How do we make that possible for everyone? It's out of reach for most. I'm a software engineer and even I don't have the time and patience to set up a home server much less migrate my software to it. How do we turn this into an appliance? Or better yet keep the convenience of the cloud services and platforms we have now but build them for the public good instead of selling ads?
YouTube is an amazing repository of knowledge but it's encrusted in a horrible layer of attention sucking nonsense. Can we have one without the other?
Same with many other systems and platforms.
So far the simplest alternative is to just unplug, which has other benefits as well.
The answer is community, the real, local, messy, annoying kind.
It’s theoretically possible for someone to be a one-man-band and know everything needed for modern life - but it’s exceedingly hard and rare, and even then they’ll fall short relatively quickly in specialized once-in-a-lifetime issues.
You don’t need to know how to replace a toilet (though you should) or other more complex plumbing tasks - but you can know a guy.
And the plumber doesn’t need to know how to run a homelab, just know a guy who can answer the questions.
Nobody in my family knows how to do the jellyfin stuff I do, but they all know how to consume it. And some will be interested and learn more.
Oh it's extremely simple: Make people care enough about privacy that they'll pay for it.
That's literally all it is. People so far have shown that they'd rather choose the cheaper thing than the private thing. If it were the other way around, the market would have provided.
It's not that hard. You can literally use any old computer. I was home labbing long before I became a SWE. Something like Ansible can make deterministic bare metal config that could be accessible to more people.
I find home IT / tech support questions are a fantastic use of AI. AI helps me mess with all these different configs and figure out what the source of a problem is, when I give it the symptoms I am seeing in my network.
So, I hope someday that people can buy a box with a local AI tech support assistent which can make it even more accessible to set up a personal cloud. This will happen gradually, first with people on the high-end margins of technical capability, then moving downwards until a curious high schooler can set it up for themselves and keep it with them, letting them stay out of the corporate cloud for most of their life more and more.
How do we make that possible for everyone? It's out of reach for most. I'm a software engineer and even I don't have the time and patience to set up a home server much less migrate my software to it. How do we turn this into an appliance? Or better yet keep the convenience of the cloud services and platforms we have now but build them for the public good instead of selling ads?
YouTube is an amazing repository of knowledge but it's encrusted in a horrible layer of attention sucking nonsense. Can we have one without the other?
Same with many other systems and platforms.
So far the simplest alternative is to just unplug, which has other benefits as well.