I too have been having a grand time running a little server of my own (in my case the first focus has been on media streaming) and it's given a powerful vision of what an internet one universe over would look like where all these cloud services that have squeezed 'personal computing' to death instead run on instances and hardware that more or less belong to the people that use them. And it's so nice! What would a streaming service look like that didn't iteratively try to squeeze more advertising into less content? Or a social network that didn't have an incentive for you to spend time there to sell you things? Or an LLM that was just a lil application to tinker with rather than the Next Big Thing?
Technically, the world has so many adequate computers sitting around in routers and phones and the like that it simply isn't that hard- but it's essentially an anti-commercial proposition, and that's where it gets tricky...
Yes, it’s fun and is interesting as a vision of how the Internet can exist as a democratized platform. Once you see the possibility, you realize that what you are really paying for is the convenience and stability of cloud-hosted apps. But it would be great to continue to reduce the barriers for folks wanting to set up their own servers.
I too have been having a grand time running a little server of my own (in my case the first focus has been on media streaming) and it's given a powerful vision of what an internet one universe over would look like where all these cloud services that have squeezed 'personal computing' to death instead run on instances and hardware that more or less belong to the people that use them. And it's so nice! What would a streaming service look like that didn't iteratively try to squeeze more advertising into less content? Or a social network that didn't have an incentive for you to spend time there to sell you things? Or an LLM that was just a lil application to tinker with rather than the Next Big Thing?
Technically, the world has so many adequate computers sitting around in routers and phones and the like that it simply isn't that hard- but it's essentially an anti-commercial proposition, and that's where it gets tricky...
Yes, it’s fun and is interesting as a vision of how the Internet can exist as a democratized platform. Once you see the possibility, you realize that what you are really paying for is the convenience and stability of cloud-hosted apps. But it would be great to continue to reduce the barriers for folks wanting to set up their own servers.