[bhauer]

Agreed. I feel as much as we've seen NASs grow into devices that are vaguely approachable by enthusiasts, there is still a huge amount of ground to cover before they would be the sort of thing that one could easily deploy in their parents' house.

There has been piecemeal progress in swinging the pendulum back from cloud-everything to easier to use edge computing. The Helm email server is one example. The slightly more plug-and-play approach to modern NASs is another. And there are others. But you can tell that the vast allocation of R&D is not going here yet. I do think investors will eventually wake up and realize that user demand for data control means better edge devices and avoiding reliance on the centralized cloud.

What I have envisioned for PAO [1] is federated encrypted backup. I would like to see NASs allow me to basically allocate a percentage of my capacity to various peers to store encrypted-at-rest duplicates of their data. And vice-versa. Basically a federated mesh. No need for blockchain or other crypto-hype nonsense. Just straight authenticated and encrypted file storage.

My opinion is that cloud dominance really traces back to the advent of and self-reinforcing power of asynchonous Internet connectivity. When Internet connectivity was often synchronous (think the very early days of DSL), peer-to-peer networking remained very common. As the number of users using asynchronous connectivity increased, it became reinforced as more services centralized data and content. Peer-to-peer is effectively a relic of the past now. Only today have we started to see some resurgence of symmetric connectivity (e.g., 1Gbps symmetric fiber). I believe deployment of symmetric connectivity will be a decentralizing force as more people realize it's possible to just access your file system and data directly between devices rather than use an intermediary. And as vendors realize this is an opportunity space to offer interesting technology (e.g., the likes of Zerotier) to consumers.

[1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

[arminiusreturns]

> I do think investors will eventually wake up and realize that user demand for data control means better edge devices and avoiding reliance on the centralized cloud.

Hear hear! We need to not forget the core lesson of the internet, which is centralization is a weakness. I have not been happy with the increasing trend towards centralization in tech, and I agree that people taking more ownership is going to mean more edge devices.

The hardware is there, it's the software that needs to catch up.

[lunch]

I would like to see NASs allow me to basically allocate a percentage of my capacity to various peers to store encrypted-at-rest duplicates of their data

This is something I've been thinking about, too. We have so many Internet-connected devices with increasingly cheap storage-- Some universal protocol for distributing data across this network would be really cool. (I understand this could sound like blockchain. I have no horse in that race.)

[smacktoward]

I would worry about the liability implications of such an approach. If one of those peers is storing (say) child porn, and some of that porn ends up on my hardware via automatic duplication, does that implicate me legally in their crime? If it does, does it matter whether it's on my hardware with or without my knowledge? If the police identify my hardware as part of that peer's storage network, is that hardware at risk of being searched and/or seized? That sort of thing.