[HN Gopher] Some people want to run their own servers
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Some people want to run their own servers
Author : nanomonkey
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-01-08 21:55 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (staltz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staltz.com)
| imgabe wrote:
| We're fixating a lot on "people don't want to run their own
| servers".
|
| People don't care. They want to talk to their friends. Watch
| videos. See pictures of their grandkids. What they don't want is
| a lot of fiddly administration tasks with weird jargon they don't
| understand. Whether there's a server running on their computer or
| not is immaterial. If it's easy enough to use, it doesn't matter,
| as long as it lets them do the things they want to do.
|
| Hopefully Web3 reaches the point that there's a 1-click
| installer, like downloading an app, that does everything you need
| it to do, so people can enjoy all of the things they want from
| the web with the benefits of decentralization.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| "Download the Web3 app from Meta!"
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| > The crypto community has to ask themselves whether they want
| decentralization or money.
|
| They already decided a long time ago. I don't know how the
| decision could be made any more clear.
|
| In case you don't get what I'm alluding to: money. They chose the
| money. They keep choosing the money. They are very likely to
| always choose the money.
|
| Almost everything in the crypto world with any traction is based
| on accumulating and flipping assets, or extracting value from
| those who are.
|
| I think there's a lot of true innovation out there, which may one
| day serve as the core of the economy. But I think there's almost
| a bifurcation between work done that furthers that goal and work
| that is involved in the speculative frenzy. The latter is the
| vast majority of what's going on. From my vantage point of some
| distance from the scene, I don't see much overlap.
| ericls wrote:
| When you observed the world, and found that it is somewhat
| centralized, to an extend that you'd like to see a change.
|
| Have you figured out why it is centralized in the first place?
|
| Just trying to re-start the process and expect to see a
| difference? It's going to end the same way.
|
| Because I'm sure centralization is not a Web2.0 property, but a
| human property. You don't change Web2 to do decentralization, you
| change humanity.
| mojuba wrote:
| Sorry for meta, but in my 30+ years in tech I haven't seen a
| technology that would spark so much discussion around whether it
| _can be_ useful or not. People invest in interesting stuff,
| others build and roll those things out. The public finds it
| useful or not, that 's how the world has been working for
| centuries.
|
| I think at this point we are more in the psychological realm than
| technological. This is a big sunk-cost-fallacy vs. sunk-cost-
| fallacy-recognition debate and it's getting very, very irritating
| already. Kudos to Moxie for giving probably the most clear
| technical explanation of what's going on behind the web3
| marketing fluff, but the rest is getting very annoying.
|
| Sorry, I had to let this out.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Thus saying "People don't want to run their own servers" is
| akin to saying "People don't want to start their own YouTube
| channel". Both sentences contain the same amount of statistical
| bullshit.
|
| The key difference is that starting a Youtube channel is free and
| dead simple. The reason people don't want to run their own
| servers is because in most cases it's as expensive, or more
| expensive, than having someone else do it for you, and requires a
| huge amount of skill and patience, not to mention risk tolerance.
|
| In general, I think this article misinterprets the statement that
| "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will" by
| taking it too literally. The meaningful counter-argument isn't
| "this cannot be factually true, some people want to run their own
| servers", because that's clearly not what he meant. Obviously
| some people want to run their own servers, and some people have
| to run servers to keep the whole thing going, but that's a
| trivial point rather than a devastating counterargument.
| dijit wrote:
| > in most cases it's as expensive, or more expensive, than
| having someone else do it for you, and requires a huge amount
| of skill
|
| What is expensive? Hosting from home has a lot of benefits if
| you're not behind CGNat and how we used to do things when I was
| 13. If a 13 year old can figure out port forwarding and DNS I'm
| fairly certain you can.
|
| I'm aware there are drawbacks but a $5 VPS is not outside the
| realm of reason if you want an additional level of reliability
| and are scared people will ddos your line.
|
| Sysadmin skills are so easy these days they're forcing
| developers to do it as an additional part of their
| responsibilities.
|
| Either it's easy: and everyone should do it.
|
| Or it's not: and we should start bringing back sysadmins.
|
| Doesn't cut both ways.
| viro wrote:
| > Sysadmin skills are so easy these days they're forcing
| developers to do it as an additional part of their
| responsibilities.
|
| Nah most devops is IaC and sysops with very little if any
| dev. As some one that edits yaml files all day, I will die on
| the yaml is not "dev work" hill.
| tomxor wrote:
| Tell all of that to your Mum when all she wants to do is buy
| an NFT...
|
| You are not 99% of people, these are skills that seem trivial
| to _you_ , everyone has different skills, very very far from
| everyone has sysadmin skills.
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| I dont know what the article's definition for 'active creator'
| is, but
|
| > requires a huge amount of skill and patience, not to mention
| risk tolerance.
|
| making a good YouTube channel also requires those, and there's
| no financial incentive to small/beginner creators which are
| investing their time
| pavlov wrote:
| It's a very different kind of skill and risk tolerance.
|
| If your YouTube channel doesn't take off, you've only lost
| the time invested.
|
| If you misconfigure your server and it loses data or is
| hacked, it might seriously disrupt your personal life.
| (Imagine someone taking over your email server and stealing
| your identity.)
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| Imagine someone makes a how-to video where their style is
| so weird that is is made into a meme that taunts them for
| the rest of their life.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| You are missing the point completely. Someone who knows a lot
| about makeup and spends lots of skill and patience but in a
| completely different domain. Yea Linus tech tips runs their
| own server because they happen to be in that domain. But
| that's not enough people to create a thriving ecosystem.
| [deleted]
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Some people want to run their own servers
|
| I can guarantee you that number is less than a million people.
| And considering internet hosts Billions of people, that is less
| than .1% of people in the world. We can safely generalize
| people don't want to run their servers
| ivanhoe wrote:
| > The reason people don't want to run their own servers is
| because in most cases it's as expensive, or more expensive,
| than having someone else do it for you, and requires a huge
| amount of skill and patience, not to mention risk tolerance.
|
| It very much depends on what do you need a server for, and may
| not always be true.
|
| However, IMHO primarily it's neither of these reasons you
| mention, nor any rational reason at all, but simply the fear of
| getting out of the comfort zone. The same reason why majority
| of people are not into DIY, but rather pay others to fix their
| plumbings or pour the concrete or change the lightbulb in a
| car. If you know nothing of it, running a server on your own
| sounds scary, you fear you'll screw up something, it's all
| stressful, and you'll rather pay to make it someone else's
| problem.
|
| But then you also have a not-so-insignificant number of people
| who really enjoy in DIY approach and love doing as much as
| possible themselves. So the author's counterargument IMHO is
| more about Moxie stating something as an absolute truth, while
| in fact it's more like "majority of people will probably not
| want to run their own servers, under the current state of
| affairs". However I'm old enough to remember the time when the
| same applied for Internet - majority of people were not
| interested in messing with modem drivers and PAP/CHAP scripts
| just to connect to some BBS to chat with people, the idea
| seemed as ridiculous waste of time if you asked my father. And
| yet here we are now 20+ years later, whole world is connected.
| So perhaps the centralized platforms can't be avoided, or
| perhaps we need to make running your own server easier? And
| maybe both ways can co-exist, because different people want
| different things?
| simonjgreen wrote:
| I'm glad to see this post, as it says exactly what I thought when
| I read the referenced sections in Moxie's post. I know I live in
| a particular echo chamber but owning two ISPs has meant a
| sizeable proportion of my Dunbar's Number are those who gladly
| host their own servers, run their own infrastructures, and
| decline the ongoing consolidation of the Internet. We generally
| consider being part of The Internet for example to mean being
| part of the DFZ (Default Free Zone), and anything less is to be a
| consumer. I know we are the extreme minority of users, but it's
| users like us who keep the world connected and accessible.
| Without people running their own ASNs, hosting their own
| infrastructures, etc, we would all be reliant on a small
| (relatively) number of huge scale businesses. And these users
| permit disruptive Internet infrastructure businesses to exist.
|
| Take for example the rural WISPs in the US or South and Eastern
| Europe who provide coverage for huge quantities of users in
| otherwise unserved locations. Or the organisations running
| Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Hosters like OVH, Hetzner,
| even Digital Ocean. Broadcasters like BBC and Netflix. Fibre
| providers like B4RN and even new ISP models like Starlink.
|
| If people didn't want to run their own infrastructure the
| underpinnings of the Internet would become stagnant and opaque
| owned by a small quantity of hyper scale businesses. This isn't
| the Internet promise that I grew up through.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| >>> On Mastodon, 1 million active users but only 2 thousand
| (0.2%) instances On Tor, 2.5 millions users but only 6 thousand
| (0.24%) relay servers
|
| The problem with this counterexample is that these are fringe
| platforms. Thriving in their own right, resilient, but a rounding
| error in chat and web traffic, respectively.
|
| In other words, those who run their own servers are the fringe of
| a fringe.
|
| The content creator comparison doesn't make sense, with
| centralized hosting one content creator can supply an infinite
| amount of consumers. Not so with hosting.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Should also be added that Mastodon is fairly heavy weight and
| designed for many tenants. The way to get participate in the
| fediverse is no more to run a Mastodon instance anymore than
| the way to take part in IRC is to run an IRC relay. For better
| or worse, that's just not how it's designed to work.
|
| This is in fact one of the main reasons I'm not on mastodon,
| because it's such a pain in the ass to set up, and I don't want
| to rent my identity on the Internet.
|
| A stark contrast is something like Gemini, where the by far
| most common model is small self-hosted operations.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| I would love to see servers become easier to host. Personally I
| enjoy hosting my own services, its super rewarding and I've
| learned an absolute _ton_ about computers and networking.
|
| I think making it easy to host reliable and secure servers we
| would see more people jumping in. Maybe not huge amounts but
| enough to change the ecosystem.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > I've learned an absolute ton about computers and networking.
|
| I think that's the problem. Most people's goal is not to learn
| a ton about computers and networking, it's to accomplish some
| other task. These days rarely is running your own server the
| _easiest_ to accomplish most tasks, even if it is an option.
| It's usually easier to use someone else's server, and into
| running your own is easier than using someone else's, most
| people will continue to do use someone else's.
| rockbruno wrote:
| Somehow all of these articles choose to ignore what is for me the
| most critical point of web3: The fact that interacting with the
| blockchain costs real money.
|
| If HN was a web3 app, then posting a comment would cost you
| money. I can't find anywhere how web3-enthusiasts justify this or
| what are the potential improvements around this.
|
| EDIT: After some small research it looks like this is an Ethereum
| thing and that other platforms differ sligthly. But still seems
| to be a considerable drawback compared to the current web.
| dang wrote:
| The related article/thread from yesterday:
|
| _My First Impressions of Web3_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208 - Jan 2022 (1049
| comments)
| aliceryhl wrote:
| The part where it explains why "People don't want to run their
| own servers, and never will." is a false statement because there
| are a few counter-examples seems like it's really missing the
| point. The vast majority of people don't want to, and indeed,
| most nerds also don't want to, even if you know some
| counterexamples.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I sometimes feel like commenting on
| the internet is like trying to walk through a minefield. Saying
| something as simple and obviously-hyperbolic as "everyone loves
| dogs!" can lead to a whole argument about how many people
| actually hate dogs, distracting from the original topic.
|
| But it can actually get more annoying than that on the internet
| because accuracy and precision are things. So for example,
| mentioning a 1TB drive on the internet has the potential for
| comments to delve into a discussion about marketing and how
| actually it's not 1TB but XYZ GB.
|
| It just feels exhausting.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| Yes, it was incredibly clear what Moxie meant with that line
| (and it's been proven over and over) but some of the rounding
| error of people who like running their own stuff (I'm one of
| them) take this as a personal attack for some reason.
| zrm wrote:
| > The vast majority of people don't want to, and indeed, most
| nerds also don't want to, even if you know some
| counterexamples.
|
| The point is that things are best designed in such a way that
| people _may_ run their own servers but not that they _must_ run
| their own servers.
|
| The former is good even for the people who never intend to do
| it, because it implies that whoever is operating the servers
| you do use is in a competitive market that anyone can enter
| without having to overcome a network effect.
| yosamino wrote:
| I think you are not giving enough credit to the whole argument
| that Andre is making.
|
| He is not saying
|
| > See I found a few people who _do_ run servers, therefore your
| argument is invalid.
|
| His point is:
|
| > It is correct that only a tiny percentage of people _do_ run
| servers. But it is _exactly_ this tiny percentage who make
| certain projects successful.
|
| He then generalizes this observation. To paraphrase: "People
| don't want to run their own servers" is similar to "People
| don't want to write their online encylopedia" - true, but not
| the defining point.
|
| In a sense this article doesn't say that the argument "people
| don't want to run their own servers" is wrong, but that _it is
| the wrong argument_.
| mrisoli wrote:
| > The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not
| fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment
| mechanics, but they care about where the money is.
|
| This is ultimately the issue, some people want to grown their own
| vegetables in their backyard, or chickens, but they do it for
| their own purposes, the loud majority in crypto space(now pushing
| the web3 branding because it sounds more revolutionary) is in it
| for the money, and since they lack the tech knowledge to build
| stuff around crypto they focus on the marketing/virality side,
| because that will make money faster.
|
| The irony starts when what these people want is to control the
| supply and distribution channels for what is supposed to be a
| decentralized set of systems. I think the comparison to the
| fediverse is very good, people are in it for the tech, no one is
| blindly pushing it to increase the value of their virtual assets.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > people don't want to run servers
|
| It's true and I completely disagree with the take that we can't
| generalize this statement because a few "nerds" still want to run
| their own. Generalizations are based on 99.9% of cases, and .1%
| are exceptions.
|
| The truth is that most people don't want to run their server,
| rather they can't. Most users on the internet don't have basic
| literacy, let alone knowing what a server is or how to run it. It
| is safe to assume most people don't want to do much beyond one
| click access to whatever it is that they want to do on the
| internet. And the most efficient way of doing that is, you
| guessed it, platforms and centralization.
| neuronic wrote:
| If 5% of people want to run their own servers and 95% use AWS
| etc. then Moxies point still stands. These blog posts fee like
| some folks are trying to ride a popularity wave rather than make
| an actual argument.
|
| What "running your own server" mostly fails at, in my view, is
| the constant needed maintenance. It doesn't matter so much if
| running a server is initially difficult and time consuming. But
| the constant need to come back to it and fix bugs, install
| patches, implement security updates, add features yadayadayada
| ... this makes it so perfect to be externalized as a service.
| habitue wrote:
| Kind of impressed by how civil the discourse has been, both
| moxie's original post and this response.
|
| Really not the norm when crypto is being discussed
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I agree. But the post of Moxie was also the only one till now
| that actually showed what most of us think.
|
| But way better explained, done and researched than anyone
| tried. Because most don't even try.
|
| I think it leveled both sides ( including me).
| jebronie wrote:
| Interpreting an obvious generalization as absolute fact, is not
| conducive to a productive discussion.
|
| Just replace "own servers" with "own restaurants" and understand
| the original meaning:
|
| > Thus saying "People don't want to run their own restaurants" is
| akin to saying "People don't want to have their own kitchen".
| Both sentences contain the same amount of statistical bullshit.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > So which one is it? Is "something that works" by definition
| also a force for censorship? Or is there actually a problem and a
| deep discomfort when your content is unilaterally taken down by
| the platform gods, no reason given and no right to dispute it?
|
| I think this misrepresents Moxies point a bit. You can have quick
| iterations or a decentralized network with many heterogeneous
| clients, but the reality showed that both is nearly impossible.
| You can argue that the centralization at OpenSea is bad, but
| that's not the same as arguing that what OpenSea provides is bad.
| It's not a paradox.
|
| It's the same as hating Google for slurping all our data and
| flooding the net with ads, while still appreciating it's great
| search functionality, fast free video hosting and best-in-class
| navigation offering.
| supperburg wrote:
| "Protocol changes more slowly than a platform" is really the crux
| of the entire issue here but not stated as such. The key
| advantage of centralized services is that they are fast,
| coordinated, more intelligent and also easier to love than a mob.
| The only things that a mob will ever do are things that don't
| require you to be smart, coordinated or fast. It's great for some
| things but here's the catch: nobody is going to invest money into
| a mob because there's no leader and no way to be confident about
| your investment. People are going to gush to their friends about
| "that mob" the same way they might have with Instagram.
|
| we've just spent an enormous amount of time and money learning
| the very simple and obvious fact that in order to have nice
| things we must have smart, honorable men around who can lead our
| society to victory at the helm of these centralized businesses.
| They think if they fiddle around with decentralized stuff enough
| they can eliminate the need for exceptional business leaders.
| serverholic wrote:
| > The crypto community has to ask themselves whether they want
| decentralization or money. Sometimes they can have both, but at
| some point, they'll be forced to make a critical choice between
| one or the other, and that's how we can know what is the primary
| value upheld by the community.
|
| I've seen this sentiment quite a bit and it bugs me because you
| cannot easily separate money from the system.
|
| When choosing between centralized, federated, and decentralized
| services you have the same fundamental problem.
|
| Do you:
|
| A) Host it yourself or
|
| B) Have someone else host it for you.
|
| A is a non-starter for most people. However, B introduces a new
| problem, the resource allocation problem. We live in a world with
| finite resources and we need to figure out how to allocate them.
| Money is a solution to the resource allocation problem.
|
| Decentralized and federated software is great but it doesn't
| solve the whole problem. This is one of the reasons federated
| services haven't taken off yet and why crypto seems to have some
| traction.
|
| A great example is IPFS. It's an interesting piece of software,
| however, you still need people to host files on IPFS. This takes
| resources and without money you rely on people hosting files out
| of the goodness of their hearts. Unfortunately this isn't a
| reliable motivator which is why Filecoin exists.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| If everything is truly decentralized and there are tons of
| options, the net value in those options will approach zero
| because they're all interchangeable. Thus, I agree that
| decentralization and money cannot be the same goal.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| Blockchains actually are decentralized.
|
| Exchanges are centralized but even then there's dozens to
| choose from.
|
| Plenty of people exchange crypto for goods and services
| directly without converting to fiat.
|
| It's almost like this argument is talking past itself and
| ignoring the reality on the ground.
| paulsutter wrote:
| This is about static IP addresses, not "servers". Anyone would be
| happy to run a server on their cellphone, but there's no good way
| to publish the address.
|
| It's DNS that makes us think a static IP is needed to have a
| "server". When there's an alternative, this will change
| vt240 wrote:
| I understand this issue with cellular end-points. I saw a
| comment on one of the two previous posts here, where a user
| complained it was impossible to obtain static IP allocations
| for setting up their own "servers". I found this odd, since in
| my own history this has never been a problem for a nominal fee,
| even when I had a 9600Baud modem connecting my network with
| PPP. I am now wondering, if perhaps I've misinterpreted the
| concern, that people would like to be able to serve content
| from their smart phones with fixed IPv4 addressing? What is the
| actual use case for this?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Thus saying "People don't want to run their own servers" is
| akin to saying "People don't want to start their own YouTube
| channel". Both sentences contain the same amount of statistical
| bullshit._
|
| The "promise of web3" has been that there are no centralized
| giants. The problem isn't one of motivation to be a YouTube
| creator, it's infrastructure. The cost to becoming a YouTube
| creator is 0 due to centralization. The cost of building YouTube
| is millions of dollars. Even in the YouTube case - people don't
| want to run their servers.
|
| Secondly, Mastodon and Tor do not have mainstream appeal, nor are
| they platforms on which other economies are built. Their
| comparison to YouTube is absurd.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| The only place I see people talking about web3 is HN and a few
| random sparsely commented articles on /.
|
| No one I work with has any plans to learn about it or use it.
|
| It's the exact opposite of how web 2.0 was.
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