dan

I think people will eventually have to get used to paying for things though, if bots / AI / ad blockers kill off the feasibility of online advertising. Either that or everything becoming a freemium service with major limits for free users.

So I can install any software I want. I’m running my own Lemmy server. I host Odoo and n8n for my wife’s business. I have servers running Borgbackup and Borgmatic for backups. And a bunch of other stuff.

It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).

I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.

I’ve tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.

I agree about the automated scaling, but with VPS hosting you can usually have several hot spares to handle traffic spikes, and still spend less than something like AWS. Most good VPS hosts will let you create a private network between your VPSes. 1000x spikes aren’t very common.

CDNs are pretty easy in general, especially if they support origin pull.

I don’t like keeping all my eggs in one basket, so I use a few different providers.

Yes, because a Linux server with root access is much more powerful than a platform like Cloudflare.

There seems to be two groups of people:

People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: “Wow, hosting is so expensive now!”

People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: “Wow, hosting is so cheap now!”

I’ve got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you’d need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.

Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.

every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can’t do it because everything is captcha’d to all hell.

On the flip side, a bunch of services / web apps (mostly paid ones) are adding APIs to become “AI native”… but you can use those APIs without having to use AI too.

A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.

The only business models that have really worked online have been:

1. Ad-supported.
2. You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
3. Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.

If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.

I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week

A lot of people don’t use it the way he used it though. He used it specifically for two sided markets (eg a service that has both businesses/advertisers and personal users) where the focus shifts to the business customers, but people have started using it to mean anything that used to be good but isn’t good any more.

For other alternatives with their own engine - the main ones are Yandex, Mojeek, and Qwant. DuckDuckGo is good, but most of their results come from Bing.

Kagi is priced well for what you get. Search engines are very expensive to run. You don’t have to pay for the premium AI, and the pricing of the starter ($5/month for 300 searches) and pro ($10/m for unlimited searches) plans hasn’t been affected by AI. They’ve remained the same price ever since they launched in 2022.

Accurate. At work I’m finally getting around to paying down tech debt from a temporary hack that was supposed to only be in the code for a month or so, but now it’s been in our production code for around five years.

It would have been maybe a week or so to do it the right way initially, but we had hard deadlines and were pressed for time and just couldn’t get around to doing it. Now it’s over a month of work for one senior engineer (me) to clean up, because there’s so many interdependencies between the hacky code and other parts of the system that depend on side effects of the hacky code, or the order of updates performed in the hacky code. What a mess.

At least AI can help a bit. Even the newest models aren’t so great at system architecture in brownfield projects though (projects building into existing systems).

Not sure if this counts, but as a software engineer, pretty much all major software you use is hacks on top of hacks on top of something someone built as a ‘temporary’ solution or as a proof-of-concept that’s still in use years later. It’s amazing that anything works properly at all. Stable software is basically just software with 10+ years of bug fixes layered on top of it.

Part of the reason that Windows backwards compatibility is so good (plenty of Windows 95/98 apps still work fine on Windows 11!) is because Windows automatically applies compatibility fixes, including simulating bugs that were in older versions of Windows, because old apps could be relying on those bugs.

My wife gets very frustrated when she encounters bugs, whereas I’m usually like “well, it’s not nearly as bad as it could be” lol

Not all those companies have their own data centers, but plenty of them would rent space in data centers. You can rent anything from individual servers owned by the data center (“dedicated servers”, like what you can get from Hetzner), to space in a shared rack, to an entire 42U rack dedicated to you, to an entire cage (or several cages).

(a cage is just a part of the data center that’s sectioned off in a locked metal mesh cage so only one customer can access it, while still allowing plenty of airflow to and from the servers)

The post is about data centers though.

No serious business is hosting an internet accessible serve in their office.

There’s some dots on the map in places where I know for sure that there’s no data center. I think people have submitted addresses of some tech company headquarters for example.

Most new builds by the larger companies are pretty big though, even if they’re not dedicated to AI.

The site explicitly mentions “AI data centers”, but how do you differentiate AI data centers from… non-AI data centers I guess?

I understand the anti-AI sentiment and environmental issues, etc. but I also think a lot of non-technical people don’t realise that literally everything they do online uses a data center.