>I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives
I want that, but for the masses of tech-illiterate Average Joes out there, it's tough to compete against the sheer convenience of "tap next to trust big tech with all your private data and sync it all in the cloud" that you get when you unbox your iPhone/Android. And for most people their phone is their primary computing device now so their lives are tied to those ecosystems and we've been conditioned for over a decade now to just give our private data to the phones' ecosystems without asking questions because everting is so convenient and ignorance is bliss.
Trying to get average consumers off the big-tech ecosystems at this point is like trying to unplug people from the matrix. It's nearly impossible, unless some new EU-style regulations break up these monopolies first so that third party alternatives can compete on feature parity.
1) most consumers have no idea what a NAS is, and even when they do, consumers have been conditioned that all their data is automagically beamed to the Apple/Google cloud at any and all time there's an internet connection without any user involvement beyond entering their ID when they unbox their phone for the first time, so it's impossible for a third party device or service to compete with this level of out of the box integration and convenience
2) NAS devices aren't made by Apple and Google so NAS integration into these ecosystems is a second class experience at best, and Apple and Google will never make NAS devices as they're incentivized to get you to pay for their cloud storage subscriptions for your data. Plus, as a a cherry on top, this way they can silently data-mine you as well.
Basically the industry is moving, or we can argue that it has moved already, towards subscriptions, where you never really own your music/movies/data but have access to it as long as you pay your monthly/yearly fee, because this is so much more lucrative for big-tech than getting you to buy commodity HW like a NAS and physically owning your data.
EU-style regulations will decrease, dramatically, the likelihood of Average Joe doing it themselves: those regulations will improve privacy, data control, et al. requirements for big tech. Average Joe will feel even safer in using big tech.
The first problem to solve would be getting a symmetric fiber connection to their home so they can actually upload at more than a highly volatile 5Mbps that is probably split amongst whole neighborhood. Second would be ipv6 address to not have to deal with CGNAT and make the ISP as dumb of a pipe as possible.
I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-connected data centers.
I’d like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I want to, but that doesn’t feel like the default we need.
Because it's my data. I should decide who can access it, when and on what terms. Relying on someone else to do it for me is an unnecessary middle man that exists for the only reason web developers haven't made a good technical solution that would be simple, secure and reliable enough for everyone to use. For goodness sake, we've had to come up with laws for how companies can use our data instead of solid technical solutions that address the problem.
The focus for the past 30 years has been on simplifying web content consumption. Everyone knows how to use a web browser. Why hasn't there been a similar push to make serving web content easier? There have been some attempts (Opera Unite, Sandstorm, Docker... web3?), but none have prevailed.
A possible answer could be because it has created a huge market for 3rd party services to step in and make things easier for web users. And now it's probably too late to stop the train. But there's no reason this couldn't work while empowering the user.
But then you could run some open source server that does it, just not typically from your home. It’s the home part that won’t work, just as most people don’t serve their web apps from home. And non tech people can still outsource and move between competing providers rather than have an oligopoly of social media companies.
Sadly publishing goes towards the lowest friction service. Was websites, then blogs, now Twitter. The backgrounds and themes weren’t as important as simple content. I’m not sure home hosting has any chance to beat that trend.
* Most home connections are asymmetric and lack upload bandwidth.
* Most personal devices are battery powered and intermittently operated.
* Many are mobile in terms of physical location and logical network (home WiFi, work/school WiFi, cellular).
Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins because it is a genuinely effective solution to problems inherent in sharing data between end users.
There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around.
> lack upload bandwidth
This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.).
The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the scale needed to support the large amount of users. If we had built services and tools around the inherent distributed nature of the web, centralization and all the problems caused by scale wouldn't be an issue.
> battery powered and intermittently operated
> mobile
Why should user data be highly available? If I'm physically unreachable or just want to be offline, shouldn't my data be unreachable as well? Besides, all of these can have technical solutions as well.
> Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins
I'm not disagreeing, but a) this wouldn't be required by most users, and b) why couldn't this be under control of users as well? The fact no such (simple) solution exists today doesn't mean that it couldn't have gained traction back when browsers were getting adopted, and today we would've had a completely different web. Unfortunately incentives are turned on its head, users aren't educated about the harms of giving their data away because they've learned that it's the way the web works, we have to pass laws to protect user data, and a vocal minority of web developers have been swimming upstream and trying to undo the harms of centralization for decades with lackluster results.
The key functionality of the major tech platforms is to convey data to other people. Almost none of the data we give them is private or proprietary in the sense you’re suggesting. We only give it to them because we want e.g. our friends to have it. Now it is unfortunate that the service provider also gets it in the process, but that’s more an issue of end to end encryption than centralization per se. We can have highly centralized yet end to end encrypted platforms, like WhatsApp and Signal. We can also have highly decentralized platforms which are panopticons, like cryptocurrencies.
One of the main reasons we “hire” the platform companies to convey our data to other people rather than opening TCP sockets to each other directly is precisely async delivery. No one wants to use a social network where we can only see each other’s content if we’re using our laptops at the same time. Just make a phone call at that point.
Now maybe you could ask for federated, open standard queueing mechanisms. But we have one of those! It’s called SMTP, and it’s not really up to the needs of modern social applications. And maybe we could do something about that. But it’s also in the nature of federated open standards that are widely deployed to ossify. The other service that Facebook and Twitter are doing for you besides pub/sub is having the coordination and agency to update their own deployments over time, something that e.g. the set of all relevant email operators does not have.
Some websites even track exactly how you move your mouse and can have a pretty good guess of your age and they can track how many times you click something that doesn't do anything (apparently older people tend to zero in on buttons and click on things that aren't clickable more often. I heard this on older episodes of the Level1news on the Level1 Techs youtube channel, which I recommend listening to for tech news that might be up to a week out of date)
It's not just the data you obviously fill in yourself
and that's before considering cookies other than letting you auto login to a specific site you already logged in to before
Also, isn't Whatsapp owned by facebook now?
Don't trust facebook or anything they own
Apple is now policing the images you own. They intend to observe everything you upload to ensure it aligns with local legislation. Some good, a lot of bad.
Beyond that, if someone owns your data they can simply decide what you pay tomorrow and its burn it or pay.
The main reason for me is identity. Imagine that when you first got an internet connection, it didn't come with an @comcast.net or @att.com email address, but rather as part of the setup of your internet connection, let you register your own domain.
The mx records could point to this homeserver box and you would fetch your messages from there. It would be the norm that your graph, photos, whatever would be stored there and you would have to allow access to share them out with others. That would have lead to a very different internet than today.
But the main thing I'm thinking of is having a physical, secure enclave protected, device that allows all internet users to u2f to their ISP in order to have the option for an "ip permitted from" protocol for registration on websites. Something that can ensure that when grandmas pc gets hacked, it's not used to create 100 Twitter accounts to pump some crypto scam.
Today even if we could get ISPs to setup such a system, people wouldn't use such a system as they are already use to easy sign ups, and companies love their growth metrics
Routers work because ISPs require them. ISPs however aren’t fond of supporting the home server use case.
I wish for a world where battery tech wasn’t so limited. Imagine if everyone could just run a full-fledged server 24/7 on their phone, as a simple app, with a reasonable data plan.
> Routers work because ISPs require them. ISPs however aren’t fond of supporting the home server use case.
This is the obvious and simplest solution. A built-in self-hosting platform right in the router, extensible with an external USB drive if the user needs it. But ISP's are notoriously terrible at everything and certainly can't be trusted with something like this.
I'm only half joking. I was just fantasizing about this the other day. I'd love this to become reality but I'm worried reality diverges from this idea further with each passing day. People produce more and more data that's useless outside of a closed platform. Nobody owns media to host.
Probably some ISPs will sell NAS or similar device and, with a monthly fee, you would have external access via a custom domain name (like john_doe.verizon.com, for example).
A lot of non-techy people already have NAS, external hard drives, and things like that. I don't know how ISPs haven't done already this.
30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives