this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
662 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
84043 readers
7190 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn't turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let's go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it's really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
I hate that everyone fucking uses discord for everything, discord when I'm using it is strictly to game and for online game related activities.
(deleted content)
Lots of "muricans" hate discord too
(deleted content)
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts...
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like "Web-Pal", keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you're the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
I think this is a really good idea. A baby server for every privacy concerned house. Make it simple enough that customizing software features is like putting together Legos, but leave in the potential for complexity as some users grow.
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting... almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.
Platforms keep getting shittier and more exploitative, while government thirst for control with things like Chat Control, OSA and whatever the US is doing.
The more we see of that the easier it becomes to market a "your internet services in a box" to a layman.
Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It's less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there's a real movement there with tech literacy.
I love the idea, but until stuff simplifies significantly that's simply not happening. I'm a moderately technical person and all the self hosting options are such a chore. Even simply looking up info about them can sometimes be harder than installing and starting the centralized option.
🤣
I hope forgejo's federation efforts come along. Being able to host projects on my own instance, yet receive contributions without having to allow people to register on my instance, would give me the push to completely abandon Github.
I worked at a place that had self-hosted git and IRC for internal messaging. Was great!
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won't use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
From my perspective that seems to be happening. I feel like there's a rift between the websites I use for work and the ones I use on my own time. I realize that for most people on the internet, the big central platforms are the internet--I'm not trying to universalize my perspective.
It's just that I remember when computers and the internet itself were niche and business was still barely aware of its potential, so this kind of feels familiar: You've got biz churning away in the mainstream, unaware of another culture that's growing up, outside of their malls and parking lots.
Seriously? WTF? We're talking current reality here, we can't do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.