DID with ZK human proof on blockchain… Is this possible?
I don't really like crypto that much from a currency perspective given its history with scam but I like the technology just a little bit so I built it.
If someone is interested on someway to monetize or I don't know just talk about it, I am more than happy to.
Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail things that can allow you to prove an amazon transaction or tax reciept etc. which can prove human proof so yeah I think its possible.
If you decide to foster an online community, then you might end up being the tech support to that community. For many of us, that is not an appealing choice.
(also, sitting with the owner / ceo very often results in them learning about something they actually did not know; a few months ago I went with bol.com managers through some process on their site which they didn't know was completely broken because of 'anti-fraud AI' and they kept blaming me (not only me, just 'dumb users'), so seeing them trying themselves and failing was hilarious)
It's cheaper and more convenient to fuck something off quickly than sue them.
You'd think that eventually market forces would try to correct this, but in practice that doesn't happen because big companies can just buy out any entity that's an actual threat to them/cover so many areas that getting rid of them is nigh impossible. (There's some attempts to limit this from the EU and before 2025, the US as well, but a major part of the beef the US has with the EU is that they're trying to force these major tech companies to care again.)
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...
Calling out one company in-particular that we just got over an absolute nightmare of a messy divorce with, Freshworks. They are Indian-based, and their support in India treated us like we didn’t have any consumer rights at all after signing their SaaS contract (you know, one of those 1000 page things you have to sign when starting any random SaaS) and starting sending us random ludicrous invoices and refusing to ie downgrade the number of subscription seats or switch from annual to monthly billing, claiming that because we didn’t give them 60 days notice of reduction in seats we had to pay a whole year for the extra users blah blah blah, which might be legal in India, but is completely illegal in Australia.
it was unthinkable not because people didn't want it, but that it costed too much back then. Half a mil for a microcomputer that took up a room?!
Current self-hosting requirements are similarly expensive - time and money. If someone were to sell an appliance for which you could just plug into the outlet, and you get it all, then it would be pretty good. Like a washing machine.
The majority of folks just want to text and call on their phones. They are unwilling to handle the complexity of having an entire computer in their pocket. -- 2006
>There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues.
Right. And Yahoo didnt want to be a search engine. They wanted to be the home page of the internet.
In 1996 there were especially no incentives from corporations for a free operating system to exists, yet Linux was born on the back of a few hard working engineers and the whole industry catched up, it created a lot (if not the majority) of business. You can engineer ~free and easy self-hosting.
I agree it needs to be personal, there are no appealing middle-man options.
Now think of actually running something consistently. And react to changes in that... A task a few steps above.
Why not post the prompts, it’ll be a shorter read with presumably the same amount of new information.
I am pretty sure that sure, it might be more tedious to actually manage your thoughts into more structured format to present to a larger audience and you might think that AI is meant for such tasks but I personally feel as if there is something about using AI in writing that feels sloppy most of the times.
Write bad but original. Maybe it won't get to the top of the HN, but you get the widest amount of freedom if you are really passionate about writing.
(I am thinking of stopping to use AI / using AI to just teach me things if I find a need to create a project that I am genuinely curious to build myself)
The ideological approaches to these problems always seem to result in adding more technology to the problem, which introduces more attack vectors, more control points and more complexity, all of which are difficult to understand and manage. The real problem is you should not need to identify yourself all the time. And the best way to do that, contrary to the SaaS culture on here, is not to hand over your stuff to someone else where you need to identify yourself to get it back or even involve yourself in "services culture".
So over the last 2 years I unpicked all my dependencies and moved to a reductionist and disposable model. The "minimum happy subset" is pretty much a domain with an IMAP box still, as it was 20 years ago. The IMAP box is dumb enough to be moved around. And your stuff should be in simple files, with well-documented formats, on the computer that you own and control. An average user can self-manage this with minimal effort. Everything else I have found to be 100% disposable.
This incidentally lines up 1:1 with the non-technical friends I have who just don't care and do it that way anyway. Perhaps we care too much.
Also can we just get some plain old HTML presented like a 50 year old book next time.
If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected pieces of data that require storage in a relational database, then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead of just returning a self-contained blob.
I know I would. I'm just not smart enough, nor have the correct kind of experience to start designing, building or evangelizing such solution, so I am stuck waiting for someone else.
A good example is ForgeFed, which I can't wait to mature enough to be usable.
Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks".
I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.
If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.
Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks.
Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.
Having controlled by the user public-private key pair instead of multiple accounts on a variety of platforms doesn't bring self-sovereigninty by itself. Whatever you post/publish must also be discoverable by other people - and that's where we go back to centralized platforms/services of today.
One key benefit is removing middlemen who may misuse aid.
I never underestimate human corruption—$100 million in aid might result in only $1 million truly helped those in need. This pattern is seen worldwide.
If you want a better future, make better self hosted apps, that are accessible, easy to set up, and don't lack features ordinary people ask for.
No fancy token ever beat an easy button. And no poorly built self hosting app is helping...
* proxies for http and WebSockets. Apache made this challenging and I thought I could do it better. I can now spin up servers in seconds and serve http and WebSockets on the same port
* tools to test dns, http, WebSockets, hashes, certificate creation, and more
How does that work? I want to see the pictures of my friends, and they want to see mine. And I also want to see the pictures of some influencers.
What's the self-hosted Instagram setup that makes this work, while all the involved parties are self-hosted?
I see no reason why everybody could not run a web server on their phone.
I make 1000 requests every time I open the app or refresh my feed?
Also not everyone can be on a stable connection with a public IP address with good upload speeds 7/24. In the ideal world: sure. In the real world: impossible (at least for any foreseeable near future).
Nice idea, but that alone is not enough.
The POP3/SMTP protocol is still a server-client based model, and such model naturally gravitates towards centralized systems which leads to the problem we're facing today.
In my opinion, to encourage self-sovereignty, a protocol should decouple the creator and the publisher. The information created by the creator can be published on multiple publisher platforms selected/directed by the creator.
And ideally the creator should be able to directly sharing information with other creators too, like a P2P system. This should also help reduce the risk of information leaking thus more secure.
The protocol also needs to be flexible enough that it can adopt the needs of more modern users too, otherwise you'll found yourself back at the start line few years later.
P.S. If you think this comment is very empty, that's because it is. I've observed quite a few P2P based protocols over these years failing to gain popularity... this is one of the things really hard to get it right. I don't know how to do it, and many way smarter people also failed to do it. So, yeah, that's why this comment is so empty. But hey, if you can get it right, maybe they should give you a Nobel or something.
Thus that in itself fails an idea of sovereignty: that choosing to be identified uniquely is your choice.
Barking down this alley, while useful from the perspective of NFTs, does not add much to the concept of actual sovereignty.
12inchidentity•4h ago