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

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.

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.

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

The future is federated.

The future is P2P

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.

Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet’s inception.

False. They came along after the fact and sullied the waters, then lobbied to make it illegal to tinker with the DRM locks, then got richer than God.

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?

Something that’s always given me trouble is sharing my music.

If I hear a cool song and want to send it to a friend I have to go to YouTube.

And many of my friends send me Spotify tracks. The share feature of Navidrome has been incredible for this.

I can send them a link and have a listen party with them and then erase the link when were done.

It’d be nice to have this feature in more of the self hosted apps.

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 host and everyone invites their friends and neighbours.

Techno feudalism mentioned. Queue a Varoufakis talk

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!

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.

I like the article, but agree with so many of the comments here as well.

Ultimately I think one thing I’d love for would be a way to simply provide services (like Immich) for people but where the client is end to end encrypted, and neither the user nor the service has to worry about the how.

Example: how can I share an Immich with my family and friends, but where I don’t have access to any of their data. I.e. what signal does, but immich or any other service. I want to share my server with friends/family, but I don’t want access to any of their data. It isn’t a lack of trust, it’s that I don’t want that as even something they have to worry about

That same concept then extends here to community hosting. If we can solve the problem for a few, it should be scalable to many.