I am definitely getting old because such idealism only ticks me off these days.
Make a hardware box that serves as a router, switch AND a home server, sell it at competitive prices, have it preloaded with a hardened Linux containing everything needed (including NAS, VPN, home media organizers and whatnot), make it automatically discover other such nodes (and maybe configure lend-able bandwidth and disk space while you are at it; decentralization!), and then we're talking.
Make it 100% transparent, automatic, fault-proof and as speedy as you can so that the regular Joe and Jane can just install it at home because they heard it's a router and a home server in one and it's costing less than other similar solutions. Tell them it can stream from YouTube and 10 other apps.
Make the regular people tempted to buy it! Only THEN will the "small web" or any such adjacent sentiments take off. Ain't ever happening before that.
Enough with the "raising awareness" stuff, seriously. We on HN / Lobsters and a lot of people on Reddit are quite "aware" already. We get it. But 99% of us have families to feed and seriously can't squeeze the effort unless we're willing to forfeit the precious 5-10% free time a time a day that we get as busy adults.
Make something that will bring the regular people on board. Before that you are just a small fly in an airplane hangar trying to buzz and make a difference.
Ain't happening, dude. Roll up your sleeves and start inventing the future. If you have the time to craft such an article then you likely have the time to start working on the practical aspect as well.
Are we really talking though? I thought the fundamental issue at play is that most people don't care giving up their privacy in exchange for not caring how things work. People aren't going to use the small web because its small, people will use it because its convenient and there is something on it that they want.
i.e. to say just getting the hardware and software right isn't enough, you'll need negative event cycles to shoo people away from the current centralised systems and attractive content being created on your new platform and even then its likely we're "just" building niches. I mean, its a good thing, its just I'm arguing this isn't a "build it and they will come" sorta problem. Its more a "build it, wait twenty years and maybe".
> I thought the fundamental issue at play is that most people don't care giving up their privacy in exchange for not caring how things work.
True, but you can tempt them: "this box can stream from 30 services", "you can download movies from these N pirate websites", "you can block most ads when connecting to this box", "you can attach two hard disks to this box and you'll automatically get storage for downloaded movies and shows" etc.
> People aren't going to use the small web because its small, people will use it because its convenient and there is something on it that they want.
Absolutely. So let's invent something that brings all those conveniences to the table. Ideals don't bring regular people on board, I think we all realize this by now.
> you'll need negative event cycles to shoo people away from the current centralised systems
We already have those. I knew several families happily paying to 3 streaming services even if they weren't high income. Then one evening one of the kids wanted to watch one animated Pixar movie from 10+ years ago. The mom cursed loudly while being unable to find it on all 3 platforms, said "fuck this!" and asked me to teach her how to torrent it. We went to have a dinner in the kitchen and the movie was downloaded when we were back. Two minutes later I downloaded subtitles and off to the races we went. Zero buffering, zero lags, no popups, no ads for other shows. Somebody needs to pee? OK, pause it without looking at anything else but a frozen frame until they are back.
Can you guess what happened next? They educated themselves enough to pirate stuff and and 2 out of those 3 families are with only 1 subscription now. The 3rd is with zero. I didn't preach piracy to them; they already knew about it, they just imagined it was super hard -- which it wasn't. Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
The big players are, ironically, disrupting themselves. They are so worried that somebody else will disrupt them and buying potential competitors left and right... in the end they are the biggest threat to their own business. I revel in the irony.
> this isn't a "build it and they will come" sorta problem. Its more a "build it, wait twenty years and maybe".
Societal changes are glacially slow, sadly, and this very rarely has anything to do with the merits of the old ways or the new ways. The correlation to those is like 10% IMO.
But I'd argue not to look at this through the lens of a future business. Let's look at it as philanthropic endeavour. You likely will make money but no you can't quit your job with that income. It's playing the long game for the good of humanity plus maybe make a few tens of thousand bucks per year in the process.
Absolutely. I am saying that whoever wants to bring a product to the mainstream must also work super hard to make sure they are solving the right problems for the masses.
And the way to make it a mass product is to make it friendly for the regular users. I feel that a lot of HN-ers get lost in rabbit holes of uber-complex VPN setups or how do you make a Kubernetes clusters of RPi machines, or how do you 3D-print a case for that etc.
Not going to try and dictate what people should work on in their free time, obviously. I am only targeting such preachy articles and organizations. If they have the budget to market some future that they are not inventing yet then maybe they should reallocate some budget to actually inventing it as well.
True, it's hard to convince them. But at one point they do get sick of their old router and then it's your chance. If you made yourself visible in the meantime you'll eventually win.
But that's not a "hyper-growth" or whatever. That's much more like "be there for a long time, eventually people will find you if you market yourself stably and persistently".
Make a hardware box that serves as a router, switch AND a home server, sell it at competitive prices, have it preloaded with a hardened Linux containing everything needed (including NAS, VPN, home media organizers and whatnot), make it automatically discover other such nodes (and maybe configure lend-able bandwidth and disk space while you are at it; decentralization!), and then we're talking.
Make it 100% transparent, automatic, fault-proof and as speedy as you can so that the regular Joe and Jane can just install it at home because they heard it's a router and a home server in one and it's costing less than other similar solutions. Tell them it can stream from YouTube and 10 other apps.
Make the regular people tempted to buy it! Only THEN will the "small web" or any such adjacent sentiments take off. Ain't ever happening before that.
Enough with the "raising awareness" stuff, seriously. We on HN / Lobsters and a lot of people on Reddit are quite "aware" already. We get it. But 99% of us have families to feed and seriously can't squeeze the effort unless we're willing to forfeit the precious 5-10% free time a time a day that we get as busy adults.
Make something that will bring the regular people on board. Before that you are just a small fly in an airplane hangar trying to buzz and make a difference.
Ain't happening, dude. Roll up your sleeves and start inventing the future. If you have the time to craft such an article then you likely have the time to start working on the practical aspect as well.