[drweevil]

"We hear them everywhere— their bad ideas, their grievances are all amplified."

Bridget Todd discusses these guys with her guest Anil Dash on the latest episode of her pod "There Are No Girls on the Internet", if anyone is interested. Dash thinks that they simply don't love tech. I also think that their bizarre world views contributes to the shit show the mainstream Internet has become.

For the rest of us, as long as net neutrality is operative we can at least experiment with alternatives. But that is already in the crosshairs. It reminds me of the history of radio. The airwaves used to be public. Now you're lucky if you can get--and keep--a community FM station on the air.

[pancsta]

Self hosting is the only way and actually not a bad idea (also quite popular and on the rise). On top of that, a common folk can use AI for end-user customizations of such open source deployments. The worst case scenario is that email will be like CB radio, to follow on your example…

[ok1984]

Agree! I don’t understand how they convinced so many companies to move to the cloud, making them pay more than actually running physical hardware. If Azure, Google, AWS go down most of the internet will be down which is really the opposite of what the internet is supposed to be! Soon we will not be able to call it the World Wide Web anymore!

Cloud is needed for very specific scenarios such as:

1) You running a global service like instagram, amazon, netflix. 2) Your hardware demands have very high fluctuations.

Apart from that, many software solutions can be easily installed on prem, and as your business grows you can increase the compute power of your infrastructure.