It's why I use dropbox to begin with.
In today's world just championing sanity is already an "ideology" :)
It is that easy to buy a few Tb disk and just run a program, if not for the: 1. Routers that doesn't allow easy port forwarding (or even ban certain ports) 2. Dynamic IPs 3. People selling domains pushing their own VPS services. 4. The amount of steps you have to take to allow
A lot of small organizations I know didn't need a system administrators to configure and run programs like this. A lot of them are beginner friendly! They needed them to configure the network.
Same applies for self-hosting sites. If there was a program that just hosted on your PC address any html-page you put into it, a lot of people would self-host something. But you can't unless you can wrangle your router and figure out how to buy static IP – two tasks that are way harder than basic html.
The stack for easy and secure self-hosting is here, but the network changed too much. Hopefully, ipv6 will help to solve this problem.
For now it's funny how Tailscale in their "How Tailscale works" post asks you to pretend that everyone uses ipv6 to simplify explanation, and then acknowledges that almost no one uses ipv6 and a lot of clients are behind NATs and firewalls.
The tricks they deploy to pass through NATs are fascinating to me though. A great service and a great blog, thank you for sharing!
I'm glad to see that fantasies about omniscient AI taking over the world are giving way to a better grasp of the more mundane realities; AI just accelerating the already obscene power imbalances present in our world. Keep your private stuff private.