great article, i also think "community clouds" are the way to go. it much more efficient, the ideal would be a cloud for each city, so if the internet goes out you could go to the phisical place.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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we disagree
I've been thinking about this. I really think there can be zero trust. The last 30 years of experience have shown that there is no "cloud" that will ever be invulnerable to hacking/back doors/government subpoena.
I believe the future requires open source tools that allows everything to work together on your own hardware seamlessly. Anything else will 100% be taken and used against your will.
I go back and forth between these positions. Not jut on IT but on infrastructure as a whole, you can't just do like you can be independent from society and live in a totally untrustworthy world. There is a strong link between privacy and democracy. Some tools allows us to bypass temporary authoritarian restrictions, but at one point, when goons come to take your servers away, technical solutions are not enough.
Even the most self-hosted decentralized solution bases itself on legal assumption and freedoms defended by laws.
Take the dire situation of smartphones for instance. It is very hard to connect to a 5G network without giving your ID. The few ways that remain are seen as loopholes by authorities and are being plugged quickly. Same could happen for hosting. "Want to open a port on a public IP? ISPs require proof of ID for that" "Want to run an encrypted service there? You need to register your keys with the police for the port to be open"
There is no clean separation between the technical and political side there, privacy can't hinge on a purely technical solution. I understand that trust is seen as fundamentally less solid that crypto algorithms, but it is unavoidable at a certain level.
My biggest issues other than privacy concerns is the fact corpations can turn your devices into paperweights over night by just turning off their servers.