from Hacker News

The case for open infrastructure

by mediocregopher on 3/13/22, 4:03 PM with 34 comments

  • by throwaway984393 on 3/13/22, 7:52 PM

    What the author essentially is asking for are public services. They just want a term to justify not having to think about the million other problems with running such a service. The typical "I'm a computer person, I can solve any problem with just code" thing.

    If you want "open" public services, form a co-op or nonprofit to develop the service. Make all users 'members' who fund it. Make both the workers and users the owners. Create a public independent board to oversee it. Put any profit back into the service. The architecture will not matter.

  • by rapnie on 3/13/22, 6:38 PM

    Note that Gitea will start adding federation support to their code forge, and at least 3 other projects are dedicated to code forge federation at: https://forum.forgefriends.org

    Also a self-hosted alternative to KeyBase is at: https://keyoxide.org (minus the chat parts).

  • by thayne on 3/14/22, 2:19 AM

    > The source code for Keybase is, right now, fully open source on their Github

    Really? My understanding was that the client and some libraries they use are open source, but the actual server code is closed source. Although if Zoom isn't going to continue maintaining keybase, then open sourcing the server code seems like "the right thing to do" (at least morally, and probably from a PR standpoint as well). Even if they did want to continue maintaining it, it would be a good thing in my opinion, but moreso if the project will die otherwise.

    See https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/24105

  • by ram_rar on 3/13/22, 7:24 PM

    I get the spirit of this article. But one of the key things to consider is the operational overhead of maintaining infra for auxiliary services far outweighs the value it provides. There are a few things like payments, notification, monitoring(logs/metrics etc) startups shouldn't build from scratch/self host anymore, unless they plan to take on the incumbents in those fields.

  • by rgbrgb on 3/13/22, 8:58 PM

    I like the spirit here.

    Any frameworks people like for building stuff with distributed or federated architecture? Thinking about this in relation to how one could build long-lived web services (like bandcamp [0]) that aren't owned by a single entity (or can't be sold at least).

    [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665311

  • by ganzuul on 3/13/22, 6:03 PM

    If DLTs push forward, maybe traditional centralized services will have to keep up.

    Smartphones are like thin clients. If you already subscribe to bandwidth, why not compute too?

  • by nonrandomstring on 3/13/22, 6:33 PM

    At what point did ICT (horizontal services) become "infrastructure"? I use quotes, because at this point it is really superstructure in the sense of Marx.

    I think we should be very careful about casually using that word.