I dislike the view of individuals as passive sufferers of the preferences of big corporations.

You can and people do self-host stuff that big tech wants pushed into the cloud.

You can have a NAS, a private media player, Home Assistant has been making waves in the home automation sphere. Turns out people don't like buying overpriced devices only to have to pay a $20 subscription, and find out their devices don't talk to each other, upload footage inside of their homes to the cloud, and then get bricked once the company selling them goes under and turns of the servers.

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rambambram 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This. And the hordes of people reacting with some explanation for why this is. The 'why' is not the point, we already know the 'why'. The point is that you can if you want. Might not be easy, might not be convenient, but that's not the point. No one has to ask someone else for permission to use other tech than big tech.

The explanation of 'why' is not an argument. Big tech is not making it easy != it's impossible. Passive sufferers indeed.

Edit: got a website with an RSS feed somewhere maybe? I would like to follow more people with a point of view like yours.

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

You can dislike it but it doesn't make it less true and getting truer.

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

You can likewise host models if you so choose. Still the vast majority of people use online services both for personal computing or for LLMs.

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api 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Things are moving this way because it’s convenient and easy and most people today are time poor.

	▲	torginus 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think it has more to do with the 'common wisdom' dictating that this is the way to do it, as 'we've always done it like this'. Which might even be true, since cloud based software might offer conveniences that local substitutes don't. However this is not an inherent property of cloud software, its just some effort needs to go into a local alternative. That's why I mentioned Home Assistant - a couple years ago, smart home stuff was all the rage, and not only was it expensive, the backend ran in the cloud, and you usually paid a subscription for it. Nowadays, you can buy a local Home Assistant hub (or make one using a Pi) and have all your stuff only connect to a local server. The same is true for routers, NAS, media sharing and streaming to TV etc. You do need to get technical a bit, but you don't need to do anything you couldn't figure out by following a 20 minute Youtube video.