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by xp84 325 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
anonzzzies 325 days ago
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.
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brewdad 325 days ago
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.
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xp84 323 days ago
> 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.

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