[Medh_Suk]

I wonder if these services will ever reach mass adoption.

I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?

[post-it]

I dream of selling a Box that plugs into the wall that backs up all of your photos and videos and maybe acts as an ActivityPub server, and you can add your friends who also have a Box, and your friends' Boxes back up all of your photos and vice versa.

The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed up on their Box, or it's striped across multiple Boxes and downloads quickly.

It would have to be dirt cheap though, like a Chromecast.

[swaroop]

Like https://umbrel.com/ ? (no affiliation)

[mulmen]

Honestly I think Apple has a good model for this. The value would be in making the box plug-and-play. Apple has proven people will pay a premium for devices that Just Work. It could still be built on open software. Some kind of a cross between Apple’s opinionated approach to defaults and RedHat’s pay-for-support model of developing open source software.

[rakoo]

Something like a freedombox (https://www.freedombox.org/) ?

Or the internet cube (https://internetcu.be/) ?

[grudg3]

Gavin Belson had the right vision after all.

[joking]

like a synology or qnap nas?

I use synology myself, don't have experience with qnap but I think it will be pretty similar. plug the box, activate the service, download the phone app and your photos are automatically synced and browsable from the device. You can add other services but the basic functionality is there.

[anderspitman]

Why does it need to be a new separate physical device, instead of just software installed on an old phone or laptop?