The Rationale for Local Computing
When I tell people that I'm running beaconny.net from computers in my basement, they usually ask "why?" - I'll tell you why!
All the Fancy Services
You know em, you love em, you can not live without them:
But we're all just users of these services, with no control over, or visibility into, their operation, or any guarantees that they'll continue to work in the future. At any moment, any of these services could disappear and take all of its content and our social network with it.
From a software engineering perspective, there's nothing special about these platforms - an experienced developer could whip up a passable clone of any of these in a week's time. The real value is in the fact that people have agreed to use them, and as the ol' adage goes: If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
While I'm not suggesting that we all abandon the Internet at large and vow to use only hand-crafted, artisanal, local digital services, for the reasons detailed below, we should do what we can to ensure that our community can continue to leverage the tools of technology, regardless of what the future may hold.
Dependability
For most, the Internet is a thing that runs out there, in The Cloud ™, on computers that they've never seen. But the dirty truth is that The Cloud ™ is just someone elses' computers, and anyone can make their computer part of the Internet. For example, check out this photo of the Raspberry Pi that runs the Kiwix server at knowledge.beaconny.net. Every time someone goes to that website, lights starting blinking in my basement - it's very exciting! Even if the Internet somehow disappeared, you could still walk over to my front yard, connect to my wifi access point, and read these 50,000+ ebooks, or check out this wikipedia article on sloths.
Ownership
We should all have local backups of our important documents, photos, and videos. Check out this NYT article: Your Memories. Their Cloud.