I think there's probably a market for a personal cloud, which probably sounds dumber than personal computer did in the 80s. What I mean by that is a computer somewhere in the garage, like a furnace, with enough compute and storage to drive all the devices and appliances in a house. In this model, devices do not have CPUs or memory, only input/output and a network chip.
The way this would work is for the computer in the garage to have the ability to divide itself arbitrarily into VMs for each purpose, with an ecosystem of images designed for things like fridges and gaming consoles. It should be possible to add or upgrade compute to the device in a hot swapped fashion, and because it doesn't have to be in a thin tablet, it could be easily cooled.
Along these lines, I’m astounded that the “selfhosted” subreddit has almost 90k subscribers (for comparison, “Microsoft” has 112k and “FigmaDesign” has 2.5k):
Interestingly, the solution to cloud software data ownership seems to be to use a self-hosted alternative, rather than use a non-Cloud solution like I would have expected.
I wonder if there would be market for community clouds, or neighborhood computes? Imagine that a new apartment building comes bundled with a server room in the basement. Every dweller gets compute/storage there. This could serve as edge cache for services like Netflix/YouTube, as well as for the ecosystem you describe.
I once imagined that homomorphic encryption would allow people to store data in their personal/neighborhood clouds and have third party SaaS code operate on that data locally. But I've recently been made to understand that homomorphic encryption would also allow companies to fully close off any access to data beyond what a program/service wants to give out, and unfortunately I get the feeling that the market will prefer the latter over the former.
Could be. You could also implement it for smaller businesses. I think another possibility is to sell excess compute back to some decentralized cloud, the same way you could sell excess solar power back to the grid.
I would love a hardware/software solution that makes it easily to backup my data (ideally with integrations to Google Takeout, Facebook, etc.). Perhaps it exists already?
Edit: of course local-first does not mean merely "backup", but instead the (redundant) hardware serves as a primary data store. I would welcome that as well!
The way this would work is for the computer in the garage to have the ability to divide itself arbitrarily into VMs for each purpose, with an ecosystem of images designed for things like fridges and gaming consoles. It should be possible to add or upgrade compute to the device in a hot swapped fashion, and because it doesn't have to be in a thin tablet, it could be easily cooled.