>>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
>This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.
Ya but it turned out that smartphones ended up being super convenient once they got good/usable enough, and it unlocked really useful things that you couldn't do before, or just made things more convenient. If I have all my gmail data at home (or on a machine I control in a data center somewhere), does that make anything more convenient for me? Whereas being able to navigate around a new city with zero knowledge of it, translate food packaging when I'm grocery shopping in a foreign country, communicate with with any of people from wherever I am as long as I have my phone on me - those are real benefits.
I do kind of like how you're thinking about this because I'd love to live in a world where I could have ownership over all my emails, social media data, music, etc and have it all be just as convenient (or more convenient than) and work just as well as gmail, instagram, spotify etc do today. But we've definitely been moving in the opposite direction for the last 20+ years and there's good reasons for that:
1. It's easier to have someone else (like google, facebook etc) manage something for you then manage it yourself. And in many cases when there's network effects it's impossible for you to replace the experience you get from one of these services on your own.
2. Most of the time, people aren't gonna do hard things like making good software (and solving the hard problems, not just the fun problems) or building a social network without some way of making money from it (either you paying for a service or them monetizing your data via ads or selling it)
3. It's way easier for them to manage everything if the data is on machines that they control than on your machine, and it way easier for them to get people to pay for a service (and deny them access if they don't pay) if its on their machines too
All that said I'd love to see the iphone of self-hosting someday
>This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.
Ya but it turned out that smartphones ended up being super convenient once they got good/usable enough, and it unlocked really useful things that you couldn't do before, or just made things more convenient. If I have all my gmail data at home (or on a machine I control in a data center somewhere), does that make anything more convenient for me? Whereas being able to navigate around a new city with zero knowledge of it, translate food packaging when I'm grocery shopping in a foreign country, communicate with with any of people from wherever I am as long as I have my phone on me - those are real benefits.
I do kind of like how you're thinking about this because I'd love to live in a world where I could have ownership over all my emails, social media data, music, etc and have it all be just as convenient (or more convenient than) and work just as well as gmail, instagram, spotify etc do today. But we've definitely been moving in the opposite direction for the last 20+ years and there's good reasons for that:
1. It's easier to have someone else (like google, facebook etc) manage something for you then manage it yourself. And in many cases when there's network effects it's impossible for you to replace the experience you get from one of these services on your own.
2. Most of the time, people aren't gonna do hard things like making good software (and solving the hard problems, not just the fun problems) or building a social network without some way of making money from it (either you paying for a service or them monetizing your data via ads or selling it)
3. It's way easier for them to manage everything if the data is on machines that they control than on your machine, and it way easier for them to get people to pay for a service (and deny them access if they don't pay) if its on their machines too
All that said I'd love to see the iphone of self-hosting someday