[irishloop]

> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent.

You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups.

It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.

[Spooky23]

Physical dependency is different than logical.

With my computer, I’m dependent on my supplier for the tools. There’s usually a reasonable market serving a variety of tools. With a storage service provider, I’m dependent on their rules, and there’s high friction (migration) to escape from those rules.

[hdgvhicv]

I can change a colo location in minutes if it’s virtual or a couple of days if it’s a rack of equipment. I can change my transit provider too. Supermicro seem to have supply problems right now, but dell don’t.

If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are dependent on one company.

[manquer]

We are tied to ASML and TSMC and to an extent to the likes of NVIDIA .

As cost of innovation in the industry soars, you are bound to end up with a monopoly or at best an oligopoly who will collude.

Competitors get acquired or fully fail when their research is not successful .

It is just as true in pharma and healthcare.

Like it or not in tech we are stuck with no real choice.

[QuadmasterXLII]

There’s a difference between dependencies beeded for growth and dependencies needed for continued operations. I can still watch my dvds, but every streaming operator that does sales happily takes away digital movies I “bought”

[atoav]

That's like saying when you grow your own tomatoes you're dependent on the weather or your capability to deal with said weather. That is true. But it misses the point. When you grow your own tomatoes and the store sells only a certain bad tasting kind, suddenly wants to increase the price by factor 10 or stops selling tomatoes at all, then the value of growing it yourself shows. And they are dependent on the weather just like you.

If you self host, you're dependent on things sure. But the point isn't to reach some hypothetical perfect state of independence, the point is to get the flavour you want, not have to deal with them changing their business model, and so on.

The reason I self host my webservers is because my webhoster decided to charge a premium for SSL certs. So much in fact that for the cost of one cert per month I could run a webserver for a year.

Then I had my mailservers noster taking decisions I didn't like, so again I went and self hosted.

Some of those things are running for a decade now and I have yet to experience the catastrophic events you mention. Sure you need to do your due diligence and know your craft, but at least I am ot affected by someone changing their business model or deciding it isn't profitable anymore.

[dare944]

Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing.

The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?

[ndriscoll]

It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete.

I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).

[tarruda]

> I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server

If you only need to stream media and serve files, sure.

[dingnuts]

You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand

I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean.

Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.

[korse]

I don't know anyone who thinks chickens are the path to complete freedom from society. I do know many who feel that chickens and other such measures provide a level of independence from societal structures they wish not to associate with or do not trust.

Having your own infra is similar. You still need electricity, replacement components and perhaps friends with similar ideas that you can trade information/services with over packet radio links but it is certainly better than whoops, no internet for a few days, nothing works, touch grass.

It also is a nice backup in case anyone starts actively censoring (versus the passive self-censoring created by tempting people into walled gardens) the internet where I live. Being able to shitpost over encrypted packet radio and exchange files/news is certainly better than radio silence and state media.