the control of
| means of production-funnel of resources-energy issue but if
| shit really hits the fan than guerilla tactics appear to
| always reign supreme, whereby major supply lines, energy
| production, an CPU architecture will be first to be targeted.
|
| The bad actors through subversion are currently attempting
| their best to not cause panic for the herds to react more
| strongly and more quickly than their apparatus they're
| currently ready to handle [at least that they believe they're
| ready to handle] - however things can fall apart very
| quickly, the Berlin wall fell much sooner than practically
| all predicted.
| velomash wrote:
| The UX vs value provided for self hosting doesn't make sense
| for normal people
| irishloop wrote:
| > If you don't own your infra, you are dependent.
|
| You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service
| provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID
| drives being easily replaced, your backups.
|
| It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think
| they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to
| build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.
| dingnuts wrote:
| You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create
| materials by hand
|
| I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that
| are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like
| you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods,
| I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and
| you'll see what I mean.
|
| Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind
| but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than
| you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools
| at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not
| cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared.
| They're a lot less dependent than I am.
| dare944 wrote:
| Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture
| silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively
| small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are
| dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern
| computing.
|
| The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's
| how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't
| strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of
| breaking them?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency.
| Intel needs to exist _today_ to buy a chip, but my 9 year
| old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly
| snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much
| power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar
| /battery powered) will also work fine for at least a
| decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than
| an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99%
| idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete.
|
| I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at
| least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the
| skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU
| manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware
| became unusable due to DRM or something).
| tarruda wrote:
| > I can't imagine needing more computing power than an
| N100 provides for a home server
|
| If you only need to stream media and serve files, sure.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Physical dependency is different than logical.
|
| With my computer, I'm dependent on my supplier for the tools.
| There's usually a reasonable market serving a variety of
| tools. With a storage service provider, I'm dependent on
| their rules, and there's high friction (migration) to escape
| from those rules.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| I can change a colo location in minutes if it's virtual or a
| couple of days if it's a rack of equipment. I can change my
| transit provider too. Supermicro seem to have supply problems
| right now, but dell don't.
|
| If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are
| dependent on one company.
| manquer wrote:
| We are tied to ASML and TSMC and to an extent to the likes
| of NVIDIA .
|
| As cost of innovation in the industry soars, you are bound
| to end up with a monopoly or at best an oligopoly who will
| collude.
|
| Competitors get acquired or fully fail when their research
| is not successful .
|
| It is just as true in pharma and healthcare.
|
| Like it or not in tech we are stuck with no real choice.
| atoav wrote:
| That's like saying when you grow your own tomatoes you're
| dependent on the weather or your capability to deal with said
| weather. That is true. But it misses the point. When you grow
| your own tomatoes and the store sells only a certain bad
| tasting kind, suddenly wants to increase the price by factor
| 10 or stops selling tomatoes at all, then the value of
| growing it yourself shows. And they are dependent on the
| weather just like you.
|
| If you self host, you're dependent on things sure. But the
| point isn't to reach some hypothetical perfect state of
| independence, the point is to get the flavour you want, not
| have to deal with them changing their business model, and so
| on.
|
| The reason I self host my webservers is because my webhoster
| decided to charge a premium for SSL certs. So much in fact
| that for the cost of one cert per month I could run a
| webserver for a year.
|
| Then I had my mailservers noster taking decisions I didn't
| like, so again I went and self hosted.
|
| Some of those things are running for a decade now and I have
| yet to experience the catastrophic events you mention. Sure
| you need to do your due diligence and know your craft, but at
| least I am ot affected by someone changing their business
| model or deciding it isn't profitable anymore.
| mnahkies wrote:
| A basic way to head off most of the security issues is throwing
| it behind a VPN (eg: wireguard) - no need to put stuff on the
| public internet if it's just for your own consumption. You can
| still include your mobile devices etc.
|
| Separately I think k8s is a solution to much of the difficulty.
| I don't use it outside of work as the baseline costs are too
| much (my personal cloud bill is under $10 and I want to keep it
| in that range), but the packaging offered by well maintained
| helm charts is hard to pass by - people dunk on it for being
| complex but imo it only exposes inherent complexity and
| simplifies a lot of other stuff.
| raybb wrote:
| Selfhosting has been tricky for a while. It's still not simple
| but things like https://Coolify.io (selfhosted Heroku) make it
| so so much easier to maintain and feel more dependable. Backups
| and upgrades will still be tricky but they seem resolvable.
| benreesman wrote:
| There's a spectrum OP / their LLM (hat tip the disclaimer, not
| shade) I think blurs into this false dichotomy.
|
| Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on
| a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a
| proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting
| connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough
| Cloud SQL).
|
| At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or
| maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some
| point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in
| their view).
|
| In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal
| providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship
| the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains
| with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated
| jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf
| war.
|
| It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with
| nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable
| authority.
| harel wrote:
| I did a fair bit of work in this world of self sovereign identity
| a couple years ago. We abandoned the project because we felt it
| won't get adoption. We also embedded a verifiable credentials in
| a CRM making it as a platform to manage VCs at scale and nobody
| cared. Most people don't care it seems. Or maybe it's just too
| future tech and we're not there yet.
| kosolam wrote:
| I am truly excited to see others are thinking in the same
| trajectory. I've been contemplating on these ideas myself for
| quite long time. The service providers should provide basic low
| level infrastructure, not own or access our data. I have a vision
| on how it should operate, it would be interesting to dive into
| this project to compare.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| I still struggle to see what exact problems Decentralized
| Identifiers solve and how exactly they would make the Internet
| better. Ommiting additional complexity they bring - where to
| store them, how to control them etc. - what new use cases they
| would allow? How would they solve some of the incentives problems
| on the Internet we currently have?
|
| Having controlled by the user public-private key pair instead of
| multiple accounts on a variety of platforms doesn't bring self-
| sovereigninty by itself. Whatever you post/publish must also be
| discoverable by other people - and that's where we go back to
| centralized platforms/services of today.
| TimByte wrote:
| You're right that discovery still tends to pull things back
| toward centralization. But if identity and data are portable by
| design, at least the gravitational pull of central platforms
| becomes more optional
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| > _how exactly they would make the Internet better._
|
| One key benefit is removing middlemen who may misuse aid.
|
| Never underestimate human corruption--$100 million in aid might
| result in only $1 million truly helped those in need. This
| pattern is seen worldwide.
| loceng wrote:
| Option then to facilitate true decentralization of total
| offline, local-first mode?
|
| Where your data and updates - including network reference IDs
| and perhaps version controlled organizational data - can be
| direct one-to-one transferred in-person someone [like a
| physical data wallet perhaps on something as simple as a USB]
| rather than being self-hosted somewhere [on a machine or device
| that's connected to the internet, even if temporarily for
| pushing updates or waiting for peer calls].
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| Ah, yes, the cure is the magical token.
|
| If you want a better future, make better self hosted apps, that
| are accessible, easy to set up, and don't lack features ordinary
| people ask for.
|
| No fancy token ever beat an easy button. And no poorly built self
| hosting app is helping...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| The thing that got me into self hosting is the phone App Store. I
| started writing personal applications to do what the media apps
| on the App Store could not. The results have been amazing and the
| required effort is less than I expected.
| salmonellaeater wrote:
| What are some personal applications you created to fill these
| gaps?
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Music player that does not skip 1 second of next track, scans
| my big library in a second.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| * A media player with playlist of local media that executes
| in a web browser.
|
| * proxies for http and WebSockets. Apache made this
| challenging and I thought I could do it better. I can now
| spin up servers in seconds and serve http and WebSockets on
| the same port
|
| * tools to test dns, http, WebSockets, hashes, certificate
| creation, and more
| imcritic wrote:
| Are you talking about Android?
|
| Can your player delete media files?
|
| If yes - PLEASE SHARE!
| dist-epoch wrote:
| So far nobody explained one simple use case - self-hosted
| Instagram.
|
| How does that work? I want to see the pictures of my friends, and
| they want to see mine. And I also want to see the pictures of
| some influencers.
|
| What's the self-hosted Instagram setup that makes this work,
| while all the involved parties are self-hosted?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| hmm, another UI that connectly directly to S3???
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| when you follow somebody, you put their public url in a list,
| then when you open the app it requests the photos from
| everybody on the list?
|
| I see no reason why everybody could not run a web server on
| their phone.
| can16358p wrote:
| So if I follow 1000 people,
|
| I make 1000 requests every time I open the app or refresh my
| feed?
|
| Also not everyone can be on a stable connection with a public
| IP address with good upload speeds 7/24. In the ideal world:
| sure. In the real world: impossible (at least for any
| foreseeable near future).
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Perhaps it could make each request as you scroll? You don't
| need to see 1000 photos all at once. And if your friend has
| sketchy internet, perhaps it can push to you when they have
| a good connection.
|
| It's not perfect, but if we want self hosted, we have to
| start somewhere and start working out the problems.
| krapp wrote:
| That would require javascript, and the set of people
| interested in self-hosting and the set of people willing
| to touch javascript with asbestos gloves and a ten foot
| pole do not intersect.
| wmf wrote:
| This has all been solved with ActivityPub or AT Protocol.
| It's push-based not pull and yes there are still servers.
| Either you pay for your own server or you mooch on a
| community server.
| dsego wrote:
| Federated social media through a common protocol.
| vaylian wrote:
| For example: https://pixelfed.org/ Which is literally the
| fediverse alternative to instagram.
| brabel wrote:
| If I choose a "community server", how does that differ from
| just using the Instagram "server" by using Instagram
| itself? Can't the community server ban me, or delete some
| of my data they don't like, for example? Or even sell my
| data?
| wmf wrote:
| In retrospect, community servers/instances were a
| mistake. You need your own domain.
| fsflover wrote:
| > how does that differ from just using the Instagram
| "server"
|
| 1. You can move to another server if you don't like their
| rules, or to your own server. There is a competition
| between servers (and self-hosting!) making the network
| better for everyone.
|
| 2. There is no single point of failure for the whole
| network. Hackers and governments love single points of
| failure.
|
| 3. There's nobody who would forbid alternative clients or
| web access forcing you into a shitty app. There's no
| single entity owning everything and trying to extract as
| much money as possible from you. On Instagram, you're in
| a walled garden.
| danabramov wrote:
| You might enjoy having a look at how atproto (which powers
| Bluesky) solves this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-
| distsys-engineers
|
| TLDR: Self-hosting is the source of truth for data; apps
| aggregate over it.
| nirui wrote:
| > We don't need more "alternatives" to the cloud. We need a shift
| in architecture--from platform-centric to protocol-centric
| systems.
|
| Nice idea, but that alone is not enough.
|
| The POP3/SMTP protocol is still a server-client based model, and
| such model naturally gravitates towards centralized systems which
| leads to the problem we're facing today.
|
| In my opinion, to encourage self-sovereignty, a protocol should
| decouple the creator and the publisher. The information created
| by the creator can be published on multiple publisher platforms
| selected/directed by the creator.
|
| And ideally the creator should be able to directly sharing
| information with other creators too, like a P2P system. This
| should also help reduce the risk of information leaking thus more
| secure.
|
| The protocol also needs to be flexible enough that it can adopt
| the needs of more modern users too, otherwise you'll found
| yourself back at the start line few years later.
|
| P.S. If you think this comment is very empty, that's because it
| is. I've observed quite a few P2P based protocols over these
| years failing to gain popularity... this is one of the things
| really hard to get it right. I don't know how to do it, and many
| way smarter people also failed to do it. So, yeah, that's why
| this comment is so empty. But hey, if you can get it right, maybe
| they should give you a Nobel or something.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| but creating new protocol (standards) also more harder, we can
| see the example with RCS message google try to push and that
| require a lot of effort even from big tech
| AstralStorm wrote:
| These protocols exist, e.g. on top of I2P network.
|
| Thing is, nobody has any incentive to back them.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| And worse, given how they work, there is a disincentive to
| use them ( especially so in US jurisdiction ).
| TimByte wrote:
| The idea of self-sovereignty being protocol-based rather than
| infrastructure-based is both compelling and challenging
| throwawayexmple wrote:
| 'Decentralized Identifiers' centralise identity in the DID.
| That's tautological.
|
| Thus that in itself fails an idea of sovereignty: that choosing
| to be identified uniquely is your choice.
|
| Barking down this alley, while useful from the perspective of
| NFTs, does not add much to the concept of actual sovereignty.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Nah, if you run your own identity service, you're supposed to
| be able to issue any number of unverified identities yourself.
|
| The problem there is that others do not play at all with these,
| plus actual trust has to be somehow solved.
|
| Typical solutions to trust in DID involve either a big central
| service, a government approved signature... Or theoretically a
| distributed web of trust but that bit is under development.
| brabel wrote:
| For ephemeral DIDs to be useful they need to be recognized by
| the authorities that issue "credentials" based on them. For
| example, if a website/app requires proof-of-age (you know,
| like the UK now) you could use a DID for whom a credential
| showing something like "this is a person who is over 18 years
| old" was issued by the Birth Registry Authority (or whatever
| they call you in your country), and the website/app could
| then check the signature of the credential and be sure it was
| signed by the right authority. As the owner of a "main" DID,
| you could request many DIDs (and issue "credentials" based on
| those), presumably one for each website/app, to evade
| tracking.
|
| If there was another mechanism to prove age, for example, if
| everyone had their Date Of Birth on a blockchain or something
| like that, it could be possible to not rely on a single
| Authority, but to my knowledge that wouldn't be acceptable in
| any country of the world... only the government is recognized
| as an "issuer" of Birth Certificates and names, and I think
| that's how it has to be... that makes it possible for the
| government to find out which apps you're using,
| unfortunately. But there may be ways around that... I believe
| the whole Verifiable Credentials Working Group uses
| Verifiable Presentations for this, see
| https://hub.ebsi.eu/vc-framework/ebsi-w3c-vc-vp
| bbuut wrote:
| oh look, we reinvented pre-shared keys and keyservers
|
| names and phone books
| brador wrote:
| The future is distributed and anonymous.
|
| Mesh only works in a post-quantum world.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related, that this responds to:
|
| _The future is not self-hosted_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175
| RajT88 wrote:
| I am in the Philippines this week. I am hoping the future is one
| where everyone has reliable internet access. My self host stuff
| is not terribly useful without it.
|
| Christ, the ISP's here need to learn about QoS. ISP's everywhere
| need to learn how to keep their DNS running well.
|
| We have not yet solved the basics. Of course we cannot solve the
| hard stuff.
| arnon wrote:
| While I really want to agree with this, it's giving "You can
| trivially set up an SFTP server..."
|
| I really wish this was as easy as talking about it is.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I suppose technically it is not wrong. The minimalist setup is
| easy, but it also won't work ( and you will be likely treated
| as spam ).
| apitman wrote:
| I'm optimistic about self-hosting/self sovereignty (which both
| fall under the umbrella of what I call indie hosting) long term.
|
| But I think both of these articles gloss over the fact that end-
| to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system
| with normal people. Key management is a completely unsolved
| problem.
|
| If you don't have e2ee, with current tooling most people will
| need someone they trust to run their server. But then you run
| into a privacy paradox: most people have more content they would
| rather have google looking at/training on than someone close to
| them looking at, than the other way around.
|
| Personally I think the next step forward is improving software to
| be more turnkey so everyone can run their own as a GUI app on an
| old laptop or phone.
|
| That said, we definitely need protocols for sharing stuff.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real
| system with normal people
|
| I would argue that Signal is a great example of this working
| quite well, and tons of normal people use Signal. It's no more
| frictional than WhatsApp.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Signal has a lot of problems with changing devices while
| preserving history. As in it's often just impossible.
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| Are you aware of this
| https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-
| devi...
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I think so, this looks like the feature where adding an
| new linked device transfers messages from your phone.
|
| What still isn't possible as far as I am aware is
| transferring messages from Android to iOS or vice versa.
| Last time I looked into this was a few weeks ago.
| apitman wrote:
| Signal is a promising example, but ephemeral messaging is a
| very different use case from things like photo management.
| j45 wrote:
| These are all solved problems depending on what someone is
| after.
|
| Tools like tailscale/headscale combined with proxmox give most
| people point and click self hosting close to using a digital
| ocean droplet (which should never be used in production).
| xp84 wrote:
| What should never be used in prod?
| j45 wrote:
| Digital Ocean. Notes in my previous comments somewhere, I
| can see if I can find it.
|
| Among other things, their system has a massive bug that
| will delete your servers without notifying anyone with a
| valid and working CC on file.
| wmf wrote:
| If Self-hosting doesn't have dissident-level privacy it's still
| dramatically better than centralized SaaS.
| fsflover wrote:
| > end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real
| system with normal people
|
| Matrix has solved this problem.
| apitman wrote:
| I've tried to adopt Matrix multiple times over years.
|
| IMO the UX is evidence that e2ee is not solved.
| Arathorn wrote:
| we solved it in element x, but there appears to be massive
| inertia towards adopting it because it doesn't have threads
| or spaces yet.
| infinitezest wrote:
| > (Disclaimer: This blog post was drafted with the help of a
| language model, but all opinions expressed are my own.)
|
| This is when I head to an LLM to summarize the key take-aways. If
| you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read
| it. That said, I certainly agree with the summary! :P
| ai-christianson wrote:
| It all comes down to the information content :)
| andy99 wrote:
| Yeah I stopped reading when I saw that, I don't care what GPT
| thinks and am completely allergic to the idiosyncrasies of LLM
| writing. Plus, yeah the whole idea they couldn't be bothered to
| write it, or as a corollary to think it through.
| oceanhaiyang wrote:
| Very anti-HN thinking to be posted here. I see a common trend
| in people loving blogging for it helps solidify their
| thoughts. Making an LLM do this is only wasting everyone
| time.
| t-writescode wrote:
| So, to be clear, you're upset by their transparency that they
| used LLMs while plenty of other writers use it to:
| * brainstorm * reword hard sections they garbage'd out
| on accident * catch typos / formatting / flow issues
|
| But only because they chose strong transparency about their
| activity?
| kamranjon wrote:
| The disclaimer said the article was drafted with the help
| of an LLM - if they just did the list of things you
| mentioned I wouldn't think they would need to put up a
| disclaimer (you don't see disclaimers saying this article
| was written with the help of Google or Wikipedia) - the
| fundamental issue I think is that they are letting the LLM
| actually write the article, which I think people know,
| pretty viscerally, that they disagree with.
|
| I had the same reaction, which is that I do not want to
| read something that was written by an LLM and immediately
| backed out - which is great I really appreciate their
| disclaimer, it helped me not waste my time on things I
| don't personally want to consume.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > There is no shared protocol for identity, no agreed standard
| for portable, user-owned data, no common infrastructure for
| composable interaction.
|
| I've heard this idea in several forms, and it's not what I think
| most people want.
|
| I don't want to live in a world where everything is trackable to
| a stable identity. Since the stable identity is ultimately
| trackable to your socual security number, this is essentially a
| world in which all of your online activity is trackable to your
| SSN.
|
| You can see why this is valuable to some people. And if you want
| to monetize everyone's data it's an important first step.
|
| But it's firmly in the authoritarian camp where everyone is
| monitored and tracked. And that I think is still contrary to how
| most people want to live their life.
| survirtual wrote:
| We need a system for digital identity that can be confidently
| connected to a singular living organism. That identity acts as
| a sort of credential. With that credential, you can anonymously
| take online action that is untraceable to the identity, besides
| knowing the anon identity is a real, singular human.
|
| If you can follow that logic, you will see that this makes
| many, many things possible. Anonymous credentials are possible
| right now and extend to anything. It can represent "this anon
| identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5
| years experience in criminal law", etc. But this sort of
| mechanism starts with being able to say "this is a singular
| person, with identity verified by X mechanism".
|
| It is absolutely foundational and the opposite of dystopian. It
| allows us to combat every current dystopian mechanism without
| creating any additional compared to what already exists.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > If you can follow that logic
|
| I can't, because it's not logical. You want a credential that
| provides exactly one bit of information with certainty. It's
| not at all clear that something like that exists or if it
| did, how you would prevent multiple people from sharing the
| same credential if it was also actually possible to use it
| anonymously.
|
| > It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics",
| "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal
| law",
|
| You're saying the credential can leak information about the
| user. You don't need many of these bits of information to de-
| anonymize someone.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| The system you are describing exists already, in China. And
| indeed it "makes many, many things possible". For one, it
| makes the concept of a ticket meaningless: either your
| "single living organism" (i.e. biometric ID) has permission
| to enter the movie theater, or get on the train, or whatever,
| or it doesn't. The hassle reduction is enormous! And it is
| also widely considered dystopian.
|
| Clearly the crucial issue is the "untraceability" of the ID.
| In practice somebody is going to have to know who is who, and
| in practice the state is going to arrogate that role, as
| perhaps it should. So the fundamental question is whether it
| is possible to make the state democratically accountable.
| loceng wrote:
| Re: "(Disclaimer: This blog post was drafted with the help of a
| language model, but all opinions expressed are my own.)"
|
| Anyone else appreciate the attribution to utilizing AI?
|
| I'd further appreciate if they were willing to provide a link or
| version of what model they used, and ideally the prompt they fed
| it with - and perhaps the version controlled history of the
| prompt(s) they used until it output as desired? Not necessarily
| so seamless if only partly using AI for output.
| wmf wrote:
| Nah, this kind of attribution is a lose-lose. It just gives AI
| haters an excuse to discount everything you say.
| mentalgear wrote:
| > We don't need more "alternatives" to the cloud. We need a shift
| in architecture--from platform-centric to protocol-centric
| systems.
|
| If the protocols are e2ee and the metadata not stored than it
| shouldn't matter who's server it is. But to be sure, better use
| something like "iroh" network protocol with hole punching.
| sylens wrote:
| Until we achieve a good ecosystem of interoperability between
| servies that allow for self-sovereign movement, we should be
| encouraging people to move off the big tech platforms and use
| smaller businesses that value things like open source, self
| hosting, and having control of your data. While most of us here
| on HN would prefer to self-host Immich ourselves, for my friends
| who are not that technically proficient, I recommend Ente to them
| - E2EE alternative to Google Photos with a way to easily get your
| data out (you can even sync it to a local copy routinely) and
| self-host if the price ever gets too high or you want to move
| providers. I'd like to see more companies and platforms follow
| that model.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I fully agree with the points the author makes about self
| hosting. You're not liberating anybody and you're just creating
| more obstacles for sharing data.
|
| Sure, if your user count equals one, then go ahead, but as
| someone who has self hosted for 2 decades, trust me, you're only
| making it harder. As soon as you want to share data or
| collaborate on data, you're forcing another person to download
| and use a specific app, and you'll be managing a bunch of users.
|
| Add to that the fact that the internet is not a friendly place,
| and you'll really cannot just take a lax stance to security.
| Everything needs to be top notch and patched.
|
| Personally I've long since moved to public cloud. It doesn't
| matter where my data is hosted as long as I have a backup of it,
| and everything stored in the cloud is encrypted (where
| applicable) before uploading it.
|
| As for the didspaces product, isn't that just what Resilio Sync
| and Syncthing did a decade ago ?
| hinkley wrote:
| If I had a database with push based replication instead of pull
| based, then one of the apps on my todo list would be done by now.
|
| There are certain application types where I think it makes sense
| to self host the admin interface and cloud host the rest. None of
| or only a fraction of the write traffic is ever exposed to
| external access, and if done right the app can work fine with two
| nines of uptime on the admin services. Which puts it into the
| realm of running it out of your home office and having it sync to
| the cloud.
| aeblyve wrote:
| I'm not really convinced of this in the long term. Commodities
| like baskets or vases were something that were once made by each
| tribe individually but became industrial products made in
| relatively fewer places (relative to human settlement) at much
| larger scales.
|
| The economies of scale of cloud computing seem to prescribe the
| same trajectory to computer services as well for completely
| material reasons, not ideological ones.
|
| In any case, differentiation is only made possible by a base of
| de-differentiated socialized production. Electricity.
| drumdance wrote:
| I don't have a strong opinion on this piece but I very much would
| like to see DID catch on.
|
| Not the WorldCoin version, but one that states and other state-
| backed providers can use to verify that someone is who they say
| they are.
| cat-whisperer wrote:
| I'm curious, how does blockchain play into being self-sovereign?
| Is the idea that decentralized networks can give us control over
| our own data?
| wmf wrote:
| Some DIDs are blockchain-based (Ethereum Name Service and
| Worldcoin being the most (in)famous) but it seems like DIDs
| that are actually used (e.g. Bluesky) are either DNS-based or
| centralized.
| BigTuna wrote:
| And fwiw Bluesky DIDs are currently still centralized in
| plc.directory but work is being done to decentralize them.
| stevenfoster wrote:
| What a last name to be making this argument with.
| aborsy wrote:
| Go to a grad office and talk to PhD students in technical
| subjects (other than CS). Ask them, what is a certificate, DNS,
| reverse proxy, SSH public key, docker, TCP/IP, hypervisor, ...
| You would be surprised how many people have no idea! You can't
| expect people manage their servers.
|
| I spent half of today tracking down a DNS issue at home. Your
| home lab will evolve and there will be changes. You need to stay
| current with the required knowledge, and that takes time and
| attention.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-27 23:00 UTC)