For an independent / small developer I think there's value in self hosting your tools, but I think it would be crazy to self host a customer facing app. I don't think it's a yes or no, right or wrong kind of thing. I just think something like Nextdoor is an interesting case to me to think through these issues because Nextdoor is so localized, and it seems like that's kind of the ideal use case for decentralized services. This isn't a criticism of decentralization - I'd like to see everything more decentralized. With e.g., Mastodon, I suppose I could see it being recognized as a thing if use got up, but where are they posting? The local popular servers? Do they run their own police server? Some kind of city government server? ![]() Nextdoor might have even reached out to them. With Nextdoor, it's something known nationally, the state probably gives them recommendations, they just post to Nextdoor. I'm trying to imagine, for example, local police posting to Mastodon about some local safety issue in the same way as on Nextdoor. I'm not sure if it is highlighting the legwork that Nextdoor did to build up its userbase (physically mailing people in a community), or the lack of technical sophistication of users in general, or the relative infancy of Mastodon/SSB/etc, or something inherent about getting a foot in the door with decentralized stuff in terms of mindset, or some inherent limitations of decentralization (can you really just compel/convince people to use decentralized services? People just use them). I'm not sure where my thoughts are going, as I'm not exactly surprised Nextdoor has more use than a more decentralized system for this use, but it's salient to me as I'd think something like SSB or Mastodon would ideally occupy the space that Nextdoor is occupying. You could have local communities around local servers, that have some natural reason to organize about that (geography), but are still loosely federated. I have really mixed feelings about Nextdoor which is a slightly separate issue, but it always seemed to me that something like Mastodon or maybe even SSB would be an ideal use case in the same space as Nextdoor. This has been on my mind lately a lot with Nextdoor. I'm happy now to get my hardware kicks on things where uptime doesn't matter. I do sometimes miss the ability to fully run down a problem (e.g., by looking at mail server logs). So eventually I shifted some of the stuff I was hosting off to service providers (yay Fastmail!) and the rest into Terraform-built slices of AWS. And I grew to dread the chance that something would break and I'd have to rush down to the colo, possibly having to return from vacation (or beg a friend to be remote hands). Trying to solve mysteries like, "Why does google sometimes decide my email is spam" was a multi-year effort that I never did solve, even though I knew people at Google. A co-op is hard to wrangle and it's basically impossible to make sure that the workload is evenly spread, so you have to be comfortable with the fact that somebody, probably you, is going to be doing a bunch of unpaid work, even if it's only keeping track of what needs doing and herding people into doing it.Įventually, I decided running physical hardware was more hassle than it was worth to me. I was glad I did it and at the end I was glad to be done with it. I think we ended up using 4 providers over the years and peaked at a full cabinet, almost all 1U servers. That became risky during the crash, so I and some pals rented a fractional cabinet in a colo provider and split the costs. The basic story, though, is that before the dot-com crash, a lot of SF nerds kept their pet projects on work bandwidth. ![]() I decommissioned my last box in the coop at the beginning of this year. I started and helped run a bandwidth cooperative from 2000-2015 or so. Wirehole with PiHole, this is a backup VPN to access my password manager in case I loose access to my OpenVPN server. This VPN blocks ads and trackers using PiHole and my self-hosted password manager is only accessible via this VPNģ. OpenVPN with Pihole, I use this VPN as a personal VPN. for eg, the stage version of Quantale is hosted on a server(with ufw rule to only allow connection from pritunl VPN IP) and I can provide access to you by creating a vpn config for you and you will only be able to access stage server, you wont be able to access any other servers behind this VPN.Ģ. Using this VPN, I provide access to different webapps/self-host to different users in my team/clients. Pritunl is used as an enterprise VPN setup. My startup focuses on big data projects and is currently building a web-based Bloomberg Terminal alternative( ) which is an infrastructure heavy project.ġ. I have my own bootstrapped startup since a year and half and I manage the entire infrastructure for my startup.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |