[GianFabien]

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.

[anonzzzies]

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)

[noirscape]

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/...

[aetherspawn]

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.

[anonzzzies]

Ah yes, Freshworks... I could write a book about them :( Stay well away.

[swader999]

Is this same as freshdesk?

[anonzzzies]

Freshdesk is one of their products.

[xp84]

> 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.

[anonzzzies]

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.

[brewdad]

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.

[xp84]

> 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.

[crinkly]

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.

[poisonborz]

> 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.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

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'.

[lenkite]

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!

[XanSurnamehere]

>internet denizens

The word netizens was right there! Still worked though.

[Ekaros]

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.

[kragen]

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.

[chrisvalleybay]

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.

[dist-epoch]

And these desktops today for 99% of people are just dumb terminals for the cloud where everything lives.

[brewdad]

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.

[chii]

> 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.

[nradov]

That hypothetical self hosting appliance would require constant system administration work, far worse than even the most complex "smart" washing machine.

[chii]

> 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?

[xp84]

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.

[ndriscoll]

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.

[psychoslave]

No, but I don't host a mail server on it?

[rapsey]

Not just majority, vast majority. This article is really about 0.01% of the population who is into this.

[MoreQARespect]

>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.