For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like “Web-Pal”, keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you’re the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
Great idea. From a nerd 😁
But who do you think would be the target demographic? Critical users, that don’t want to use major crap but are also not suited for doing it all by themselves, either due to skill, time, money or a combination thereof?
I wouldn’t think that group is significantly large. And definitely not large enough to seriously put a dent in the major crap apps.
Better than nothing, but probably not worth investing in such a project. Sadly so, I might add.
Platforms keep getting shittier and more exploitative, while government thirst for control with things like Chat Control, OSA and whatever the US is doing.
The more we see of that the easier it becomes to market a “your internet services in a box” to a layman.
But first they have to care. The amount of people who don’t care for e.g. privacy - even if explained in detail - is flabbergasting. Even today I heard two times “why? I have nothing to hide” or “but WhatsApp is superior!”
I think this is a really good idea. A baby server for every privacy concerned house. Make it simple enough that customizing software features is like putting together Legos, but leave in the potential for complexity as some users grow.
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.