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Hacker News Hacker NewsThe democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)
For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.
The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.
So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.
As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.
In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...
Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>
I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.
Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
But I do think we’re reaching a turning point on the software side. The barrier to building custom, personalized apps is trending toward 0. I’m not naive enough to think every grandma will suddenly start asking ChatGPT to “build me an app to do XYZ,” but with the right UX it can be implicit. Imagine you tell an assistant: “My doctor says my blood sugar is high. Research tips to reduce it.” -> it not only replies with tips, it also proactively builds a custom app (that you own and control) for tracking your blood sugar (measurements, meals, reminders, charts, etc.). You can edit it by describing changes (“add a weekly trend graph,” “don’t nag me after 8pm,” etc.).
This doesn’t fully solve your Big Co control issue (they own the flagship models today), but open-weight + local options keep improving. I'm hopeful we have a chance to tip the scales back toward co-owner and participant.
Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe it's time to bring it back properly.
The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.
That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.
The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into.
Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful.
I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others.
But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.
HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure
It's all over the place.
Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.
I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker.
So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server).
You can’t run your own email server. All other large email providers will consider your self hosted emails as spam by default. It understandable why they took this stance (due to actual spam) but it is also awfully convenient it also increases their market power.
We are now at the whim of large corps even if we get a custom domain with them.
This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
They totally suck like tiny homes? No, actually they are better than tiny homes. Browser are the #1 reason why you want a computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern games is #2.
Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point?
I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that.
You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.
Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.
If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on!
The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration.
Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.
The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind
Simple to use software... this would be grand!
> Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux)
Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away.
They still manage to screw things up.
Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people.
Usability needs to make a comeback.
And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that.
BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned.
Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.
>I publish this site via GitHub Pages
Okay, and that depends on an entire economy and infrastructure of privately owned switching, other network equipment, fiber optic, etc, etc, etc, -- not to mention that if GitHub did not have, as a private company, a profit motive, they wouldn't even bother to offer the service you're using.
Sure, yes, rebuild the world but if you want it to be free like open source, you'll also need to make it free like beer -- and that means you'll need to work for free, too.
I support the aim. I acknowledge the problems. I'm just so frustrated by these silly oversimplifications of how to solve it.