Comment by saladuh

5 years ago

> without the ability to self host is a dead end

Indeed, this is why you would be foolish to use Ente as you cannot self host it. At any point they can choose to lock things down, make their clients closed source, etc etc, and you'd once again need to spend time jumping ship because you'd need to find a new ecosystem.

Ente is just convient and is coming at the right time (hence the massive amount of upvotes) but does not give you total control nor your freedom back. Using them instead of something you can self host is just running in circles.

> open source may suck...

What? This was extremely random and out of place with the rest of your comment.

What you really want, if you care about self hosting and all the other stuff you mentioned, is Nextcloud[0]. And if you don't want to self host yet, you'd be better off hosting Nextcloud in a VPS, even on Linode you can just 1 click deploy a Nextcloud instance in their app store[1]. That way you don't become dependent on a service you cannot control/deploy yourself.

[0] https://github.com/nextcloud [1] https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/linode/nextcloud/

6 comments

saladuh

Reply
raman162  5 years ago

I think ente does fill a niche, people don't mind paying dollars for companies because it is supposed to guarantee a level of service/polish. And in the case of photos, if the service were to shut down, there's very likely a path one can take to perform a migration.

I'm a big user of open source solutions, I use Linux on my machine and use syncthing to sync files across all my devices. I'm aware that my solution is not doable for everyone and that's the problem with most open source solutions, the lack of polish/ease of use. There are tons of systems that aren't open source that we are forced to rely upon for day to day, airplane software, traffic lights, telecommunications) and we've just accepted it because of convenience and trust.

What I'm trying to say is that we don't have to worry about self-hosting everything and force ourselves to only use open source tools. I do think that if we do use private tools, we should understand how our data can be exported to a new system if necessary so we're not "locked in".

  • istingray  5 years ago

    Standard Notes seems like a good example of this balance to me. While you can self host, I assume 99% of people don't. It must be an option, otherwise I wouldn't use it.

istingray  5 years ago

Yes, Ente needs to have self-hosting on their roadmap or I won't support it.

> What? This was extremely random and out of place with the rest of your comment.

Edited to say "open source options may suck today"

Thanks for giving me the chance to explain. My comment here may give more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28321460

I've tried NextCloud, even 1-click hosted by a third party. For all the power, it's not built with me in mind, it seems to treat my photos like files/data, not like photos. I want to pay money for that extra oomph, for algorithms, searchability (about $10/month for my photos seems about right), and I want to pay money so I don't have to pay with my time. Is there something I can buy that's on top of NextCloud?

  • raman162  5 years ago

    There are many people like you willing to spend money on a good solution that gets the job done who have no interest in self hosting and reviewing the source.

    After experiencing the ease of Google photos, any basic file management system to store photos is a downgrade after that.

    If ente can figure out how to do the extras (search, face matching) without invading privacy (not even sure how possible this is) I can see this being valuable to the people who want to de-google and maybe even de-apple.

  • saladuh  5 years ago

    > not built with me in mind

    Fairo

    > on top of NextCloud

    Not that I know of. Could have a look through the nextcloud marketplace for something or another. Tbh, I don't see any open platforms having Google/Apple photos kind of functionality for at least a little bit. Google and Apple trained their algorithms on the people using their free tiers for years. Google especially had access to so much information on the user using Google Photos that it was able to build the algorithms it has today. For an open platform to have this functionality, it would need to wait for an open source model/algorithm to exist, else it would need to build it itself by using user data (no E2EE then).

    Unless Google open sourced whatever models it uses in Google Photos today, don't expect this level of searchability yet. Actually even if Google did, it would probably be so tied to Google user information and be incompatible with E2EE.