Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benefit like that from self hosting. I only see better privacy, more control and ownership over your data, and in some cases lower cost (but often higher), and those aren't nearly as powerful motivators for people.

I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

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MoreQARespect 4 days ago | parent [-]

privacy and control are things which people dont tend to think about until:

* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").

* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.

* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).

* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.

* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).

* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.

Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.

And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.

>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

	▲	subarctic 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud >This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money. Ya but it turned out that smartphones ended up being super convenient once they got good/usable enough, and it unlocked really useful things that you couldn't do before, or just made things more convenient. If I have all my gmail data at home (or on a machine I control in a data center somewhere), does that make anything more convenient for me? Whereas being able to navigate around a new city with zero knowledge of it, translate food packaging when I'm grocery shopping in a foreign country, communicate with with any of people from wherever I am as long as I have my phone on me - those are real benefits. I do kind of like how you're thinking about this because I'd love to live in a world where I could have ownership over all my emails, social media data, music, etc and have it all be just as convenient (or more convenient than) and work just as well as gmail, instagram, spotify etc do today. But we've definitely been moving in the opposite direction for the last 20+ years and there's good reasons for that: 1. It's easier to have someone else (like google, facebook etc) manage something for you then manage it yourself. And in many cases when there's network effects it's impossible for you to replace the experience you get from one of these services on your own. 2. Most of the time, people aren't gonna do hard things like making good software (and solving the hard problems, not just the fun problems) or building a social network without some way of making money from it (either you paying for a service or them monetizing your data via ads or selling it) 3. It's way easier for them to manage everything if the data is on machines that they control than on your machine, and it way easier for them to get people to pay for a service (and deny them access if they don't pay) if its on their machines too All that said I'd love to see the iphone of self-hosting someday