We will win the war for general-purpose computing

I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse.

Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.

> locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms

Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms.

Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features.

Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.

Counterpoint: closed platforms will continue to account to majority of users because innovation available to open platforms is counterbalanced by massive amount of capital available to closed platforms.

> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively.

I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?

> Buy an off the shelf processor chip

Sure in a free market you could do that, be we aren't living in a free market. Both corporations and politicians wants you to use locked in devices where you are easier to monetize and control. And since those are the two powers controlling regulations chances are you will no longer be able to buy those chips legally without an active software engineering license and a business document stating what you will use them for.

It wont happen tomorrow, but what about 20-40 years? Compare todays market with 20 years ago and how much it changed, extrapolate 20 years in the future and it doesn't seem improbable at all.

> Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board

I suspect those things will become regulated and require either constraints built in or license to be able to purchase them. Then likely aveneues for connection will be required to verify devices are trusted (so, cellular companies, ISPs) and they will do this by associating devices that try to communicate with government issued cryptographic signatures that are built into chips etc.

And yeah you could bypass everything but it will still be illegal. So a bit like you could build your own car but you won't be legally allowed to drive it on the road and you will incur huge liability if you try.

Can you buy a Qualcomm SOC to create a Pinephone with the state-of-the-art hardware specs? It's not a matter of money, they just won't sell them.

It gets tiresome at some point. My first PC was in 1993, with MS-DOS and some kooky custom GUI that Packard Bell cooked up on their own. I'm a bit jaded now because I got really good at several of the early UIs I used and they of course are in the dustbin now. Nothing like having your skills thrown in the trash every couple years.

"Just let Apple decide everything for you, they know best!" is exactly the sort of attitude that is causing us to lose this war.

Defaults are designed for common users, who barely know how to copy and paste.

Their setup is really not working for me.

I want my desktop designed for me, from me. And if the OS thinks, it knows better than me, how to handle things and regulary rearanges or reconfigures, than screw this OS.

Ha, I stopped changing the wallpaper when I realized I would never be looking at it.

You are basically correct but even today I can add a PHY 10/100MB Ethernet from a low spec microcontroller understand and compile a basic TCP/IP stack, and add some simple telnet or HTTP server on top, several of my projects do this and a lot of engineers have that basic understanding. Even humble AVRs and Casio calculators can run a basic TCP/IP stack but the difference between this and a gigabit ethernet on some massive multithreaded operating system is night and day and as you say well beyond most.

Unfortunately you are exactly right about what DRM/TPM is going to do to computers. Once Windows 11 reaches 50% marketshare, some Western government is going to demand that ISPs in their country not allow anyone online unless they are using a government-approved OS. Then they will require OSes and app stores to ban Tor and E2E encrypted chat apps.

Perhaps they won't go so far as to kick Windows 10 computers off the internet, but they might at least restrict them to certain sites and protocols. They could also say that people running "unsafe" OSes must install a government-issued CA certificate, to allow TLS interception.

You can start to see the restrictions creeping in. It seems inexpensive tablets don’t play videos from the the major vendor (Netflix/amazon/hbo) if the hardware/os don’t support “Widevine” drm solution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine

I genuinely wish I could give more mod points. This is already happening. If there is going to be a war, its outcome is far from a given ( and I personally worry, general computing will be on the losing side ).

The only thing that could stop is us. We are still creating the building blocks that make it all happen. It is not like we do not stand a chance, but it is hard not to feel pessimistic about the outcome since just about every communication from the power centers can be summed up with 'moar powah, moar'.

In the old days you couldn't do banking or shop on your PC because the web was young and these services didn't exist.

Perhaps in some future time your hacker computer won't be useful for these things either, so you have to use your phone instead. This seems livable? Maybe we should aim at doing more interesting things than shopping and banking?

Looks like the 'usual' capacity went from 8 GB to 32 GB and anything over $50 disappeared, in lieu of dozens of inexpensive devices from Chinese manufacturers?

> unless users' freedom to own their devices is taken away

This is a really easy problem to fix though, we are already quickly moving in that direction. Every big provider is moving towards more and more hardware and software lockins, and since everyone is doing it slowly consumers aren't reacting. I'd be surprised if general purpose computers aren't seen as a niche market in 20 years and illegal in many parts of the world in 40 years.

Here is roughly how it will happen: As more people are locked in general purpose computing will get an increasing density of bad actors. Big tech will publish studies showing that almost all viruses, malware, scams, child porn etc comes from general purpose devices, and therefore push for regulations to ensure everyone uses a locked down device. Anyone who argues against that will be attacked with arguments such as "Are you really going to prioritize your hobby at the expense of children getting sexually abused? There is no need for anyone but criminals to own a general purpose computer!".

Steve Wozniak wanted - and built - a pre-assembled computer for tinkerers and engineers; it also turned out to have some mass market appeal as a game and spreadsheet machine, and Apple made a fair amount of money selling it to hobbyists, gamers, schools, and businesses.

Steve Jobs realized that computing appliances (from computers that you couldn't open up to handheld music/game/app/phone devices) for people who typically had little or no interest in tinkering or engineering ("the rest of us") was a much larger market. Apple claimed the high margin section of that market and became one of the wealthiest companies on the planet.

I recall a story about Jobs being opposed to hardware - and software! - upgrades for the original Mac because "you don't upgrade your toaster." That's precisely the thinking behind the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple watch - except Apple now knows that you'll have to buy a new internet-connected toaster every few years if they stop producing security bug fixes for your old one.

I run into this all the time. but medicine doesn't get called "bicycle for the mind".

The question of market share is uninteresting to me, now. We have zero idea what the market is. The ecosystem is unhealthy, rotting, consumer dissent is skyrocketing (see the Freedom Phone yesterday as a rife example). Fixing this situation is not doable in 18 months though. We don't fix the war on general purpose computing with a product launch (although pinephone aloneight singlehandedly jump start the sea change). This market based mentality though I find so reductionist & off base, besides the point. We have so much pioneering to do in computing. so much freeing people to enable them to begin to think.

> Maybe you aren't winning hearts and minds because you aren't actually offering something people want.

I feel like most people have no idea what tech is offering.

There have been some special purpose projects (FreedomBox, NextCloud, &c) that have specific ideas, but the relatively new YUNoHost is a fairly new breed of examples to create an easy to run way to get people started hosting their own stuff. https://yunohost.org/

Federated model is interesting, in that it means not everyone has to operate their stuff. Instead, we have protocols of interoperability, and lots of hosts. That gives people the experience faster, but yes, it's still currently sub-par. And most importantly, there's no Competitive Compatibility (ComCom, formerly called Adversarial Interopability), so most things we write will not interlace with & work with people's existing networks.

> Maybe you aren't going to re-kindle any dreams because you are not offering anything worth dreaming about.

You're welcome to your opinion on that. Indeed right now is a good time to question this. General purpose computing is a very nebulous header, with a lot of different ideas. Certainly there's the negative-liberties we can see slipping away, as DRM, as cloud-computing removes us from power over our systems. The appliance-ization of computing is indeed the forefront of what people think about when they think about general purpose computing, and I tend to agree, that a far more revolutionary outlook with much further reaching positive-liberties is what we ought to be dreaming about. The difficulty is that these endless open frontiers are still unsure: each of us has to carry our own little light, try to figure out who elses light to join with, where-as the big huge forces of the world & their snuffing-of-the-light is much more visible, apparent, easy to rally around. So we need to make some traction on the big dreams forwards, we need something encompassing, and bold that floods people's imagination with possibility & excitement.

This is just my 2c, but the ubiquotous & pervasive computing world, I think, spoke to a vector of computing as cross-system, as connected, that currently is almost entirely anti-General-Purpose. We don't have good open general systems for working cross system. This is one hub of capability that we need to encompass into our dreams, that needs to be part of the General, for the General to get far. But it's just one piece, just one aspect. The dream needs to immerse us fully.

I think work's like Karli Coss's data-liberation is basically the ground floor of where we need to start. This is still early prototype stage, basically, but we need wide-spanning access to a huge cross-section of the digital (in much easier to pull off manners) to even begin to allow the interesting dreaming to begin, to begin to inspire each other: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html

> "convenience" is just marketing.

No, it isn't. This is intentional ignorance and if people keep believing it we will absolutely lose. This kind of thinking goes all the way back to the 1980s and 1990s when people said "GUIs are for wimps" and became increasingly irrelevant as everyone started using GUIs.

When I am driving and need turn by turn directions, if I have to take extra steps to get my maps app to work I might have to pull over or might try to do it while driving and crash. My map app must "just work."

If I'm about to give a talk and I plug in the projector's HDMI cable and my video driver crashes and I have to load up a config file, I look amateurish. My video subsystem must "just work."

If I'm trying to close a deal and can't share a document, the deal may fail and revenue could be lost. People might even lose their jobs. My collaboration system must "just work."

I could keep going.

Convenience is extremely important in the real world. It saves time, money, and even lives.

This is the kind of thinking causing FOSS or other grassroots movements to fail. Convenience is extremely important. Much like you don't wake up every day taking pride in understanding every aspect of the electrical and water distribution to your house or how your car engine works, most people don't want to understand how their software works. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be easy for folks who _want to understand_, but unfortunately a lot of grassroots software just gatekeeps this way. The result is the slow death of GPC as users use the thing that's easy and there's no privacy or freedom-respecting alternatives that non-technical users can actually use.

You make good points: the barriers to entry have dramatically decreased across a huge portion of the stack. With one notable exception: the cost and complexity of modern fabs increases every year while the companies involved consolidate or die out.

tsmc could easily decide “we’re not gonna fab your RISC-V design” at any moment and you’d be more or less SOL. I mean, you could fall back to a 150 nm process, but that kills a lot of opportunities.

And if things continue — if Apple, Amazon and Google move further in the direction of custom silicon — this will happen. Apple already has a pretty big advantage with their custom silicon — which they don’t sell for use in non-Apple products. Now just imagine if they brought tsmc in-house and had exclusive access to the most advanced fabs on the planet. Your ability to compete, and the room for people to build GPC would constrict MUCH further.

We have this enormous, all-pervasive stack built upon a foundation of like 3 companies, in the midst of massive consolidation. I honestly don’t understand how so many people who think about that are comfortable with it.

I don't know anyone who got into programming who didn't do it on a computer they had for other reasons. Nobody buys their kid a $2000 device just in case they might want to be a programmer, especially since the kid isn't going to play with that device -- there won't be any games for it.

No, it's always a side-effect of using GPCs for other things. Even, or really, especially when it's inconvenient.

Anecdotally, it is indeed getting harder to hire good people. I don't know that we've reached 'peak programmer', but the count isn't growing as fast as it used to.

As long as you have paid for your annual "software development licence" from the government, and they haven't revoked it after finding you breaking "best practices" like producing or using encryption software without a government backdoor.

Not OP but I use LineageOS with microG as my phone OS

Linux is pretty perfect. Definitely superior to other OS.

Could be that the popularity caused tons of support and unrelated to FOSS. Or maybe leadership.

Gimp has always sucked.

Do what we did to fight tabacco addiction?

Combination of support and shaming?