There is a middleground, imo. The way apps are designed massively impacts the general requirements of system administration.
What we're seeing is largely centralized applications and the work it takes to manage them. Ignore UX for a second, and imagine you wrote a database on top of a distributed system - ala IPFS - and all modifications were effectively pushed into IPFS. This suddenly boils the system administration tasks down to:
1. make sure my IPFS node is up to date
2. make sure my computer is online
And even those can be heavily mitigated with peers who follow each other.
Now we're not there yet, i'm not advertising a better solution. I'm simply saying that part of the administration is a heavy lift simply because of how these apps were written. I think we can do better for the home user.
Secure Scuttlebutt is a lot easier to maintain, for example. The most important thing with that is that you simply connect to the internet and publish your posts/fetch other posts. In doing so, other people make backups for you and you of them. Backing up your key seems like the highest priority.. and even that could be eliminated i imagine, in the P2P model at least. Very low maintenance.
What we're seeing is largely centralized applications and the work it takes to manage them. Ignore UX for a second, and imagine you wrote a database on top of a distributed system - ala IPFS - and all modifications were effectively pushed into IPFS. This suddenly boils the system administration tasks down to:
1. make sure my IPFS node is up to date
2. make sure my computer is online
And even those can be heavily mitigated with peers who follow each other.
Now we're not there yet, i'm not advertising a better solution. I'm simply saying that part of the administration is a heavy lift simply because of how these apps were written. I think we can do better for the home user.
Secure Scuttlebutt is a lot easier to maintain, for example. The most important thing with that is that you simply connect to the internet and publish your posts/fetch other posts. In doing so, other people make backups for you and you of them. Backing up your key seems like the highest priority.. and even that could be eliminated i imagine, in the P2P model at least. Very low maintenance.