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The New Internet

(tailscale.com)
517 points ingve | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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sfRattan ◴[] No.41083257[source]
As I've been deliberately moving toward self-hosted computing, under my control, on my home network, I've had a feeling more and more that we're on the cusp of something transformative... For those who want it and those who care. There's an ecosystem of mostly FOSS software now designed to run on a home network and replace big, centralized, cloud providers. That software is right on the edge of being easy enough for everyone to use and for sufficient numbers of people to deploy and administer. News like Immich (to replace Google Photos) getting a major investment thanks to Louis Rossman and FUTO [1] is encouraging. The ecosystem of software you can now run on a commodity built NAS or homelab is, for me, the most exciting thing in computing since I first used the Internet in the late 90s.

The rollout and transformation, if it happens, won't look like all this stuff becoming so easy that every individual can run a server. But it is possible that every extended family will have at least one member who can run a server or administer a private network for the whole clan. And that's where tech like tailscale's offering will come in. That's where I see the author's vision being a believable moonshot:

Each extended family, and some small communities, with their own little interconnected, distributed network-citadels, behind the firewalls of which they do their computing, their sharing, and their work. Most family members won't need to understand it any more than they understand the centralized clouds they use now. And most networks won't be as well secured as a massive company can make its cloud offering, but a patchwork heterogeneity of network-citadels creates its own sort of security, and significantly lowers the value of any one "citadel" to even motivated adversaries.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyTPqxgqgjU

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1. denton-scratch ◴[] No.41085648[source]
> But it is possible that every extended family will have at least one member who can run a server

That's as may be; but many, many people have no access to an "extended family". And extended families are not necessarily warm, safe spaces where everyone trusts everyone else; extended families are more likely to be "broken" than nuclear families.

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2. sfRattan ◴[] No.41089085[source]
> And extended families are not necessarily warm, safe spaces where everyone trusts everyone else; extended families are more likely to be "broken" than nuclear families.

It is a good thing to promote and advance privacy, security, and freedom to isolated, atomized individuals; but it is important for all of humanity to promote and advance those same ideals to extended families. People who have no access to an extended family will ultimately either join a different one or disappear into the mists of ages past. In 100 years, the Earth will be populated mostly by the descendants of people in extended families today, however imperfect or even broken those extended families may be. If those people today don't see privacy, security, and freedom as both possible and worthy, their descendants may not value or even possess any of those ideals.