cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5717757
Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
Unfortunately self-hosting is not a realistic solution for the vast majority of the population. Even the best solutions out there for self-hosting are way too complex for most people. If it’s not close to “point-click-done”, with no debugging or maintenance whatsoever, it’s just not a viable solution for most people. I’m decent with tech and do self-host a few things, but it’s a complete PITA compared to “cloud” options.
I don’t use the cloud and I also don’t self host.
Occasionally I have to put up with a minor inconvenience like putting a file on a USB stick and carry that physical USB stick with me. The horrific inconvenience! How do I survive
My big issue is rarely with data i need myself, but data i need to share with other people. Using physical storage to pass this between us is not a solution as we would need to send that via mail.
Manually moving files across my devices all the time is also a nuisance that i prefer not to deal with.
Thats way we have to organize us in groups running strong homeserver behind VPN and proxy running all kinds of FOSS web services and federate those services with other groups.
A tech-noob should trust his local Sysadmin, not some (foreign) company
That’s still putting your data in some internet rando’s computer, because “trust me bruh!”…it’s still putting it in " the cloud", but now in a way that is nearly completely impossible to enforce things like GDPR
Well, it’s not a random guy on the internet, it’s a guy in the neighborhood that you meet regularly (like a friend for example) and you trust. Well that’s the case for me, and I even grown out of noob state in many IT related stuff thanks to that. I bet anyone has that one guy (or girl of course) who is constantly talking about privacy, not? That’s the people you support and for example providing financial support on server parts in return for a save heaven for your data. But of course, if you trust nobody than yourself, you gota be Sysadmin yourself.
I know someone like this.
He’s so burned out from doing it as a full time job he can’t be bothered to set up his own system, much less everyone else’s. (He sometimes helps me with stuff, with the understanding that he will answer questions and that’s about it after it’s been set up)
Maybe if he were to charge for the service and labor and quit his regular job, and just do nothing but troubleshooting all day (frustrating and tiring in its own way). But assuming people were into that (which they typically aren’t, especially not enough to pay for it, which is part of the frustration), being security focused and enjoying that stuff for yourself becomes a lot of work very very quickly when you do it for others.
Yea, he is Crazy about work but he likes it that way, he does way more hours for his main job than he would have to (no fear, he gets paid accordingly) and does the Sysadmin work as a hobby. I mostly manage the stuff with UI (all the *arr web apps) and pay for Indexers. Our Plex lifetime is also initially purchased by me. So thats how we got there. Now we have nextcloud and soon the first activityPub instances
Yeah, guy I know isn’t crazy about work, and was a sysadmin (now security). Burned right out. He bought the Plex lifetime for me, though, because I enjoy curating the library and he likes free streaming (and can afford it which I really can’t).
He mostly just answers questions for me (which is challenging because I’m really good at asking the questions that lead me to fully understanding, and those tend to be fairly specific) and explains things I don’t understand when possible. He doesn’t do any self-hosting (other than a coax-based tv channel that runs my Plex and nothing else), preferring to leave to to me to handle… says it’s too much work and too expensive to be worth it, even knowing fully the alternatives (ofc thinking like a sysadmin, he’s thinking raid5 and full servers and stuff whereas I just have an old-ish dedicated pc for that lol.)
Plus side, I’m learning a lot. Downside, learning this stuff while not having a strong tech foundation is hard!
My next foray is into automating my *arr, and setting up self-hosts for things like photos, comics, games, maaaaaaybe Lemmy, and music (Plex does ok with music tho, so maybe just adding last.fm to it will do the job. I don’t listen to music; the need is not my own, so I need something robust and host-hands-off)
He does help me with a few things I really don’t understand though, like complex tunnel/router configuration, setting up pihole (I can do that myself now) and hosting my home vpn (I could probably do this, but he does it for me for now with a custom domain) but it’s almost the exact opposite of what you described as the dynamic lol
Maybe I should be “that girl”, but I’d be tempted to snoop. Very very tempted. “Don’t trust me with your data” level of tempted.
I think you’re severely overestimating the closeness of people’s relations to neighbors and availability of people with the skills to pull this off with high enough stability for other people to want to use it…and all in their free time outside of their regular job and personal life.
I think you’re speaking for yourself here.
Maybe, maybe not…it will vary greatly from country to country whether or not close social interaction with neighbors is the norm.
In that case, I underestimated my luck having such friends…
Removed by mod
Yea, and we were happy with them in that state, it’s only a problem if companies grow too big and get to a near-monopoly state