Conversation

Recent discussions about self-hosting and coop services got me thinking...

How absurd is it that we're all expected to surrender our computing needs to for-profit hyperscalers and cloud service providers? How dare these oligarchs try to make us feel weak and incapable of providing for ourselves?

They want us to forget that three decades ago we collectively created one of the world's fastest supercomputers with distributed.net using nothing more than scavenged compute power from our idle PCs.

They want us to forget that most of us have drawers full of old-but-otherwise-servicable smartphones with performance specs meeting or exceeding that of low-tier cloud service provider VMs, which might be brought back to useful life using open source tech like @postmarketOS.

They want us to ignore open source tech like BOINC, web assembly, and @thekhronosgroup 's Vulkan and OpenCL that might allow us to safely run local and distributed compute.

They want us to assume we have no choice but to accept higher electricity bills and greater reliance on fossil fuels to drive oligarch-run computing, and to ignore how the explosion of rooftop solar and the rapid commercialization of sodium ion battery tech could shift our society's power dynamics, both literally and figuratively.

We are mighty.

#solarpunk