>How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations?
Here's my pitch...
Sell a productized version of a server that has everything you need to run all of your data-sharing needs already set up with a nice front end that can be operated by a remote control from an HDMI-connected TV. Using that front end, the user connects to the local network, establishes mobile app companions, enters in any global details for accounts they want to maintain, and manages all the configuration options for the server.
The server would host all of the things a household would want to maintain, using open source projects for transparency and maintainability. That would include things like peertube and mastadon for publishing content and media, but it would also include home automation software, as well as personal media software like owncloud as a way to replace google drive content and plex to manage personal media playback.
Basically, a little server that uses open-source software to emulate every modern cloud-based service, on a household scale so that you can run it cheaply enough to be affordable ($60-$70 bucks?), layered in encryption and firewalls for privacy and federated to other home servers (and everywhere else) using the fediverse, while also adding in anything you would want a home-management or home media server to do.
I call it an "accent server". Like an "accent table". I would make it stylish enough to display, but discreet enough to tuck out of sight.
And, personally, I see this kind of thing coming around either way. It's just a matter of whether or not one company puts together all of this software and starts offering it as a walled garden, or if it bumbles itself together out of CLI utility chaining, and enough reddit posts circling around the same setup questions.
That assumption is based on the idea that most people seem to want what this would provide; it's just that not even particularly tech-minded people want to go through the steps of setting each of all of these things up. And it's only when you have 3 or 4 of the services or features working in tandem that they add up enough to make a change in lifestyle (which is what we're attempting) tempting enough.
So if you could put together a "buy it once, plug it in, set it up, forget about it" kind of offering, I think you would get a ton of people that would buy it, and then once it was just a thing in your house that you could start adding custom plugins to (as easy as installing an app), then you would get a ton of adoption. The hard part is marketing; you have to really explain it fully to make anyone understand what it is you're trying to offer.
I can't count how many hacker conventions over the past 15-20 years I've been to where someone was evangelizing a product that claims to do what you're talking about. So many of these "dead simple" "plug and play" devices. Rarely do they survive more than a year or two before those involved lose interest or give up. They have a very hard time finding a product-market fit in a market of technophiles. They never even come close to a market of normies.
- The raw idea seems easy.
- The initial implementation seems like it should be of moderate difficulty, but is actually very challenging to get even close to right.
- The long term maintenance is a nightmare, but don't worry, you won't survive long enough to worry about that.
- The infrastructure and policy implications of getting and keeping it connected to everyone else are intractable. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531969 for some tip-of-the-iceberg examples.)
Yeah, as someone interested in this kind of thing, I've been hoping someone else would put something together that would work, but I think I share your assumption that this is probably not something that can be made into a product profitable enough to finance a company on.
I will say that, for the most part, these companies try a kind of "lock you in to our product which uses open source" scheme that could never possibly work. And, further, that no one has ever implemented the kind of system that I have in mind that I've seen. But that's not because it's unique or complex, just that it isn't a good path to a minimum viable product, so it isn't a good way to spin up a company quickly.
But yeah; aside from burning through cash in order to build enough coverage (maybe a year of dev just on this; no product dev yet) for a product that you will never actually profit from, I don't see how anyone could bring something like this to market.
All of that aside, a product that can sustain a company is not the only way to have a product exist. Modular productization and loss leading are a couple of ways to envision this. But I'm betting some kind of fractional componentization starts happening that makes this kind of stuff more maintainable. YMMV, though!
This actually seems like a great use-case for FOSS. Lots of people have tried their hand at this, so why don't we all put a little effort in to get it done?
Here's my pitch...
Sell a productized version of a server that has everything you need to run all of your data-sharing needs already set up with a nice front end that can be operated by a remote control from an HDMI-connected TV. Using that front end, the user connects to the local network, establishes mobile app companions, enters in any global details for accounts they want to maintain, and manages all the configuration options for the server.
The server would host all of the things a household would want to maintain, using open source projects for transparency and maintainability. That would include things like peertube and mastadon for publishing content and media, but it would also include home automation software, as well as personal media software like owncloud as a way to replace google drive content and plex to manage personal media playback.
Basically, a little server that uses open-source software to emulate every modern cloud-based service, on a household scale so that you can run it cheaply enough to be affordable ($60-$70 bucks?), layered in encryption and firewalls for privacy and federated to other home servers (and everywhere else) using the fediverse, while also adding in anything you would want a home-management or home media server to do.
I call it an "accent server". Like an "accent table". I would make it stylish enough to display, but discreet enough to tuck out of sight.
And, personally, I see this kind of thing coming around either way. It's just a matter of whether or not one company puts together all of this software and starts offering it as a walled garden, or if it bumbles itself together out of CLI utility chaining, and enough reddit posts circling around the same setup questions.
That assumption is based on the idea that most people seem to want what this would provide; it's just that not even particularly tech-minded people want to go through the steps of setting each of all of these things up. And it's only when you have 3 or 4 of the services or features working in tandem that they add up enough to make a change in lifestyle (which is what we're attempting) tempting enough.
So if you could put together a "buy it once, plug it in, set it up, forget about it" kind of offering, I think you would get a ton of people that would buy it, and then once it was just a thing in your house that you could start adding custom plugins to (as easy as installing an app), then you would get a ton of adoption. The hard part is marketing; you have to really explain it fully to make anyone understand what it is you're trying to offer.