I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.

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bobajeff 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've been thinking lately how nice it was when the Internet had lots of phpBB-like forums spread around. Each one ran by a different server with it's own rules. None of them required your ID or phone number to join. No one really knew who anyone else was in real life. If you got tired of the people one forum you had several similar forums on different sites you could go to. It was fun seeing the kinds of things people would share in that environment. Everyone had the power to be seen, heard and disregarded in a short span of time.

I think of these things like they only exist in the past but I'm sure these places are still around only I don't go to them as much now. Probably because all the useful stuff these days exist in mainly reddit and the stackexchanges.

	▲	reustle a day ago \| parent [-]
		I too miss the days of phpBB an IPB forums. Circle.so has come the closest to replicating some of that interface / vibe, but as expected, their pricing has crept up beyond a reasonable point for small projects / communities. The answer seems to be something self hosted.

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psadri 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is always discovery. There are lots and lots of little sites out there but without a search engine or directory you don’t know about them. Even back in the day Yahoo had a directory. And once you need such an aggregator, it will naturally create a choke point.

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dflock 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can still do this, it all still works, technically. You will have a spam/malware/security issues that wouldn't have been an issue back in the day. You will also have discoverability issues - but that hasn't actually changed, if it's just for you or your friends.

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keehun 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is one of the core usecases of cloudflared (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared)! Without having a static IP address or dynamic DNS, you can establish a connection between your machine in a private network with Cloudflare. And once a resource is on the Cloudflare network, you can pretty much do anything with it, including routing your visitors to that server and using the full Cloudflare stack including its CDN, firewalls, and Anti-Bot protections.

	▲	egorfine 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This project does exactly the opposite of what the GP was talking about. We need to selfhost to be independent of Cloudflare, not dive even deeper into it. cloudflared exists to embrace and extinguish and absolutely fuck that and everything that comes from Cloudflare.

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bix6 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Let us host stuff at home.

We can dream. ISP says NO!

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txrx0000 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Don't just dream. We can choose to use the ISP that says "yes", or at least a less firm "no". We can vote with our wallets to create a market opening for the ISP that says "yes".

	▲	bix6 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have 2 options and both are garbage :/

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grahameb 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My ISP gives me v6 and lets me turn off their firewall. That's a start

	▲	Joel_Mckay 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		In general, most ISP have a usage agreement posted which prohibits excessive client server traffic. This is why most NOCs enforce an asymmetric firewall bandwidth limit for download focused customers, and install colo Google/CDN rack appliances. Most ISP are just the modern retooled Cable company business. Try to stream video off your home platform on a normal service port, and you will hit the caps pretty quickly. =3

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raincole 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you want more people to view your content?

If no, you can still do that today.

If yes, then imagine the other 1,000,000 people who think likewise. That was how we got where we are today.

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paxys 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Who is stopping you from doing any of this?

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ihsw 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]