I think the Cloud is a result of a gradual move towards centralization of networked software built by software developers living in countries where DSL and cable broadband was rolled it early. It was a bit like mainframe developers back in the day. I remember people discussing “fat clients” vs “thin clients”.

We forgot what it’s like to have dialup, and the innovative generation of decentralized software protocols (IRC, Usenet etc) faded into obscurity. Even Email and the Web are now centralized!

Well the companies won and now we have a feudal kingdom again where we are the data-serfs. We have been well-trained like pavlov’s dogs using notifications and rewards (likes, comments) to till the datafields and plant fresh crops, use our social capital to reshare articles etc. And you know that you’re a serf when that notification lights up on your master’s device and you pause talking to your girlfriend, wife or child to look at it and maybe act on it.

And of course governments love having a central place they can implement censorship and spy on everyone.

This has got to stop. It’s not just a technological topology problem, it’s become a sociological problem and even a problem of democracy and society. THE SOLUTION IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that will disrupt the landlords of the Web (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) as much as the Web once disrupted the landlords of the Internet (AOL, MSN, Compuserve).

The first HTTP browsers weren’t better than AOL at anything except one thing... ANYONE could permissionlessly host a web browser.

What realistic alternatives do we have to Facebook today? Google Docs? That anyone can easily host and share stuff with friends to easily collaborate? It would have to have people’s identity and contacts stay consistent across domains, without owning them and storing them on centralized servers like Facebook.

I know a few attempts. Diaspora, Solid, Mastodon and Matrix. I also liked Sandstorm a lot, and OwnCloud was ok. They have not reached mass adoption. Scuttlebutt is slightly better in that it can interoperate with everything. The biggest winner in the last few years has been the DID standard, although it solves one problem only.

There is also an innovative project called MaidSAFE which raised around $10M and spent 12 years so far building this back-end. I have high hopes for it once it is released and plan to make Qbix Platform interoperate with it. Check it out: https://maidsafe.net/

We will eventually replace the idea of a startup running a database that has to scale, with an open source startup that releases software that anyone can pay any hosting company to run and makes money via tokens. That was the dream of cryptocurrency. The first kind of startup extracts rents via a SAAS model and forcibly bundles infrastructure management (Slack, Salesforce, Twitter, Etsy, you name it). The other doesn’t care about cheaper “cloud” costs so much, because anyone can host it (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal etc.) and the hosting costs are miniscule for each individual client business. Wordpress and Magento and Drupal are all valued in the billions, as open source companies. Maybe people on HN should strive for this rather than “Zero to One” “competition is for losers” “build a monopoly and extract rents” Peter Thiel style facebook startups.

Do we need something like this? Or am I just ranting?

EDIT: why whenever I post this subject, it is heavily downvoted with no actual replies or explanations showing me why my position is wrong? Is there a coordinated effort to downvote this position without further engaging with it?