Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well.
This model works so well for housing, where the renters are also the owners of the building. Incentives are aligned perfectly, rents are kept low, the building is kept intact, no unnecessary expensive stuff added. And most importantly, no worries of the building ever getting sold and things going south. That's what I would like for my cloud storage, e-mail etc.
I was thinking about what if your "cloud" was more like a tilde.club, with self hosted web services plus a Linux login. What services would you want?
Email and cloud make sense. I think a VPN and Ad Blocker would too. Maybe Immich and music hosting? Calendar? I don't know what people use for self hosting
I'd really focus on it being usable for non-techies, I don't think I'd want a linux login for anything. IMO, the focus should be on the basic infrastructure of digital life for the everyday person.
tilde.club sounds interesting though! Hadn't heard of it before.
I say all this as someone who's been self-hosting services in one form or another for almost a decade at this point. The market incorporation/consumerfication of the hobby has been so noticeable in the last five years. Even this AI thing seems like another step in that direction; now even non-experts can drop $350+ on consumer hardware and maybe $100 on some network gear so that they can control their $50/bulb Hue lights and manage their expansive personal media collection.
I don't think mainstream tech media is deliberately omitting co-ops in their reporting due to them challenging the status quo. I think it's rather that actually, there aren't really many initiatives in the space.
And I think that is due to a lot of tech people thinking that if only the technology becomes good enough, then the problem will be solved, then, finally, everyone can have their own cloud at home.
I think that's wrong though, I think the solution in this case is that we organize the service differently, with power structured in a different way. We don't need more software to solve the problem. We know how to build a cloud services, technically. We know how to do it will. It's just that if the service is run for-profit, counter to the interests of the users, it will eventually become a problem for the users. That's the problem to fix, and it's not one to fix with technology, but just with organizing it differently.
It works for housing, in some areas it also works for utilities like internet, there are also co-ops for food. Why shouldn't it also work for modern-day utilities like cloud storage and email?
As a techie, don't be content with just running your own self-hosted service. Run it for your family, run it for your friends, run it for your neighborhood! Band together!
100% agree with you here, and yeah I'm definitely leaning a bit too conspiratorial about it. It's probably not actually intentional, and instead just a product of the larger dynamics.
A while ago I read some interesting economic analysis about why more co-ops hadn't popped up specifically in the gig worker space, since it seems to natural to cut out the platform rent that eg. Uber extracts as profit. I'm failing to recall the specific conclusions, but IIRC the authors seemed to feel that there were some structural obstacles preventing co-ops from growing in those space. Something something capex and unit costs. It's certainly an area I'd be interested to see further analysis in.
Also you sounds like you might get a kick out of mayfirst.coop (if you're not familiar with them already). It's not exactly what you're describing, but the spirit is there. I use them for my web-hosting needs and have been extremely satisfied.
What you're describing is possible but you would need to market it differently if selling to non-tech people.
Now if you could make something like this https://oxide.computer/ for home users and make it affordable, that would be cool.
Also I am currently only targeting locals so I can physically go to their place and configure their server.
I don’t mind growing slowly here btw. It’s my side business and I plan to keep my current job for the time being.