> but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people.
Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous.
I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes.
edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.
I have a Synology NAS at home and it has apps that let you do exactly what you said: it has apps to automatically backup photos from phones and then you can easily share them in a pretty nice interface. And one of their photo organization apps, Moments, also automatically clusters all faces and runs object detection on your pictures, locally, on the NAS. And it just works.
Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous.
I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes.
edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.