Posted by janandonly 4 hours ago
Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by intention.
We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that they'll attempt in the next 18 months.
I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and export should be fast and easy.
That is why most of my programs use JSONs that are human readable, or use SQLite tables that are just copy-paste away.
I am from Poland. My ancestors were able to survive by hiding, and by fighting small partisan battles. My idea of software is "partisan". It battles big tech in small, distributed ways.
I am not sure, but I think what I said is similar to interoperability.
If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it.
If you're talking about making software available for others, for free and open source, I also don't think there is any battles to be won here.
When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks" and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses.
Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff", I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it was regulated to be forced.
All my programs and data are open. It is something that anybody can pick up, and use as they wish
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - domains I found
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - feeds I found
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2026 - news from 2026
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - news from 2025, etc.
Does make any change? I don't know. I run web crawlers. It is interesting for me to see what my crawlers pick up from the Internet. It did change my life, these project changed how I see the Internet. More pro-activly.
I think there are many projects which can be useful for niche groups. I suppose I have 390 stars on one repo. I hope at least my projects were useful for them. That is a hopeful thought.
If you host friends over for dinner at your house a lot, nobody will ever say you are subject to the same rules as a restaurant. You start letting other people host dinners at your house, and things could change. You start letting people solicit your place for paid dinners, similar outcome. Do it once, nobody will probably know or care. Continue to do it at scale, though, and I don't know why you would expect to not be subject to regulations.
Can I do it on my phone?
You can't just run programs on your phone. You have to run apps, which require approved by the government and the company that made the phone, which tacks on additional fees as well. The phone also has constant cellular/GPS/wifi/bt-mesh location tracking, and it can never be completely turned off by the user without destroying the phone because even the batteries are glued in.
It's basicially the perfect slave device for your average goy. And everyone will need one to to access your bank account, recieve insecure SMS authentication, talk to other NPCs, and generally participate in the neo-economy.
If you don't think this is right, you are literally going to empty the bank account of my dumb ass grandma who can't stop installing malware, and in every way is better served by a flip phone from the early 2000's.
Then why are you demanding that everyone else's mobile computers have to be locked down instead of demanding that somebody make a mobile phone that only makes phone calls?
I was talking about creating/running software for yourself, in a self-hosted scenario, not just "I run the software, but it's for others" but really "I run software and it's for myself and/or my family, no one else"./
What I'm saying in the previous comment is that regulations requiring "Age checks, encryption backdoors and other bad/annoying stuff" also apply to small hosts and can be abused like DMCA (unless you are hosting on tor/i2p with good opsec).
It's this notion that any regulation is good because it's done on a "big bad public company" that is at the heart of what I disagree with. At what point do you become a "big bad company"? Does anna's archive count? they accept donations. It just doesn't seem like a fleshed-out worldview.
Revenue exceeds 0.1% of US GDP or market share exceeds 10% of their own market.
Yes, just like even if it's just you and your bakery, you still have to follow a bunch of health and food safety regulations, as you're providing something people can be harmed by.
I don't think it's so out of this world to require similar things for platforms and services available to the public on the internet. Although I wouldn't maybe say it should be straight up illegal, I wouldn't mind more research and understanding of how we could prevent the biggest harms, without infringing on what people do in private. But then is a self-hosted Mastodon instance connected to the public internet and other instances in public or in private? Personally I'd lean towards the first.
1) Use HTTP (secure is not the way to decentralize).
2) Selfhost DNS server (hard to scale in practice).
3) Selfhost SMTP server (also tricky).
4) Know and backup your router (dd-wrt or iptables).
JSON over HTTP is the way.
XML is not bad for certain things too; even if I understand the legacy of abuse.
This doesn't seem like useful advice. If you're going to use HTTP at all there is essentially zero practical advantage in not using Let's Encrypt.
The better alternative would be to use new protocols that support alternative methods of key distribution (e.g. QR codes, trust on first use) instead of none.
> Selfhost DNS server (hard to scale in practice).
This is actually very easy to do.
DNS is easy for yourself, but if you host it for others (1000+ of people) and it needs to have all domains in the world, then it becomes a struggle.
DNS can answer thousands of queries per second on a Raspberry Pi and crazy numbers on a single piece of old server hardware that costs less than $500.
Also if people need more food for (decentralized) thought:
For me the freedom to own my computer means I can run any software I want on it.
Self hosting is predicated on some openness of computing in general. Interestingly it still does not practically allow you to use certain services like Google Maps, where even if the end user has great benefit, they get it for free because they give back their data.
Or maybe Comaps, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43961908
Support https://edri.org and https://noyb.eu
Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire industry hasn't happened before.
You might also define "exists" in some sort of way that makes sense. And you can also realize that payers are encroaching on every aspect of interoperability data exchange.
But there is a real health element to it. Although I perfectly agree that standards are good for the consumer, the incentives here are not as strong.
This is an implementation of something called MUMPS, which is apparently some US system that is very arcane but widely used.
Again, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it indeed seems like standards, API's, file formats and whatnot would be keys to a system where decoupled components can be evolved step-by-step over time instead of the current system which seems to be a humongous monolith.
Interoperability can save the open web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 - Sept 2023 (97 comments)