I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.

Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

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cube00 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.

Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.

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myaccountonhn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

General public is weird because everyone, yet no one, is the general public.

Fwiw I've started to see a shift in many non-tech circles I'm a part of. Especially when you take the time to explain the problems. Many do care, they just aren't made aware of the issues.

	▲	edoceo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		GP typically means middle of the bell-curve. HN visitors and for sure commenters are at the edge of that curve...3-sta-nines away.

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noman-land an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The general public will do whatever their friends do. If there was an iPhone charger sized box they could plug in anywhere and have their own personal cloud that can interconnect with other personal clouds, and a celebrity said it was cool to have one, the general public will do it without giving it a first thought.

	▲	yoz-y 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In my experience just telling people to enable Google / Apple backup for photos is a chore at 5€ a month. And for general public this covers 90% of their needs.
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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sevenzero 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

True, most people get the full ad driven internet experience and it drives me nuts. Everytime I have to help other people with computer stuff I almost get an aneurysm when opening their browser...

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makeitdouble 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At the same time buying compute is more expensive than ever, and the gap between homemade projects and what's available online in term of speed, functionality and LLM capacity is bigger than ever.

Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues. Trying to do the same today will cost two arms and leg and require a lot more overall knowledge of what to compose to get the same result.

The dust will settle and we should go back to a nearer gap in I hope a few years, until the. it might be a glacier age for self-hosting.

	▲	whateveracct 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		for self hosted and personal use, compute lasts a good while though. and in the time you would've been waiting to time the compute market, you get to benefit by being less a part of the AI data dragnet.

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GZGavinZhao 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions.

Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. All the Gen X and Y people that I know of, including many that are very intelligent and accomplished in their field, literally have no idea how to operate a computer outside of watching youtube, checking emails, and opening Word documents. Ads? They hate it but have no idea how to disable them. iPhone running out of storage and iCloud says I can solve that for $2.99/mo? They would be like IDK what that is but sure I'll pay that $2.99 if that means I can record more videos of my kids.

I really hate this situation, and I try my best to help out the folks around me who I see are getting ripped off (either they don't know or they know but think that's what it is). But still, it's really hard to communicate or teach those people when the skill of operating a computer has become intuition and human nature to me. I really can't put these things into words on the fly that would help them understand :(

	▲	ebiester an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Or, alternatively, I was a lot more willing to put in the time to self host before I had more money and less time. If it's truly important it's not in public. If it's public, I don't have time to keep up with security patches if I'm not being paid.
	▲	tokioyoyo 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. Yeah, you’ll need a lot of supporting evidence for this claim. From my personal and professional experience, this doesn’t track. And given how online the younger generations are, it tracks even less. I think there might be a bias towards tech bubbles in that statement.

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0c3ca83 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But this is a company building on AI.

	▲	ball_of_lint an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The project itself is open source and doesn't have any AI features. Also while Imbue is in some sense an AI startup it does have a very different ethos from a lot of tech companies: https://imbue.com/about