In a world where corporations have detached buying from owning, one man attempts to do something radical: build his own cloud.
  • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
    404·
    5 months ago

    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

    • elDalvini@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      29·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • NotKyloRen@lemmy.zipEnglish
        51·
        5 months ago

        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. We’re talking massive fines and/or jail time.

        Edit: I should clarify that I’m not talking about services here, but content itself.

        • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          7·
          5 months ago

          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.

        • Max@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          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

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    5 months ago

    Thank fuck I neither desired nor ever used Kindle. I used either my library app to read e-books or getting my booty from the high seas!

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      My partner has a Kindle,. its been connected to Amazon once when she got it… 4 years layer it still hasn’t been reconnected. Everything is just loaded and managed via Calibre. I have a Kobo but the screen on her 4 yr old Kindle is better then my 6 month old Kobo

  • meh@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    122·
    5 months ago

    so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn’t enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?

    • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?

      Absolutely not.

    • th3raid0r@tucson.socialEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      I didn’t get the vibe that he didn’t enjoy it. More that he figures that a typical person wouldn’t enjoy it. And that I would agree with.

  • dodos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    5 months ago

    I’d love to help community host stuff, but I’m terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      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.

  • thejml@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    223·
    5 months ago

    Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

    I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

    • Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
    • Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
    • Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
    • The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
    • They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.
  • eleitl@lemmy.zipEnglish
    101·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Telex@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      I have bought a few otherwise hard to find books on Amazon. Actual paper books. At least used to be possible.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      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?

  • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteEnglish
    16·
    5 months ago

    The LinkedIn-styled writing here is hard for me to get through, but I think the general gist is that for profit platforms are easier to onboard which I agree with. This line stands out:

    And what do we get in return? A worse experience than cloud-based services.

    I have to disagree somewhat, it’s a different experience that is absolutely more difficult in many ways, but for those of us who value privacy, control over our data, and don’t like ads, the trade-off is worth it. Also it goes without saying that the usability of selfhosted apps has exploded in the past few years and it will likely become less and less of an issue.

    • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      13·
      5 months ago

      Its funny to say a worse experience because I can confidently say that all the services ive replaced are equal or better than their corporate counterparts. And sometimes better by 10x

      • huquad@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        I never wonder, is “X” is on jellyfin? Yes, good. No, give me 5.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
    7·
    5 months ago

    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.