Stephen Downes

I've considered this, setting up my own personal cloud and moving all my content off the platforms and onto a space I control. But as Drew Lyton discovered, this is not easy to do. It takes a lot of work and requires quite a bit of knowledge. And it's not cheap. So even though commercial cloud companies are squeezing their customers for more money and less ownership, the self-hosted cloud is not the answer. So what is? "Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services." We already have public libraries offering web 1.0 services, he writes. Having them offer web 2.0 services isn't a stretch. Or if not that, then community cooperatives. Via Stephen Harlow.