[email protected] wrote:
Not at all. It's my intention to have my own mail server too. I was
merely highlighting an interesting article from Mako hinting our efforts
may be in vain.
Good to hear, thanks for clarifying that.
I don't think the effort is in vain. I think that this is an issue of
making it easy for non-technical users to get the services they need on
a system they can store in their home, maintain (ideally,
automatically), and use in their daily lives as a complete replacement
for the untrustworthy services hosted elsewhere.
I imagine this means we'll need some services to have far fewer options
than most services have today (I imagine it is not difficult to identify
configuration points most people can do without), and these services
will need interfaces that make it trivially easy to deploy (ideally,
click a button to activate the service and that's it). I don't say this
because I think ordinary computer users are stupid, I say this because I
think ordinary computer users want the service and will have no interest
in learning about that service like one would expect a professional IT
administrator to do. It's okay if this means deploying, say, an email
server that doesn't scale up to meet the demands of more than a dozen
users (a large family living together with some guests who show up from
time to time).
I'd also imagine this requires some low-power, low-speed, high-capacity
storage -- perhaps an SSD-based RAID array -- to hold logs and user data
(email, webpages, media files, recent chat/video recordings, etc.). And
a means of letting other users communicate with the home-based setup
(perhaps helping non-technical users get their own domain name and
automatically get set up to use a high-speed home-based Internet
connection so the services will work). This will require some political
work be done so that ordinary home-based high-speed network connections
aren't port blocked; we want users to receive TCP packets on port 25
(SMTP), for instance, precisely because they will be running their own
email server.
Encrypted access and storage would be the default, naturally, in case of
physical storage loss or a home raid. All network connections should be
encrypted (https://letsencrypt.org/ or something functionally equivalent
should be the default). And all updates delivered automatically without
user intervention by default, of course.
And since this would all be implemented with Free Software any user who
wants to dig into the details may do so without voiding a warranty, even
if that means they forgo the after-sale service the device comes with
(it's not reasonable to expect a $100 unit with no ongoing fee to supply
admin expertise akin to what your ISP offers you). And this device
should be available in ordinary stores users already know and use.
If service setup and maintenance continues to require considerable
technical skill, users will keep flocking to services hosted outside
their control. People have a way of mentally accommodating something
once an option is available to them. So it will be up to the
implementers to alter the status quo to meet the public's need.
