I don’t know if de-centralized, by self-hosting, is really a solution, in particular for big numbers, no just a few individuals who can…

I think what we need is more distributed networks and mechanisms.

If you self host, you need to keep in mind several things:

• Security: how to prevent attacks to your services, being email, nextcloud, services through web servers, matrix, xmmp, etc… Containers don’t fix anything neither protect against everything. And if you isolate different services on their own containers, and try to keep a bunch of services, and if you want to host for your family and not just yourself, then a limited old pd might be far from enough… The most important part is you have to know how to keep your services and data protected, and how to prevent as much as you can attacks.

• HW protection: Depending where you live, you need really protecting UPS, with voltage regulators whether external or incorporated, as well as current surge protection.

• Redundancy of services: Depending on where you live, having an UPS might be far from enough, if there are power or internet outages or both. And you might have your services unavailable for a day or so if you don’t have geographical redundancy (hopefully such that when one location is affected, then that other is not). You might miss important email, or notifications by the lost of your self-hosted services.

• Be careful with hosting on corporate services HW: Some think the solution for the need for HW, services being kept alive, and redundancy, is the HW cloud, like renting CPU power from non 5-eyes clouds, like some hosted in Germany or France. Oh well, then that’s no longer self hosting, and your traffic can and most probably will be monitored and analyzed, not to mention the storage is not your own.

• Other people’s services: Keep in mind that even though you don’t have services accounts such as facebook or whatsapp, those businesses still gather a lot of information from you through your contacts.

• Federation: If the federation mechanism is such that your data gets replicated in other centralized services, then your data ends up getting into a central server any ways. There’s also metadata exchange to be able to federate, which exposes information as well. The less data gets replicated into central servers, and the less metada is required to be able to federate, the better.

• Knowledge+Numbers: Do all individuals have the knowledge and ability to self host properly? Do we all have the resources to keep the right HW, and associated bills (a bit extra electricity for your 24/7 self hosted services)?

There might be other things to consider about self hosting. But in my mind, we should look for distributed, private and secure mechanisms, that work without a bunch additional resources and capabilities. We should strive for no central servers at all.

One more thing, a special consideration for relevant data or storage… If we use distributed services, and share data with other individuals through those services, replicating that data on the shared and synced devices, then you would secure a way to restore data loss in a particular device. If we shared books, papers, articles, etc, through distributed storage and services, then getting one device or storage out, wouldn’t be the end of such storage, it could be easily recovered through the distributed storage hopefully. If the mechanisms are not distributed, the individual servers could get shut down, and that’s it…

Perhaps only in my mind, but I really hope we eventually get to distributed mechanisms for communication, storage, services and so on… There are some efforts for distributed networking and in particular storage already, but not with privacy and security embedded, neither as easy to use. But I can keep hoping… Ahh, there’s also Briar, Tox and Jami for communications, but the 1st 2 are really not an option for a phone for regular use, and lack now a days standard functionality, the 2nd have security unsolved issues (like lack of audits), and the 3rd one seems more usable on the phone, though its device syncing it’s not really working (not as I would have expected any ways), but I still hope those options get better and better, and more options will emerge as well… Just day dreaming, :)