Comment by chasing0entropy

5 days ago

Spot on article, but without a call to action. What can we do to combat the migration of society to a centralized corpro-government intertwined entity with no regard for unprofitable privacy or individualism?

12 comments

chasing0entropy

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adrianN  5 days ago

Individuals are unlikely to be able to do something about the centralization problem except vote for politicians that want to implement countermeasures. I don’t know of any politicians (with a chance to win anything) that have that on their agenda.

  • teiferer  5 days ago

    There is a crucial step between having an opinion and voting. It's conversations within society. That's what makes democracy and facilitates change. If you only take your opiniom, isolated from everybody else, and vote from that, there isn't much democracy going on and your chance for change is slim. It's when there is broad conversations happening when movements have an impact.

    And that step is here on HN. That's why it's very relevant to observe that that HN crowd is increasingly happy to support a non-free internet. Be it walled gardens, geofencing, etc.

  • turtletontine  5 days ago

    That’s called antitrust, and is absolutely a cause you can vote for. Some of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements were in antitrust, and the head of the FTC for Biden has joined Mamdani’s transition team.

DANmode  5 days ago

Learn how to host anything, today.

  • imsurajkadam  5 days ago

    Even if you learn to Host, there are many other services that are going to get relied on those centralised platforms, so if you are thinking to Host, every single thing on your own, then it is going to be more work than you can even imagine and definitely super hard to organise as well

  • rurban  5 days ago

    If you host you are running on my cPanel SW. 70% of the internet is doing that. Also a kinda centralized point of failure, but I didn't hear of any bugs in the last 14 years.

  • randallsquared  5 days ago

    Have you tried that? I gave up on hosting my own email server seven or eight years ago, after it became clear that there would be an endless fight with various entities to accept my mail. Hosting a webserver without the expectation that you'll need some high powered DDOS defense seems naive, in the current day, and good luck doing that with a server or two.

    • IgorPartola  5 days ago

      I have never hosted my own email. It took me roughly a day to set it up on a vanilla FreeBSD install running on Vultr’s free tier plan and it has been running flawlessly for nearly a year. I did not use AI at all, just the FreeBSD, Postfix, and Dovecot’s handbooks. I do have a fair bit of Linux admin and development experience but all in all this has been a weirdly painless experience.

      If you don’t love this approach, Mail-in-a-box works incredibly well even if the author of all the Python code behind it insists on using tabs instead of spaces :)

      And you can always grab a really good deal from a small hosting company, likely with decades of experience in what they do, via LowEndBox/LowEndTalk. The deal would likely blow AWS/DO/Vultr/Google Cloud out of the water in terms of value. I have been snagging deals from there for ages and I lost a virtual host twice. Once was a new company that turned out to be shady and another was when I rented a VPS in Cairo and a revolution broke out. They brought everything back up after a couple of months.

      For example I just bought a lifetime email hosting system with 250GB of storage, email, video, full office suite, calendar, contacts, and file storage for $75. Configuration here is down to setting the DNS records they give you and adding users. Company behind it has been around for ages and is one of the best regarded in the LET community.

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