[Hidden-tech] Interesting article on Local-First Software Movement: "The Cloud Is a Prison…" Thoughts anyone?

[R. David Murray]

My short answer is:  yes, in general the cloud is evil.  Central servers
required to run an ap are in most cases evil.

Professionally I work on a cloud based service, but it actually isn't
one that makes sense to be distributed and isn't about collaboration, so
it is suited for the cloud.  It's basically a matter of us outsourcing
the data center, which is what the cloud really is good for (but is
still somewhat evil since it results in global single points of failure
where a *lot* of companies go down at once when the cloud services die.)
And yes, it makes use of the customer activity data...but only in
anonymous aggregate and to entice partners to make the system better,
and I can state that with confidence because I've overseen all the
design and code that went in to doing it.

Personally I don't store anything in the cloud except the stuff that
google backs up for me on my phone, and even most of that I have
disabled.  (Cloud backup isn't a bad thing conceptually, but it should
really be encrypted so that the backup provider can't read it, which is
not true for most phone backups...see tarsnap.com for good (non-phone)
cloud backup if you are techie, by the way.)  In general I avoid
products that ought to be something that can run locally but instead
stores my personal data on their servers (which means I miss out on a
lot of cool stuff but I don't really care) and keep hoping companies
will produce equivalents that only read and write from my own servers,
but for obvious sell-our-customers-data reasons very few to none do.

As for the technology the article talks about, I haven't investigated
any of the truly distributed approaches to collaboration, but I've heard
of several, and I heartily approve of them and wish them luck.
Unfortunately the economics are against any of it becoming widespread
unless we really do manifest another cultural shift like open source
software itself was.


On Wed, 09 Aug 2023 11:01:54 -0400, Lisa Hoag via Hidden-discuss <hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net> wrote:
> Hi All,
> Just came across this interesting read about the Local-First Software
> Movement, yesterday:
> The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?
> https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
> 
> Anyone have thoughts about this? I'm curious to know what our community thinks.
> 
> Warm Regards,
> Lisa
> 
> -- 
> Lisa Hoag Designs
> http://www.lisahoagdesigns.com
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