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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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].
> 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.
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.
Separate from actual-human-identity, a internet-facing digital system needs some concept of user identity to provide privacy. Either people authenticate, or you share data publicly - where is the middle road here? How do you come back and reauthenticate with a private system later if you don't have a stable identity for the system to recognise?
I'm not sure what's forcing these DIDs being one-to-one with a human, or why have the ability to create as many pseudonomynous identities as you like results in centralization or authoritarianism?
> （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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Authors of both articles (OP's and the one it's responding to) seem to have the answer, put it in their mouths, turn it around with their tongues, and spit it back out, not recognizing it as the obvious way forward: self-hosting was how the internet started. It was the good old days. Now that we are all dancing puppets in the attention attrition economy, the answer is still the same: independence through concrete means. This means being able to tell some service provider to fuck off all the way to the top of Fuck Off Mountain, to swap out A for B, to connect to X, Y and Z, etc. On my own website, I can say whatever I want, and there's absolutely fuck-all you can do about it. You don't like it? You can leave.
Sure, the walled gardens of social media have conditioned new generations to twitch in unison, crave likes and spill rage via comments -- but is that something we want to sustain? I'd deprive that of oxygen and watch it wither. Give me ACTUAL connections, with the people I care about. The shimmering flickering scrolling dopamine drip gets in the way of real connection.
I think the idea of some kind of a distributed, persistent identity is a terrible spectre. Given how much power the incumbents have, if any kind of distributed identity authority actually took root, they would either clone their own and smother the original, or adopt it outright -- with the terrifying consequences of now being able to control your online presence everywhere, and tied to your actual offline identity. This would mean they could exact suffering on you everywhere (not just online) for whatever actions of yours they deem to be transgressions in their own little worlds.
No, the future IS self-hosted. Whether the "self" is an individual, a group, a community -- the answer is in a robust network of independent nodes, that actively choose how and whom they cooperate / interoperate with.
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.
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.
> 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.
As expected based on the opening disclaimer, I'm noticing a lot of LLM "fluff" in this writing. Louis Rossmann made me aware of the "It's not ABC, it's DEF with XYZ" pattern. Also arguably overuse of the tricolons (groups of 3 things) with overlapping/redundant meanings.
I have no issue with literary devices when used thoughtfully, but thought is exactly what LLMs lack.
Makes me wonder if one day we'll need LLMs to compress this kind of writing again. Like purposefully decreasing the signal to noise ratio for transmission, then distilling it down at the receiving end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve always felt that self-hosting and self-sovereignty aren’t mutually exclusive. Most people don’t avoid freedom because they don’t want it, but because it’s too much hassle. The real question isn’t who wants control, but whether there’s a simpler way for ordinary people to have this sovereignty without wrestling with a pile of tech.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
poisonborz|7 months ago
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.
irishloop|7 months ago
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.
Retr0id|7 months ago
Very prescient indeed for someone in 1970 to predict the success of AWS
em-bee|7 months ago
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.
benreesman|7 months ago
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.
mnahkies|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
velomash|7 months ago
youatme|7 months ago
[deleted]
GianFabien|7 months ago
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.
anonzzzies|7 months ago
(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)
poisonborz|7 months ago
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.
Ekaros|7 months ago
Now think of actually running something consistently. And react to changes in that... A task a few steps above.
kragen|7 months ago
chrisvalleybay|7 months ago
rapsey|7 months ago
MoreQARespect|7 months ago
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.
BinaryIgor|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
loceng|7 months ago
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].
kindkang2024|7 months ago
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.
ants_everywhere|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
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.
andyferris|7 months ago
I'm not sure what's forcing these DIDs being one-to-one with a human, or why have the ability to create as many pseudonomynous identities as you like results in centralization or authoritarianism?
Jommi|7 months ago
infinitezest|7 months ago
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
andy99|7 months ago
ai-christianson|7 months ago
pluto_modadic|7 months ago
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...
aborsy|7 months ago
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.
pferde|7 months ago
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.
vaylian|7 months ago
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.
dist-epoch|7 months ago
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?
dsego|7 months ago
danabramov|7 months ago
TLDR: Self-hosting is the source of truth for data; apps aggregate over it.
tonyhart7|7 months ago
jay_kyburz|7 months ago
I see no reason why everybody could not run a web server on their phone.
kennywinker|7 months ago
Why not post the prompts, it’ll be a shorter read with presumably the same amount of new information.
robmao|7 months ago
austin-cheney|7 months ago
salmonellaeater|7 months ago
8fingerlouie|7 months ago
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 ?
apitman|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
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.
j45|7 months ago
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).
wmf|7 months ago
fsflover|7 months ago
Matrix has solved this problem.
throwawayexmple|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
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.
crinkly|7 months ago
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.
sylens|7 months ago
ChrisArchitect|7 months ago
The future is not self-hosted
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175
btbuildem|7 months ago
Sure, the walled gardens of social media have conditioned new generations to twitch in unison, crave likes and spill rage via comments -- but is that something we want to sustain? I'd deprive that of oxygen and watch it wither. Give me ACTUAL connections, with the people I care about. The shimmering flickering scrolling dopamine drip gets in the way of real connection.
I think the idea of some kind of a distributed, persistent identity is a terrible spectre. Given how much power the incumbents have, if any kind of distributed identity authority actually took root, they would either clone their own and smother the original, or adopt it outright -- with the terrifying consequences of now being able to control your online presence everywhere, and tied to your actual offline identity. This would mean they could exact suffering on you everywhere (not just online) for whatever actions of yours they deem to be transgressions in their own little worlds.
No, the future IS self-hosted. Whether the "self" is an individual, a group, a community -- the answer is in a robust network of independent nodes, that actively choose how and whom they cooperate / interoperate with.
harel|7 months ago
kosolam|7 months ago
mentalgear|7 months ago
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.
Liftyee|7 months ago
I have no issue with literary devices when used thoughtfully, but thought is exactly what LLMs lack.
Makes me wonder if one day we'll need LLMs to compress this kind of writing again. Like purposefully decreasing the signal to noise ratio for transmission, then distilling it down at the receiving end.
drumdance|7 months ago
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.
aeblyve|7 months ago
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.
hinkley|7 months ago
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.
loceng|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
robmao|7 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44707040
cat-whisperer|7 months ago
wmf|7 months ago
Raphell|7 months ago
TimByte|7 months ago
bbuut|7 months ago
names and phone books
kindkang2024|7 months ago
DID with ZK human proof on blockchain… Is this possible?
Imustaskforhelp|7 months ago
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.
unknown|7 months ago
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reconnecting|7 months ago
RajT88|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
I really wish this was as easy as talking about it is.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2|7 months ago
nirui|7 months ago
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.
AstralStorm|7 months ago
Thing is, nobody has any incentive to back them.
tonyhart7|7 months ago
12inchidentity|7 months ago
brador|7 months ago
Mesh only works in a post-quantum world.
stevenfoster|7 months ago
shark_laser|7 months ago
Kate5477|7 months ago
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