The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign

Deeply disagree.

Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks".

I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.

If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.

Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks.

Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.

The majority of folks are consumers and unable and/or unwilling to handle the complexity of self-hosting, self-sovereignity, etc. They will gravitate to what is free and easy. There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues.

If you decide to foster an online community, then you might end up being the tech support to that community. For many of us, that is not an appealing choice.

I still struggle to see what exact problems Decentralized Identifiers solve and how exactly they would make the Internet better. Ommiting additional complexity they bring - where to store them, how to control them etc. - what new use cases they would allow? How would they solve some of the incentives problems on the Internet we currently have?

Having controlled by the user public-private key pair instead of multiple accounts on a variety of platforms doesn't bring self-sovereigninty by itself. Whatever you post/publish must also be discoverable by other people - and that's where we go back to centralized platforms/services of today.

Ah, yes, the cure is the magical token.

If you want a better future, make better self hosted apps, that are accessible, easy to set up, and don't lack features ordinary people ask for.

No fancy token ever beat an easy button. And no poorly built self hosting app is helping...

The article argues for interoperability through standardized protocols. Freedom is achieved through the possibility to move one's own data to a different host when the current host becomes problematic. Either host can be a commercial service, a friend's computer or your own server. Self-hosting is only one option among several in this model.

If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected pieces of data that require storage in a relational database, then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead of just returning a self-contained blob.

'Decentralized Identifiers' centralise identity in the DID. That's tautological.

Thus that in itself fails an idea of sovereignty: that choosing to be identified uniquely is your choice.

Barking down this alley, while useful from the perspective of NFTs, does not add much to the concept of actual sovereignty.

The thing that got me into self hosting is the phone App Store. I started writing personal applications to do what the media apps on the App Store could not. The results have been amazing and the required effort is less than I expected.

I did a fair bit of work in this world of self sovereign identity a couple years ago. We abandoned the project because we felt it won't get adoption. We also embedded a verifiable credentials in a CRM making it as a platform to manage VCs at scale and nobody cared. Most people don't care it seems. Or maybe it's just too future tech and we're not there yet.

The good news is that every self-hoster will be more than happy to start using this hypothetical self-sovereign solution with their data, if and when it becomes available.

I know I would. I'm just not smart enough, nor have the correct kind of experience to start designing, building or evangelizing such solution, so I am stuck waiting for someone else.

A good example is ForgeFed, which I can't wait to mature enough to be usable.

> This blog post was drafted with the help of a language model, but all opinions expressed are my own

Why not post the prompts, it’ll be a shorter read with presumably the same amount of new information.

The idea of self-sovereignty being protocol-based rather than infrastructure-based is both compelling and challenging

> We don’t need more “alternatives” to the cloud. We need a shift in architecture—from platform-centric to protocol-centric systems.

Nice idea, but that alone is not enough.

The POP3/SMTP protocol is still a server-client based model, and such model naturally gravitates towards centralized systems which leads to the problem we're facing today.

In my opinion, to encourage self-sovereignty, a protocol should decouple the creator and the publisher. The information created by the creator can be published on multiple publisher platforms selected/directed by the creator.

And ideally the creator should be able to directly sharing information with other creators too, like a P2P system. This should also help reduce the risk of information leaking thus more secure.

The protocol also needs to be flexible enough that it can adopt the needs of more modern users too, otherwise you'll found yourself back at the start line few years later.

P.S. If you think this comment is very empty, that's because it is. I've observed quite a few P2P based protocols over these years failing to gain popularity... this is one of the things really hard to get it right. I don't know how to do it, and many way smarter people also failed to do it. So, yeah, that's why this comment is so empty. But hey, if you can get it right, maybe they should give you a Nobel or something.