Us, selfhosters - sure.

Average person who value convenience over privacy/cost - no. They’ll continue to pay and be in prisoned by the cloud.

So, I used Homebox for a few days now. I like the simplicity of it and I like the direction they’re going. However, there are quite a few bugs and data loss issues, it’s not ready for production yet. The thing is, these issues should be so easy to fix (it’s a simple CRUD app) that it makes me doubt the dev skills and possibility of other issues I haven’t discovered yet.

• The purchase date just increments or decrements by one day after editing an item
• When editing an item the notes/description fields show the data from the previously edited item, causing you to overwrite data

These two issues alone made me go back to my spreadsheet for now (good thing I kept a backup). I simply don’t trust the app to keep my data intact.

I don’t need a social network in a village, I’ll just step out of my house and yell.

Touche. Not dictating anything, just pointing out the obvious that when you sign up at an instance, the admin still has full control.

Which is why we shouldn’t get instances grow too large as then we have the same issue as any centralized platform.

It would be great if that was the way it worked, unfortunately right now it’s granular to the instance level, not user level. Not sure it’s even possible to get it down to user level unless every user runs their own instance which is unlikely to ever happen. The data has to live somewhere, so we need instances or instance -equivalent to host the data. Maybe if they get it down to where hosting your own instance is super easy one-click ordeal. Then each user would be truly in control.

Yeah, it would be nice to have a capability to move all your user content to another instance.

You’re in no position dictate what an instance should or should not do. If you don’t like what an instance is doing, you’re welcome to join another one or start your own, that’s the beauty of decentralization.

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I think this happens with any decentralized system: the users tend to cluster around a few big players. Those big players then get too big, get too much power and are able to control the entire system. I don’t know why it’s happening, I don’t like it, but for some reason it does.