The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign
robertmao.comRecent and related: The future is not self-hosted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175 (424 comments)
Recent and related: The future is not self-hosted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175 (424 comments)
Deeply disagree.
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.
> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent.
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.
Physical dependency is different than logical.
With my computer, I’m dependent on my supplier for the tools. There’s usually a reasonable market serving a variety of tools. With a storage service provider, I’m dependent on their rules, and there’s high friction (migration) to escape from those rules.
I can change a colo location in minutes if it’s virtual or a couple of days if it’s a rack of equipment. I can change my transit provider too. Supermicro seem to have supply problems right now, but dell don’t.
If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are dependent on one company.
We are tied to ASML and TSMC and to an extent to the likes of NVIDIA .
As cost of innovation in the industry soars, you are bound to end up with a monopoly or at best an oligopoly who will collude.
Competitors get acquired or fully fail when their research is not successful .
It is just as true in pharma and healthcare.
Like it or not in tech we are stuck with no real choice.
There’s a difference between dependencies beeded for growth and dependencies needed for continued operations. I can still watch my dvds, but every streaming operator that does sales happily takes away digital movies I “bought”
That's like saying when you grow your own tomatoes you're dependent on the weather or your capability to deal with said weather. That is true. But it misses the point. When you grow your own tomatoes and the store sells only a certain bad tasting kind, suddenly wants to increase the price by factor 10 or stops selling tomatoes at all, then the value of growing it yourself shows. And they are dependent on the weather just like you.
If you self host, you're dependent on things sure. But the point isn't to reach some hypothetical perfect state of independence, the point is to get the flavour you want, not have to deal with them changing their business model, and so on.
The reason I self host my webservers is because my webhoster decided to charge a premium for SSL certs. So much in fact that for the cost of one cert per month I could run a webserver for a year.
Then I had my mailservers noster taking decisions I didn't like, so again I went and self hosted.
Some of those things are running for a decade now and I have yet to experience the catastrophic events you mention. Sure you need to do your due diligence and know your craft, but at least I am ot affected by someone changing their business model or deciding it isn't profitable anymore.
Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing.
The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?
It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete.
I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).
> I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server
If you only need to stream media and serve files, sure.
You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand
I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean.
Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.
I don't know anyone who thinks chickens are the path to complete freedom from society. I do know many who feel that chickens and other such measures provide a level of independence from societal structures they wish not to associate with or do not trust.
Having your own infra is similar. You still need electricity, replacement components and perhaps friends with similar ideas that you can trade information/services with over packet radio links but it is certainly better than whoops, no internet for a few days, nothing works, touch grass.
It also is a nice backup in case anyone starts actively censoring (versus the passive self-censoring created by tempting people into walled gardens) the internet where I live. Being able to shitpost over encrypted packet radio and exchange files/news is certainly better than radio silence and state media.
> "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks"
Very prescient indeed for someone in 1970 to predict the success of AWS
Until you understand how 1984 extrapolates with today's technologies - and the only defense against corrupt-captured state(s) and industrial complexes toeing the establishment line, in ever increasing consolidation of so-called power-control, is decentralized-distributed tech - and then where the centralization [especially physical infrastructure] becomes their major weakness; yes, there is the control of means of production-funnel of resources-energy issue but if shit really hits the fan than guerilla tactics appear to always reign supreme, whereby major supply lines, energy production, an CPU architecture will be first to be targeted.
The bad actors through subversion are currently attempting their best to not cause panic for the herds to react more strongly and more quickly than their apparatus they're currently ready to handle [at least that they believe they're ready to handle] - however things can fall apart very quickly, the Berlin wall fell much sooner than practically all predicted.
Guerrilla tactics only work against an enemy with too weak a stomach to exterminate civilians. You’ll notice for instance that there is little guerrilla activity in Russian occupied Ukraine, due to Russia not possessing any such scruples.
Perhaps they realize by first hand that Russian army is the lesser evil than the Ukrainian government or the local oligarchy. On the other hand, there apparently is some guirilla activity in Palestina and Gaza against the Israel occupation. Does it mean that Israel army possess too weak a stomach?
We had timesharing on mainframes. Everything old is new again.
It's right for business (partially - how are the business employees managing AWS?), wrong for personal use.
Nobody's renting their phone on a task-by-task basis, they're staring at a personal computer for hours a day in their leisure time by choice.
That's how computers were before the rise of personal computers
That was GP's point, it's just also how things are today.
These things are cyclical. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
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.
> each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine?
Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that.
So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most independence and freedom. The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.
Now you lost me. Expecting one server per person in a household is unrealistic. Even if software becomes perfect, what about the hardware aspect? Expecting a family of 5 to have 5 servers all available and reachable from anywhere sounds like a nightmare, and just a waste of electricity.
Your whole premise is that self hosting software can become a one-click deploy, if they can achieve that I'm sure different settings per user is possible. If who is legally responsible about what your brother does with the family serve is really such a big question, then let's just accept widely adoption of self hosting is not going to happen.
A server could be a $30 silent soap-sized box hanging on the router consuming 5 watts, you plug it in and it sets up services and domains ready to access. Why would this be a nightmare? It is already feasible on all levels. Assuming the house has fiber, reliability shouldn't be much of an issue.
A server could be a VM taps head
“Hello, Metropolitan Police here. We have a warrant to seize… docker container ab38asdf8765jk on your home server. Go ahead and export its attached volumes and the image. We’ll wait.”
Docker IDs are hexadecimal so that one is invalid. Sorry Met!
That sounds like a you problem, failure to comply will result in forfeiture and imprisonment…
I wouldn’t put it past them… capriciousness in UK policing is a feature not a bug.
I'm gonna be doubly pedantic - that wasn't the container id, that was the actual container name. As a name, it is valid.
I actually did think of that so that's definitely the best kind of correct!
Why do you think this hasn't already happened?
CGNAT (lack of ipv6), and lack of fiber, meaning lack of upload bandwidth.
A 30 dollars box will replace cloud storage, photo storage, video steaming, and all the other services people expect to have? I don't think you have though through what exactly you're trying to replace, we're not talking about tech people wanting to host their static blog here.
A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that.
Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.
Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates.
And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't even get to have a public IP for their router anymore, and having every non-tech person punch a hole in their firewall to access their photos... I'm sure that's going to go well.
And if you somehow manage to do that, how are you going to share your photos in your personal server with your friends? Because that's pretty high in people's needs.
There is always a way to make things more complicated and/or expensive. That is not the goal of the exercise, though.
What I listed is not optional, it's the bare minimum if you want to have a widely-adopted self-hosted solution for someone's digital life.
If you're going to recommend your non-tech family store all their photos in raspberry with a single hard drive with no backup, that's kind of evil.
a cheap virtual host with a reverse tunnel...
if the servers are all in the same house then the police is not going to ask who's server they can take, they are just going to take all of them. so if that is a concern, it would be lost. but GP is not talking about people living together, but not sharing with relatives who live elsewhere.
Yeah, this makes intuitive sense too. You share lots of that potential IRL liability with live-in family members anyway.
> The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others.
How is that the golden rule? I self host and somehow missed that. I think of it more as devolution, you can self host if you want to, or you can use a family hosted option, or a community. That way a balance can be struck between convenience and sovereignty such that as convenience naturally improves so does sovereignty. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good, is a soft gradient all the way down.
Edit: I googled the ‘golden rule of self-hosting’ and all I could find the the parents comment but that seemed to be enough for google AI summary to accept it, so stating it as fact appears to have done so in so far as Googles AI is concerned.
> The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.
Some people think otherwise because they trust each other, and understand that specialization allows efficiency and economies of scale.
Even if it's stupid easy to run five servers at home, there's sure to be one person who likes maintaining them more than the other four.
It's stupid easy to load and unload the dishwasher, but my sister didn't like handling the dirty dishes and I didn't like running around and putting them away, so I loaded and she unloaded, and we were both slightly but meaningfully better off on a daily basis because of it. Of course we could each just load and unload our own dishes, but a slight reduction in independence and freedom (counting on each other to do our part) improves things for both of us.
People often--I'd even say usually--work together because they benefit from it, not just because they lack the technical chops to do otherwise.
it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it).
and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i see everything that is posted. if he needs different software he can still host that himself, that's besides the point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a platform for the family to use. a private facebook alternative.
i don't know about your family relationships, but for me family means to support and stand by each other.
> it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that
That's just an usability issue that needs to be solved. In 2002 nobody could believe that even elderly and children could use smartphones 20 years later.
And it turns out maybe children.shouldn't be using smartphones 20 years later.
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 UX vs value provided for self hosting doesn’t make sense for normal people
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I would hesitate before entrusting that kind of hardware to an AI agent. It is an interesting idea, but what if it decides full format is necessary? In my personal anecdata of where AI went wrong, at least I was the human in the middle to stop the bad decision. At best, you end up with a Simpson level nuclear plant terminal, where Homer is just trained to press Y each time it sees a prompt.
I guess what I am saying is: some LLM integration may be worthwhile.
Separately, on a more serious note, what makes this offer that different from its competition?
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)
Cory Doctorow has a good term for what those big American tech companies do; rather than too big to fail, they're too big to care[0]. Because they've muscled all their meaningful competition out of the way (or at least think they do), they instead start ignoring support requests and increasingly alienating customers.
You'd think that eventually market forces would try to correct this, but in practice that doesn't happen because big companies can just buy out any entity that's an actual threat to them/cover so many areas that getting rid of them is nigh impossible. (There's some attempts to limit this from the EU and before 2025, the US as well, but a major part of the beef the US has with the EU is that they're trying to force these major tech companies to care again.)
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...
Completely agree about working with companies in the same country so you actually get support, I learnt the hard way and now try and avoid overseas companies for this reason.
Calling out one company in-particular that we just got over an absolute nightmare of a messy divorce with, Freshworks. They are Indian-based, and their support in India treated us like we didn’t have any consumer rights at all after signing their SaaS contract (you know, one of those 1000 page things you have to sign when starting any random SaaS) and starting sending us random ludicrous invoices and refusing to ie downgrade the number of subscription seats or switch from annual to monthly billing, claiming that because we didn’t give them 60 days notice of reduction in seats we had to pay a whole year for the extra users blah blah blah, which might be legal in India, but is completely illegal in Australia.
Ah yes, Freshworks... I could write a book about them :( Stay well away.
Is this same as freshdesk?
Freshdesk is one of their products.
> There are no incentives until you get screwed over yourself.
In B2B you have a point. In the consumer space this doesn’t happen though. I know several people who have had big snafus with their data with Google, Apple, etc. but none of them moved to self hosting. I agree with the people who have said elsewhere that that’s mainly a user experience problem that could be solved - but I also agree the companies like Google and Apple will not provide any support to any standards which have the potential to commoditize or replace their strings-attached and corporate-controlled services. Meaning self hosting and avoiding those big companies’ stuff will continue to be rather lonely and isolating.
Well.. It depends what they are. Social networks, obviously are an issue. But for personal email, photos, vids, content etc, that's not isolating; the self hosted versions have the same sharing / coop features as the google/ms ones for most / all personal needs. And setting up is just not very hard. It is a niche, I agree, but at least where I live, people are getting increasingly angry with the big corps and are asking how to avoid them. It won't make a dent in google revenue, but I won't have the frustrating experience myself or being asked to fix the frustrating experience for someone else.
> personal email
no, it is isolating because self-hosting personal email you may as well just pipe your messages straight to /dev/null. Google and Microsoft will straight up blackhole messages coming from a random IP, let alone a residential one.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of selfhosting and play around with it myself, but at no point in the next 10 years will it be ready for average people to "plug and play" and for that reason it will be limited to tech enthusiasts like us.
Until you can give consumers an AppleTV type box that they can buy at Walmart, plug in and maybe spend 5 minutes setting up, then never have to think about again, you simply aren't going to get 90% of the population to self-host anything. Most don't have the knowledge to make it happen and won't be able to understand the documentation needed to acquire that knowledge. The rest simply can't be bothered with it.
Yeah been screwed here a couple of times. You have to treat all these companies as disposable. Use them until they piss you off. Do not build your entire universe on someone else's turf.
It's cheaper and more convenient to fuck something off quickly than sue them.
> 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 weird thing is, LLMs do seem to create an environment, in which such shift is not impossible. By this I mean, I know I personally use search engines a lot less now ( and I suspect that here I am not that much different from other internet denizens ). If true, there is a possibility that the existing ad model will -- out of necessity -- have to adapt to a new venue. This did not seem to fully happen yet ( providers seem skittish and are trying not to alienate people ).
I self-host some parts and I am currently in the process of adding some LLM layers in my setup. It seems like it can be made very personal..if one is so inclined. The question remains whether people will be inconvenienced enough.
That I have no real answer for since I am not sure what enough here is. I wince when I see hulu ad on Disney+ platform when I have their no ads tier, but did not drop them yet.
It is not a perfect example, but lots people see it as: 'its not that bad yet'.
ChatGPT: Certainly! While I organize answers to your query, please view the following product and service offerings by my corporate sponsors - the more you click, the more I can answer!
>internet denizens
The word netizens was right there! Still worked though.
Substantial part of population can't even manage their router or simple devices say NAS... And by manage keep them up to date.
Now think of actually running something consistently. And react to changes in that... A task a few steps above.
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.
And these desktops today for 99% of people are just dumb terminals for the cloud where everything lives.
For most people, keeping a desktop running securely and efficiently is beyond their abilities. Spyware and bloat and outdated, insecure software is the standard for most people.
> unthinkable that everyone would have their own desktop computer at some point
it was unthinkable not because people didn't want it, but that it costed too much back then. Half a mil for a microcomputer that took up a room?!
Current self-hosting requirements are similarly expensive - time and money. If someone were to sell an appliance for which you could just plug into the outlet, and you get it all, then it would be pretty good. Like a washing machine.
That hypothetical self hosting appliance would require constant system administration work, far worse than even the most complex "smart" washing machine.
> constant system administration work
why is that an inescapable truth? If the needs of such a self-hosted system is not changing, there's a theoretical argument that there shouldn't be any need to make administrative work.
if the environment changes such that this need arises, like changing/new protocols, new services, etc, it stands to reason that the seller of this appliance would release a new version, or an update of sorts.
Like mobile phones. You certainly don't constantly do "system admin" on your mobile do you?
One reason at least in my country (USA) is the dire state of broadband. A few people have awesome symmetric fiber, but it’s about a single digit percentage. Most of the rest uses DOCSIS with wildly asymmetrical ratios (e.g. mine is 1000 down/100 up), dynamic IP, and some have unreliable connectivity.
Getting people to self host without corporate dependencies unfortunately means dynamic DNS, revealing your home IP address, and means that when your home internet is down or degraded, it affects you even if you go elsewhere.
Dynamic DNS doesn't reveal your IP to anyone that doesn't know the domain name. Most self-hosted services also have offline modes. e.g. my finamp playlists are synced to my phone when I'm home and then play offline anywhere else. Within your home if your Internet connection goes down, a self-hosted service (e.g. streaming video) has better availability than cloud ones.
> Dynamic DNS doesn't reveal your IP to anyone that doesn't know the domain name
That assumes you don't set up SSL, since cert transparency now forces the publishing of every hostname that a cert is issued for.
(Painfully) work-around-able though, with a paid wildcard cert and manual setup, or with a self-hosted certificate authority that you have to install everywhere.
No, but I don't host a mail server on it?
Not just majority, vast majority. This article is really about 0.01% of the population who is into this.
>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.
> 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.
The system you are describing exists already, in China. And indeed it "makes many, many things possible". For one, it makes the concept of a ticket meaningless: either your "single living organism" (i.e. biometric ID) has permission to enter the movie theater, or get on the train, or whatever, or it doesn't. The hassle reduction is enormous! And it is also widely considered dystopian.
Clearly the crucial issue is the "untraceability" of the ID. In practice somebody is going to have to know who is who, and in practice the state is going to arrogate that role, as perhaps it should. So the fundamental question is whether it is possible to make the state democratically accountable.
> If you can follow that logic
I can't, because it's not logical. You want a credential that provides exactly one bit of information with certainty. It's not at all clear that something like that exists or if it did, how you would prevent multiple people from sharing the same credential if it was also actually possible to use it anonymously.
> It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law",
You're saying the credential can leak information about the user. You don't need many of these bits of information to de-anonymize someone.
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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?
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/06/28/zkid.html Counter Points
> （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.
So, to be clear, you’re upset by their transparency that they used LLMs while plenty of other writers use it to:
But only because they chose strong transparency about their activity?The disclaimer said the article was drafted with the help of an LLM - if they just did the list of things you mentioned I wouldn’t think they would need to put up a disclaimer (you don’t see disclaimers saying this article was written with the help of Google or Wikipedia) - the fundamental issue I think is that they are letting the LLM actually write the article, which I think people know, pretty viscerally, that they disagree with.
I had the same reaction, which is that I do not want to read something that was written by an LLM and immediately backed out - which is great I really appreciate their disclaimer, it helped me not waste my time on things I don’t personally want to consume.
Alternatively, they could be very, very conscious of being hyper-honest. There is a huge amount of overlap between people with a “strong sense of justice” (and honesty about using controversial technologies could be covered in that), and people on this forum.
You might not think that’s sufficient for a disclaimer; but if I was worried about AI use and wanted to be super duper up front, I would put that on my own journal if I used it for the things I mentioned.
Very anti-HN thinking to be posted here. I see a common trend in people loving blogging for it helps solidify their thoughts. Making an LLM do this is only wasting everyone time.
Whatever you think HN is, it isn't. People are not represented by a subdomain of an accelerator.
HN also drank the crypto-crap and NFT Kool-Aid. It's nice to see people able to not follow the groupthink.
It all comes down to the information content :)
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].
> how exactly they would make the Internet better.
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.
Ah, yes, the cure is the magical token.
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...
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.
So far nobody explained one simple use case - self-hosted Instagram.
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?
Federated social media through a common protocol.
For example: https://pixelfed.org/ Which is literally the fediverse alternative to instagram.
If I choose a "community server", how does that differ from just using the Instagram "server" by using Instagram itself? Can't the community server ban me, or delete some of my data they don't like, for example? Or even sell my data?
> how does that differ from just using the Instagram "server"
1. You can move to another server if you don't like their rules, or to your own server. There is a competition between servers (and self-hosting!) making the network better for everyone.
2. There is no single point of failure for the whole network. Hackers and governments love single points of failure.
3. There's nobody who would forbid alternative clients or web access forcing you into a shitty app. There's no single entity owning everything and trying to extract as much money as possible from you. On Instagram, you're in a walled garden.
> There is a competition between servers
Why? What do they gain by hosting our accounts?
Why do they exist in the first place? Some of them can and do take money for the service. Some are volunteers who want to help users and support federation. Some are run by non-profits or companies as self-promotion.
In retrospect, community servers/instances were a mistake. You need your own domain.
You might enjoy having a look at how atproto (which powers Bluesky) solves this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
TLDR: Self-hosting is the source of truth for data; apps aggregate over it.
hmm, another UI that connectly directly to S3???
when you follow somebody, you put their public url in a list, then when you open the app it requests the photos from everybody on the list?
I see no reason why everybody could not run a web server on their phone.
So if I follow 1000 people,
I make 1000 requests every time I open the app or refresh my feed?
Also not everyone can be on a stable connection with a public IP address with good upload speeds 7/24. In the ideal world: sure. In the real world: impossible (at least for any foreseeable near future).
This has all been solved with ActivityPub or AT Protocol. It's push-based not pull and yes there are still servers. Either you pay for your own server or you mooch on a community server.
Oh, missed that. Then it makes sense, thank you.
Perhaps it could make each request as you scroll? You don't need to see 1000 photos all at once. And if your friend has sketchy internet, perhaps it can push to you when they have a good connection.
It's not perfect, but if we want self hosted, we have to start somewhere and start working out the problems.
That would require javascript, and the set of people interested in self-hosting and the set of people willing to touch javascript with asbestos gloves and a ten foot pole do not intersect.
> This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model, but all opinions expressed are my own
Why not post the prompts, it’ll be a shorter read with presumably the same amount of new information.
The prompt is much longer and less structured than the blog post.
I am not a writer and the blog posts I have built are really long and I am pretty sure that noone except myself have read them, but I really feel as if I use AI quite a lot to code some one off projects and nowadays a general overreliance on them too.
I am pretty sure that sure, it might be more tedious to actually manage your thoughts into more structured format to present to a larger audience and you might think that AI is meant for such tasks but I personally feel as if there is something about using AI in writing that feels sloppy most of the times.
Write bad but original. Maybe it won't get to the top of the HN, but you get the widest amount of freedom if you are really passionate about writing.
(I am thinking of stopping to use AI / using AI to just teach me things if I find a need to create a project that I am genuinely curious to build myself)
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.
What are some personal applications you created to fill these gaps?
* A media player with playlist of local media that executes in a web browser.
* proxies for http and WebSockets. Apache made this challenging and I thought I could do it better. I can now spin up servers in seconds and serve http and WebSockets on the same port
* tools to test dns, http, WebSockets, hashes, certificate creation, and more
Are you talking about Android?
Can your player delete media files?
If yes - PLEASE SHARE!
Music player that does not skip 1 second of next track, scans my big library in a second.
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.
> end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people
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.
Signal is a promising example, but ephemeral messaging is a very different use case from things like photo management.
Signal has a lot of problems with changing devices while preserving history. As in it's often just impossible.
Are you aware of this https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-devi...
I think so, this looks like the feature where adding an new linked device transfers messages from your phone.
What still isn't possible as far as I am aware is transferring messages from Android to iOS or vice versa. Last time I looked into this was a few weeks ago.
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).
Tailscale + Proxmox is still an order of magnitude more difficult than this is going to need to be.
One can follow a video in about an hour maybe two and be up and have the basics down with proxmox.
Of course, if someone wants to figure out perfection the first time it might take a bit longer.
Like I said, an order of magnitude harder than it should be.
It should be install app, do an oauth flow to open a tunnel, done.
Ah, for Tailscale inside Proxmox I'm assuming.
This script exactly works like as you're describing:
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=add...
Most humans don't know what a script is
What should never be used in prod?
Digital Ocean. Notes in my previous comments somewhere, I can see if I can find it.
Among other things, their system has a massive bug that will delete your servers without notifying anyone with a valid and working CC on file.
If Self-hosting doesn't have dissident-level privacy it's still dramatically better than centralized SaaS.
> end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people
Matrix has solved this problem.
I've tried to adopt Matrix multiple times over years.
IMO the UX is evidence that e2ee is not solved.
we solved it in element x, but there appears to be massive inertia towards adopting it because it doesn’t have threads or spaces yet.
If I only use 1 device for 5 years, then lose it, how do I recover?
From a backup?
Backed up from what? People only use the cloud for backups, at which point the e2ee is compromised.
It doesn't matter what people are currently doing. In Matrix, there is a possibility to make reliable, encrypted backups. It can also be done with a simple interface.
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.
'Decentralized Identifiers' centralise identity in the DID. That's tautological.
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.
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.
For ephemeral DIDs to be useful they need to be recognized by the authorities that issue "credentials" based on them. For example, if a website/app requires proof-of-age (you know, like the UK now) you could use a DID for whom a credential showing something like "this is a person who is over 18 years old" was issued by the Birth Registry Authority (or whatever they call you in your country), and the website/app could then check the signature of the credential and be sure it was signed by the right authority. As the owner of a "main" DID, you could request many DIDs (and issue "credentials" based on those), presumably one for each website/app, to evade tracking.
If there was another mechanism to prove age, for example, if everyone had their Date Of Birth on a blockchain or something like that, it could be possible to not rely on a single Authority, but to my knowledge that wouldn't be acceptable in any country of the world... only the government is recognized as an "issuer" of Birth Certificates and names, and I think that's how it has to be... that makes it possible for the government to find out which apps you're using, unfortunately. But there may be ways around that... I believe the whole Verifiable Credentials Working Group uses Verifiable Presentations for this, see https://hub.ebsi.eu/vc-framework/ebsi-w3c-vc-vp
I disagree with this.
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.
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.
Related, that this responds to:
The future is not self-hosted
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682175
> 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.
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.
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 don't have a strong opinion on this piece but I very much would like to see DID catch on.
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.
I just write a follow up post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44707040
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.
Nah, this kind of attribution is a lose-lose. It just gives AI haters an excuse to discount everything you say.
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'm curious, how does blockchain play into being self-sovereign? Is the idea that decentralized networks can give us control over our own data?
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.
And fwiw Bluesky DIDs are currently still centralized in plc.directory but work is being done to decentralize them.
The idea of self-sovereignty being protocol-based rather than infrastructure-based is both compelling and challenging
oh look, we reinvented pre-shared keys and keyservers
names and phone books
Server said: Can not proxy to upstream target: http://127.0.0.1:28421
Forever free, forever sovereign.
DID with ZK human proof on blockchain… Is this possible?
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 have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0 gas fees.
How is this possible? Is it something that EVM-based chains can support? Curious to hear more.
> Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail
Zkmail doesn’t prove that you’re a unique human. Worldcoin does, but it requires trusting a single company with everyone’s iris data, which is quite dangerous, and completely undermines the goal of building a decentralized, trustless system.
The future I hope for is one where our own devices handle this entirely. Imagine a VR headset or future phone using its iris scanner, combined with our social data, to generate a single, secure cryptographic proof. This proof would verify our uniqueness in the world without ever leaking iris data or any other sensitive information.
Its really complicated but I will try to sum it up.
Basically nano cryptocurrency has no gas fees so if you can get even 10^-30 nano, you can technically do unlimited transactions forever (there is some caveat)
You can get such nano from faucets and then you have basically an eternal source of doing transactions.
What are transactions? Transactions are a way of sending money from A public key to B public key
Now what if we actually take some data and parse it into chunks and then we can create a lot of addresses using some vanity generator whose seed we can know
Then we got all the seeds of the vanity addresses whose lets say top 4 letters of the first address can form a word... now we do the transactions and then we take a transaction id and in the end we send money to original account
by that transaction id or that special account we can actually see a loop of sorts and thus tada! we get some data that we can actually store in blockchain itself.. for 0 fees!!
Now what was my use case! sounds really silly but I wanted to use worldoftext and I wanted to prove that I am the first person to write some text..
Now so what I did was take a unique hash of text and then embed it into blockchain.., and since blockchain has some time, we have essentially timestamped some text and we can also prove that we are the owner of the account that created that text...
Oh yeah, I have also created my own cryptocurrency which actually used algorand's vrf function with it to create a sort of way for randomness to be integrated in it too/ in sense create a cryptocurrency too with this usecase lol
Side note: in order to improve the efficiency you could lose the 10^-30 nano to send to a completely different account which we don't control and since most faucets give like 10^-10 nano ish and like honestly, that is a more practical approach
How is nano still alive? because for each transaction the person doing the transaction has to do some work function, I recommend the 2nd latter approach but I like both approaches. I have some bun code which can automate this whole thing too and Its all on github and uh my practical approach is with me T-T, I think I legit accidentally deleted it but uh yea I built it using claude and its kinda Ai slop but it works :/
Someone gifted me the domain name for my work and some dollars too, Y'know.. I personally feel like the thing that I did was really innovative and I am the most proud of it but I personally feel like the decentralization aspect would never make me earn a single cent out of it and that's okay to me but I don't have too much money and I wish someday that I could work on such things without thinking about money :/
Fun fact: nano cryptocurrency creator actually said on reddit that such behaviour is unintended and that's exactly what I like doing.. Doing unintended things to do something useful.
I also created a whole youtube video and some other which I might share privately https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hHG8gOkZBE
I will update my HN to show some contact info I guess too
Thanks for sharing this. The method of encoding data through a looping chain of transactions between vanity addresses is particularly clever. Truly a innovative idea.
Hope to see more practical applications emerge. Please keep us updated should it unfold in the future.
Thanks a lot, well here are some practical applications I can think of personally:
Uncensored forum app (though would be insanely slow and I personally feel like it might lead to some nefarious activities and I was thinking of creating it but I didn't want to be linked to it)
Multi crypto payment while having the same address: we add all crypto addresses into nano chain itself and so then anybody can pay to anybody else in all the crypto address data of different blockchains like eth, polygon , (bitcoin?) , monero without requiring multiple addresses, a single address is enough.
Proving of data (nanotimestamps) could be useful to create a decentralized way of "seeding" other people's data while still knowing that its tamper free using bao (incremental streaming)
so this could theoretically be used for lets say download of archlinux iso without using bittorrent and without trusting any middle man or even hashing yourself. So it can sort of link download links into addresses too.
I was thinking of a social media where such thing could be used and so the underlying stack could be changed to whatever and you can move away just like in did but the did server would actually be a 60 node (nano has 60 nodes from various amount of people so more decentralized and anyone can host their own node too)
All while doing any of this, we can guarantee sort of something like nostr too in the sense that payments can be built in (not sure if its good or bad but its still a feature)
I must admit though, I am just in high school and honestly it made my day thinking that people think what I created to be innovative since I will admit, the code sucks really bad and AI slop but the idea is the one thing I am proud of. Truly an eureka moment I must admit.
I want to be honest, I may have created this idea but its hard for me to monetize it given the decentralized nature. If someone has some more ideas feel free to list it.
Should I create my own blog post about it?
I personally want to work on this project too, get some practical applications but just have no incentive really sadly. I also don't want to generate too much hype on it as if its something revolutionary since only time will tell.
I may sound cheesy but if someone interested in crypto is seriously impressed, please just mail me and I guess fund me for this project and give me ideas on monetization.
Honestly I don't know, I don't want a lot of money. I just want enough money to work on things I like without dreading about studies/college/job cycle.
https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/randomnano Not sure why I named it randomnano but naming has always been difficult for me..
This does sound interesting and very much show HN level. Do you have any shareable github/page where you discuss the idea in more detail?
Lurking in HN, this might be one of the highest compliments out there. So thanks, I appreciate it.
I have created a whole video about it actually too! it was part of some coding competition to explain software that I took part in.
I must admit, I was just babbling since I didn't knew too much of the code but just the higher basics so it would be a little tough watching a video so you might need to hold tight!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChyJALOsSmY
Here's the repo https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/randomnano
I had created a blog post too iirc, I will create it again this time explaining it better since I think there is some reignited interest in it.
While I really want to agree with this, it's giving "You can trivially set up an SFTP server..."
I really wish this was as easy as talking about it is.
I suppose technically it is not wrong. The minimalist setup is easy, but it also won't work ( and you will be likely treated as spam ).
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.
These protocols exist, e.g. on top of I2P network.
Thing is, nobody has any incentive to back them.
IMO, I2P and Tor were never a solution to this, they are anonymization networks, which adds their own requirement on how to use it, and most people don't need anonymization. These protocols are slow and complex, thus not user friendly.
Maybe aiming a lower tier of security (like what TLS offers) is good enough for regular user. For example, Matrix or Jami.
But the problem with Matrix and Jami is that these are still too complex for regular user. No user, no motivation for the developer and it's a downward spiral from there.
And worse, given how they work, there is a disincentive to use them ( especially so in US jurisdiction ).
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
Own yer identity. Equip yourself and others with the power of self determinism.
The future is distributed and anonymous.
Mesh only works in a post-quantum world.
What a last name to be making this argument with.
Every time I see an article like this that doesn't mention Nostr I just shake my head...
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