[mulmen]

The problem being solved here is data locality. This idea predates the TV show by literally decades.

Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box. They want to sell us a subscription. My assertion is that Apple’s model of selling hardware would work for home servers.

[dangus]

I repeat myself: focus your mind on the value, or the problem the customer is looking to solve. Data locality isn’t a problem, it’s an implementation choice or detail.

The problem is something like: “I need to keep my family photos/files safe” or “I need to store customer orders and data” or “I need a way to protect my data when I drop my phone in the toilet.”

Even giant companies with eye-watering IT budgets see the appeal of having someone else manage their physical hardware and software infrastructure.. I haven’t worked at a company that owned its own servers in nearly a decade.

Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box and coincidentally nobody wants to buy a box.

[mulmen]

Home hosting protects from institutional threats like governments, TLAs, and LEO. Cloud providers can’t offer that. They’re a huge target and it’s an open secret they are compromised. Apple even tried to pitch that as a feature. And they’re the leaders in privacy!

It’s easy to reason about data locality. I can have a literal social network of just my actual friends and no tech company gets to spy on it.

Cloud backups are still good for disaster recovery if they are fully encrypted.

[dangus]

Wow! Those institutional threats sound pretty sophisticated. I’m sure the average self-hosting solution is prepared for adversaries like that, and when agents come knocking on my door I’ll just tell them “no hard drives here!”

You know, with such a scary and complex network of online adversaries and government agencies, I wonder if I could pay someone else to manage that risk for me. My business is selling online greeting cards for pets and I don’t really specialize in network security and data protection.