On the brink of a big change?

[leke]

I keep seeing opensource products and services emerging that are focusing of self hosting. Could it be that the average user is soon able host all their services from home, and not rely on "big web" (google, fb, ms, yahoo etc...) for their online experience?

I for one have been running a web server on my a cheap and low-powered raspberry pi with a free domain name from dyndns, but there is currently a learning curve for such things.

That could soon change though. Services are becoming more user friendly and are now an attractive option after news of government privacy violations, plus the cost of handing all your information over to the likes of google and facebook to pass around in an exhibitionist manner.

Here is a list of new projects I've noticed lately. There are probably much more.

Out of the box server and admin...
Arkos: A project to help users self-host their websites, email, files and more. Decentralize your web and reclaim your privacy rights while keeping the conveniences you need. Runs on the Raspberry Pi.

Email...
MailPile: A modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features.

Blog...
Ghost blog: Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It's simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time messing with making your blog work - and more time blogging.

Social...
diaspora*: Instead of everyone’s data being contained on huge central servers owned by a large organization, local servers (“pods”) can be set up anywhere in the world. You choose which pod to register with - perhaps your local pod - and seamlessly connect with the diaspora* community worldwide.

[guy]

Apple tried it years ago - put a personal web server on every Mac. Two problems quickly emerged amid a chorus of "told-yo-so":
1. non-availability due to dumb owners switching off the box, not taking backups, things like that.
2. utter lack of security.

Securing and maintaining a service takes a certain minimum of time and knowledge. Better to let the cloud do it. Of course, that won't stop geeks wanting it to be a non-problem so bad they believe their own dreams and churn out D-I-Y services right left and centre just because they can. The British and American Governments (among others) tried to kid themselves it was a non-problem too - for a while; nowadays they take rather a different view.

[johnhudson]

I agree with Guy; it takes a bit of sophistication and most users - like most enterprises - are more likely to buy into a commercial offering.

That said, commercial offerings are increasingly likely to be open source - so the user who buys a cloud service (however that is marketed) will probably be using open source and paying for the support involved in providing the service.

[Nuke]

Could it be that the average user is soon able host all their services from home, and not rely on "big web" (google, fb, ms, yahoo etc...) for their online experience?
.....
Out of the box server and admin...
Arkos: A project to help users self-host their websites, email, files and more. Decentralize your web and reclaim your privacy rights ..

Email...
MailPile: A modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features.

Social...
diaspora*: Instead of everyone’s data being contained on huge central servers owned by a large organization, local servers (“pods”) can be set up anywhere in the world.

I am afraid you are losing me a bit here. Could it be that I am so old-fashioned that the rest of the world has gone through some loop and is returning to the point where I have been standing all the time?

I don't have any data on "huge central servers", it is all on my HD. I do have a couple of web sites, but nothing that is not backed up on my HD and couldn't afford to lose. Admittedly, I do not have anything on my HD to rival Wikipedia - I intend to remain reliant on their huge central server for that.

"Local servers .. anywhere in the world" ? Frankly I don't know or care where the servers for my email and web site are - I had assumed they were already anywhere in the world.

"A project to help users self-host their ... files". Does anyone need help to save a file on their HD? Isn't it the second thing anyone learns (after learning how to hit keys) when learning to use a PC? Or have the Facebook crowd really become that dumb? (If they really are that dumb, it is highly unlikely that they would ever be able to set up hosting no matter how easy it is made.)

"Decentralize your web and reclaim your privacy rights" Er, I thought a website was essentially public. You may want to restrict it to subscribers, but as at least the home page is public facing it is equally open to hackers however it is hosted surely? Ditto email - at some point it will travel over the tubes and can be seen by men in the middle, who could decrypt it at leisure, no matter who hosts the mail server.

Let me know if I am missing something, honest.