• grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I want my web browser to actively defend me against tracking/enshittification/exploitation/hostile design, then show me cleaned-up web pages with all the ads and shit removed, then get out of the way.

    I want it to show me the information (which is not same thing as the “page” as a whole) that I’m looking for without modifying it or hallucinating some kind of AI summary, but I want it to aggressively get rid of as much of the extraneous crap obfuscating said information as possible.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    0·
    10 months ago

    I’m far from an AI hater, but I fully agree with this.

    I think there’s a distinct business oppotunity coming up for two things: Hassle-free self-hosting and back-to-basics apps and services.

    Nobody is tapping into those correctly (you’re going to want to give me examples of self-hosted things, and you’re wrong), and it’s extremely hard to do either right, but if you can figure it out and are ballsy enough to build a proper business around it I may be interested in your pitch deck.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        0·
        10 months ago

        Kinda not the point, but at the risk of starting a huge tangent: yes, there are a bunch of self-hosted applications that are reasonably practical and easy to install, but there’s still the layer of having to understand how to access a thing in your LAN from each device, and ideally you’d want some sort of dedicated server running at all times and a bunch of this stuff is provided in multiple formats, including containerized versions or versions for virtual machines, all of which is way over the heads of normie users.

        The closest to a fire-and-forget self-hosting platform is maybe Home Assistant or perhaps some of the commercial NAS sellers, like the Synology suite of apps that will mooostly set themselves up. Maybe Plex. But even those don’t work in quite the way mainstream users think about applications working. You really need something you plug in and it goes. Maybe the branded Home Assistant hardware is closest to that, but HA itself is so overengineered and customizable it’s not so much the start of a commercial self-hosting revolution as a relatively accessible hobby project rabbit hole.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
            0·
            10 months ago

            I hadn’t, but at a glance, while well intentioned that’s pretty much exactly the “still a bridge too far” thing I’m talking about.

            Effectively that mimics the interface (bit uglier, but same idea) you get in a Synology NAS or other commercial home server services.

            Here’s the problem, Jellyfin itself might already be alien tech. The type of solution they’re proposing is trying to streamline something end users don’t even know exists.

            And I’d be moderately interested on it at my level of awareness, but now I am looking at redoing my own self hosting machine from scratch and wondering if some of the things I’m doing with it will be doable with this, so as of right now, moving to it is more complicated, not less.

            The bar self hosting needs to be mainstream is this: I click a button on a Windows PC and it downloads a piece of software. I click “install” and said software installs itself like a normal application.

            There is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.

            Alternately, I buy a little box, plug it in and there is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.

            The only examples that approximate this in my view are Plex (NOT Jellyfin) for scenario one and HA Yellow/Green for scenario two. And even those two will set up the hardware and software but you’ll still be pointing at a LAN IP for access. They both will only do remote access via a subscription and a connection to an external could-based service, so they aren’t even a fully self hosted solution if you want to go with the “easy” proper external access.

              • MudMan@fedia.io
                0·
                10 months ago

                I think there’s a bit of misunderstanding there. I’m not saying we should force self-hosting. I’m saying that when you get enshittification to a certain point, the idea of a non-shitty service becomes a selling point and you can compete on that as a feature.

                You see that in commercial software all the time. Davinci Resolve exists because nobody wants to deal with Adobe, ClipStudio grew for the same reason, then went around that loop and now Affinity is getting some attention, and so on.

                So what I’m saying is a self-contained package/service for self-hosting has a good chance to compete on price and features with enshittified services. The problem with getting that out of the OSS community is that they typically have more decisionmaking power on the engineering side and you end up with overly flexible, customizable software no mom and pop normie would ever get into unless they’re making a project out of it.

                See, Jellyfin should be a hit. Everybody should have a Jellyfin server. But instead they have an overly powerful thing that is trying to allow you to customize the UI and incorporate every single piece of media and do everything Plex does except for the one useful thing Plex does which is give you Internet access to your library.

                That’s the opposite of what an eventually successful self-hosted thing would be. You want one thing that does one thing with zero hassle and has the hard feature but none of the superfluous easy features. That’s why I’m saying HA, Plex and Synology are best positioned.

                I think Synology is going the Plex route, where they are starting to enshittify their hardwareto sell you more hard drives. Their software is a better version of Yunohost already, though. And crucially they do provide a one click OpenVPN install, which is the still-too-complicated version of how all of this should work.

                But if you really wanted to make some money one can envision a world in which a ISP (particularly a Starlink-style connect-anywhere ISP) sells you a one time stop package with a box that does your routing and also has a big app manager thing that sets you up for what you want. “It works just like Gmail but it’s at your place” is the pitch, not “ironclad security and full access to set it up just like you want”. That’s for nerds.

                And then you charge them for cloud backups, if you’re clever.

                Thanks for coming to my pitch, I’ll be in meeting room 4 all week.