The future is community-hosted
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I’d love to help community host stuff, but I’m terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.
Zero-knowledge hosting solutions should help with that, but I’m unsure how the tech and UX has been going for that on FOSS as of yet.
The future is federated.
I would say the future is in pooling resources.
Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.
Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.
All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.
But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.
And global cryptographic identities.
Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.
E2E usually suffers from the same thing HTTP does: the MITM might not be able to read what you’re saying, but they know who you’re saying it to, and they may know in what context. This is a lot of information that can be used in profiling.
So you end up with systems like SimpleX, where everyone has a different UID for every contact, but that has its own problems, as anyone who’s used systems like that are aware. We haven’t really solved making that a good user experience for messaging; I don’t see it translating to broader social media any time soon.
Nostr has some really good specs and tooling that neatly addresses these topics, including great cryptography support, signing, ad-hoc IDs, and an entirely voluntary simple naming lookup; it doesn’t exactly solve zooko’s triangle, but it provides a toolset sufficient to mix and match characteristics for whatever your threat model is. Sadly, Nostr is utterly dominated by the crypto crowd (and is associated with some controversial personalities), and even if you’re not cryptocurrency-hostile, it’s a really dull echo chamber with little other content that has prevented people who might otherwise build interesting platforms in it from doing so.
Mastodon was around for ages before (the in practice centralized) Bluesky; why did it take Bluesky to open a mass exodus from X?
This is a hard problem to solve. Throwing E2E at it doesn’t make it easier; it’s just tossing a buzzword in.
This guy didn’t want to do the leg work of emailing his photos to his friends, and declares self-hosting isn’t the solution to a social net? I totally see the point in community hosting, in fact I’m all for that.
But really? You don’t have to make your servers public facing, you just white-list the people you want to see your stuff and make sure to organize your drives with public and private pages.
He went through all that and didn’t take it far enough.
emailing his photos to his friends
that’s sometimes difficult, e.g. when you have thousands of photos, and emails have a size limit of 20 MB per email. using matrix chat or sth is also not ideal since the other side will have to download images one-by-one. sending a zip file might work, but the matrix protocol might have a size limit for attachments.
an FTP server might work. also consider that you want to store the images somewhere, not just send them once. how do you do that with messaging services?
I feel like I covered my bases with the rest of my comment there. If you have thousands of photos that you want to share, host them on your server and whitelist the people you want to see them :/
IRL I’ve never sent nor received more than a handful of pics at a time, and always through email. It would have never occurred to me that people are out there sending the whole family collection to each other digitally. Grandma hordes those pics for a reason; as leverage for people to visit her!
Synology shared folder, separate user accounts, accessible through tailscale is how I share media with my friends and family outside my network.
I agree with the premise that selfhosting is not something the layman can or want to do, but the assumption that self-hosters only host software that serve themselves is very, very dumb, and clearly comes from the mouth of someone who self-hosts out of hate for corporate services (same, though) and not for the love of selfhosting.
He complains that the software he uses can’t handle multi-users, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. His solution is to make his government give him metered cloud services. What he actually wants is software that allows multi-users. What he wants, by extension, is federated services.
The bulk of users on the fediverse are on large, centrally/cloud hosted instances, but the vast majority of instances are self-hosted, and can talk to the centrally hosted instances, serving usually more than the 1 user who’s hosting the instance in their attic.
The author conflates self-hosting with self-reliance, and I understand why, but it’s wrong. If you’re part of this community, you’re probably not some off-gridder who wants nothing to do with society, self-isolating your way out of the problems we face. If you’re reading this, you already know that we don’t have to live on our own individual and isolated paradise islands to escape Big Tech. Federation is the future, but selfhosting is fundamental to that, and not everything can or should be federated. Selfhosting is also the future.
That’s an interesting point…
I’d like to share some (holiday) photos with my friends & family, so I can put those onto Pixelfed / Friendica / etc… I don’t necesarily want to share all the photos…
And that’s using the cloud.
Job Done. The self-hosting + federated cloud future is here!
Rejoice.
The photo sharing complaint I don’t understand, unless immich doesn’t have the option to provide public or password protected share and upload links, which would be a real shortcoming for such app.
Immich indeed has that option, I use it frequently. Password protection and upload option
I’ve not looked into it properly yet, but - considering this is still free software - I don’t believe that level of granularity exists.
So, if I wanted to share my holiday photos from last week with 1 friend, and the photos from someone’s party to different friends… nope.
The future is P2P
The future (and the past) is piracy.
End-to-end encryption means the service provider can’t see your data even if they wanted to
Not necessarily. All it means is that intermediaries can’t see the data in transit. You need to trust that the data is handled properly at either end, and most service providers also make the apps that you run at either end. Your library is more likely to buy whatever is cheapest than what respects your privacy the most (e.g. probably Google drive, not Tuta or Proton).
The incentives for even community-hosted services (e.g. if the library spun up its own cloud servers) to share/sell information is just too high. Maybe the library found someone uploading illegal content, and they wanted some monitoring in there to catch service abusers going forward. They’ll probably put something into the client that a third party monitors, and now you have someone snooping on everything.
Instead of this, I think P2P storage is the better option for those who don’t want to self-host. That way there’s an incentive for the person providing storage to not know what it is (reduce liability), as well as the person submitting the data (reduce risk). Unfortunately, most current solutions here are a little shady, because they either rely on volunteers (no guarantees about data integrity) or anonymous payments (again, no guarantees about data integrity).
I’d like to see something in the middle:
- apps that work off buckets of data, that the user configures
- services that provide data guarantees that users can choose (e.g. AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Hetzner Storage boxes)
- common protocol between apps for accessing this data
So if you want more storage, you buy said storage and know who is responsible for protecting it, and your app doesn’t care where it comes from.
That’s possible, but the bigger leap is getting people off the major platforms like Google’s or Microsoft’s cloud.
End-to-end encryption means the service provider can’t see your data even if they wanted to
Not necessarily. All it means is that intermediaries can’t see the data in transit. You need to trust that the data is handled properly at either end, and most service providers also make the apps that you run at either end.
This is incorrect. End-to-End is defined as from “User to User” and not “User to Service provider”. That would be just transport encryption.
Right, and that’s what I mean too.
For example, let’s assume Google Drive is E2EE, the client apps on both sides have access to unencrypted data, and they can absolutely index it or whatever to sell to advertisers. The statement in the article was overly broad, because the service provider can see your data, assuming they also control the client apps.
You can already do what you want. S3 with HTTP, XML + XSL for responsive / dynamic content.
Compute has become so ubiquitous it’s silly that we need to pick between server-client and p2p
Syncthing is a good example of being both, with options you can enable for your server version, but it’s way too basic compared to immich or nextcloud
Eh, Syncthing is only stuff you control, which doesn’t exactly fulfill what OP is talking about: extending the benefits of self-hosting to those who can’t or don’t want to self-host. It also doesn’t expand storage, it just keeps your storage in sync between devices.
P2P solves a lot of this. It provides expanded storage, can be easy to get into (add nodes as you go/pay others for nodes), etc. But there’s the perennial issue w/ trusting others w/ your data.
That’s why I think a hybrid is better. Buy storage from trusted providers as needed and use apps that work w/ that. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to really be a thing, but I think it could be super cool. Places like libraries can provide libraries to underprivileged people, who can then add to it w/ something from the market.
Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
Has anyone ever worked with them IT wise?
I do so in four different EU countries and know people who do in the US and Canada. And…well…there is a reason local governments often went towards the cloud services. Do people think Joe Admin in Bumfucknowhere can operate what basically becomes a MiniDC? And who controls that?
Sorry. Either go “host at home” and only fuck up things for oneself. Or do it properly with a proper DC. Colocate if you want. But that? I know it sounds appealing, especially for someone entering selfhosting (like the author did a few weeks ago). But there is a reason hosting is a business once it comes to other peoples data.
I can easily host vaultwarden, trillium, docker-mailserver, jellyfin, borgbackup and syncthing instances for my 5 neighbours. Everyone who’s even slightly good with computers can do that for their neighbours. That’s what I think when I hear “community”. Not online fandoms.
I think the issue is more that large tech firms can absolutely deal with external security in their applications. The amount of times gmail or Microsoft 365 has been hacked and leaked a bunch of client data is statistically zero when looking at their attack area.
Joe Dirt self hosting a mail server for his neighbors on a salvaged rack server is 1000x more likely to get hacked or lose a ton of his neighbors’ data than a big tech firm.
That is kind of the trade off for community hosting. There are very very few backup and security-literate people in communities.
Yeah. And I am sure you won’t do anything bad.
But we all know how many that will not be the case. There were countless cases of school IT staff being malicious, of healthcare IT staff being malicious. Do you think that won’t be happening regularly on a small community scale? And that goes both ways: What happens when your neighbour suddenly accuses you of stealing passwords from you?
Don’t get me wrong - I am also providing services to my friends and family. But I absolutely do refuse to do so for any vital or financially debilitating services (which I consider vaultwarden for example). And I am seeing large issues with promoting this model as a solution - which need to be addressed.
I trust my neighbour more than I trust Big Tech.
With Big Tech we know full well they’ll completely legally, ethically and anonymously harvest us, profile us, manipulate us, encircle us and enslave us in their digital slaughter house. I’ll take my chances with 10 million community organizers and the occasionnal small time crook instead of the certainty of a Big Tech Panopticon Mega DystopiaYeah,big US tech is cancer - but I am fortunate enough to not live in the US and there are enough mid size companies that fall under reasonable laws and governmental oversight (in the good way,not the bad way) that I can choose from. People always seem to think it’s “selfhost or big tech” but there is a shitton of solutions between them.
Mailbox.org, Infomaniak(but I would be cautious on them due to the changing legal framework), posteo,Mullvad,Photoprism,Passbolt,Hetzner Storage Space,Ionos, Deepl, etc. are all a sane middle ground for most people and
I much rather have people do that than fall into the arms of their neighbourhood asshole (and let’s face it,there are a lot of difficult characters in IT). Because first of all it’s people’s lives who are at stake - You can wait for the first creep who will use access to his neighbours photos (Immich,Photoprism,etc.) for some uncanny purposes. Who will use the WiFi&Device passwords saved to get access to someones CCTV system to spy on his neighbours. Etc. Etc. And, and this is as much of an issue,it will only take a few of these people to drive people away from all open source products, right back into BigTech.
Lastly: It’s okay,that you see it that way. But people need to be informed that these are the risks. If you would take those risks (and don’t think from an IT role but from your neighbours perspective here), go for it. I wouldn’t, we can absolutely agree to disagree. And I don’t think many would once someone tells them the truth: “Yeah, BigTech can absolutely access your files and possibly your passwords with enough efforts. If you let Joe over here host your files and passwords he can,but BigTech can’t.” I am not sure how people would decide.
Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
I trust my local community more than i trust Amazon, that’s for sure.
Communities might be incompetent with IT (today), but maybe they just need a while to catch up. It could work in 10 years from now, and we gotta work towards that point.
Also, note that “local community” doesn’t have to mean municipality; it can also be your local nerd working part-time at your local library.
And this is somehow better?
There is a lot of room between “BigTech” and “Joe Average” doing it for his neighbours. Mailbox.org, etc. (see my other post here)
No, you could never buy books on Amazon, only rent them. Calibre with DeDRM plugin was a poor way to liberate them, given that formatting in libre formats was often worse than the original.
I stopped doing that and ingnored the Kindle ecosystem in general. I tried a Kobe reader with .epub books from diverse sources but I mostly use tablets (LineageOS and GrapheneOS) to consume content these days. The reader apps are not that great there, sadly.
I have bought a few otherwise hard to find books on Amazon. Actual paper books. At least used to be possible.
Yes, when I buy books on Amazon it’s the dead tree kind.
I’d be pretty surprised if you couldn’t waydroid something decent without googleing up. Certainly moon reader or something should run without the store?
I’m limiting myself to only open source applications on the tablets. Strictly nothing from Play Store or Aurora.
I like KOReader for my Kindle, but it’s available for Android too. Have you tried it?
Yes, KOReader and Librera FD are two applications I use currently.
When you call the shots, you get the outcomes. It’s honestly not a bad way to live. Best of luck to ya!
Thanks, it is enough for me.
I agree that we need to find a way to make this communal rather than individualistic, but government backing isn’t that. It would be nice if that happened and all, but with a thesis like that it feels like it’s missing the mark calling state-hosting "community ". How do we make self-hosted services something that can serve at the level of the community? Like a load balancing reverse proxy that points to the servers those in the community can fun, and everyone invites their friends and neighbours.
If you do not have physical access, it is not yours. Trust absolutely no one.
The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything
He proposes the cloud be owned by communities, so in a way by everyone. That’s not the same everything being owned by private companies.
In fact, that model (conceptually, though not technically) is how most fediverse software already work
So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?
Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.
Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn’t usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you’re going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences.
Edit: I should clarify that I’m not talking about services here, but content itself.
The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
There’s so much to host that isn’t related to pirated media sharing though. I host like 5 services and only one could be related to that. I know you clarified that you’re talking about content, but there’s also so much content that isn’t related to pirating either. Like most of the fediverse for example
Every city should host main public web servicies for its citizens, each one as an instance of a complex system, that’s how anarchy works.
That quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons. The city residents pay for it but how do you verify “citizenship”?
If every city has the same then why would you even want to?
If you mean citizenship as being associated to the city whose hosting services you are using, yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence should be able to do that. Now, if you want that plus anonimity, the only practical option I can think of for a city-wide physical campaign is some sort of GPG Signature Meetup (“signature party”).
yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills. Renters are usually two levels away from the actual owner. Then there are all the people who live and work in cities but aren’t official renters.
Hi! This is what I’m trying to do with tucson.social. Wish the city would get back to me. I don’t want to own/operate Tucson.social alone perpetually. Lol.
It would allow me to expand to a lot more community services outside of social media, chat, and Meetup platforms.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
This is really cool. And I would say a good replacement for current cloud setups. Since it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to self-host. Although I think this could only really be a cost saving measure since there are already services like protondrive that offer end 2 end encryption. And I would probably trust the reliability of proton drive over the community hosting my stuff.
