> We're coming back full cycle to decentralized systems.
You say this as if it's something that's happening, but it's not. There's a few pockets of self hosted bits here and there, but that's not new. We are not coming back to decentralised systems, and we will -never- go back to that in any significant number.
Most people are not going to give up the cloud to go back to bare metal. Most people are not going to give up their zero-maintenance SaaS app to go self-host something. All of it is just too convenient, and you then also have the inertia working against you; there's a whole generation of developers now that has grown up without ever administering a server. They're not gonna give up their Lambdas and drop down to a lower level, just like I'm not gonna give up my interpreted languages and drop down to C, even though it'd perform a hell of a lot better.
I'm with you - I like self-hosting, and I run everything I can on bare metal, and I hate everything costing money every month. But there's no future in which people decide "oh I'll give up the convenience and the extra money I can make from this" and go back to the old way of doing things.
Of course nothing is inevitable. Things never go back to the old way, but things do revert. Just look at some of the replies here and you'll see comments such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319989 and others. Is decentralization an inevitability? No. But as I said above, the more that cloud companies do these sorts of customer-adverse actions, the more we'll see this movement to decentralization.
> We are not coming back to decentralised systems, and we will -never- go back to that in any significant number.
In the 70s when mainframes (effectively same as cloud, remote access to someone else's computer) were king and small personal computers and workstations were just a toy, it seemed ridiculous to think centralized mainframes could ever be replaced.
So I will hold hope that things will swing back the other way at some point. As the cloud companies become more and more powerful they will inevitably become ever more abusive, so at some point enough people will look for better ways.
If you don't think that flipping back and forth between centralise and decentralize is a cycle that will repeat forever, then you haven't been in computing long enough.
Using this logic, we'd be still using landline phones. The reason decentralized/baremetal is not popular is the same reason why cloud is: It's not as practical.
Once there is the infrastructure to make it as practical as cloud (or more), the change will happen.
Landline phones are an example of centralized infrastructure. You don't own anything but your phone, and the landline company owns and manages the rest, and you can be cut off at any time. Landline vs. mobile isn't as different as you might think. The business model is the same (monthly subscription). The only difference is the lack of being physically tethered to your voice connection and of course the addition of data services.
You say this as if it's something that's happening, but it's not. There's a few pockets of self hosted bits here and there, but that's not new. We are not coming back to decentralised systems, and we will -never- go back to that in any significant number.
Most people are not going to give up the cloud to go back to bare metal. Most people are not going to give up their zero-maintenance SaaS app to go self-host something. All of it is just too convenient, and you then also have the inertia working against you; there's a whole generation of developers now that has grown up without ever administering a server. They're not gonna give up their Lambdas and drop down to a lower level, just like I'm not gonna give up my interpreted languages and drop down to C, even though it'd perform a hell of a lot better.
I'm with you - I like self-hosting, and I run everything I can on bare metal, and I hate everything costing money every month. But there's no future in which people decide "oh I'll give up the convenience and the extra money I can make from this" and go back to the old way of doing things.