Dave Winer:

The UGC business model only seems good for the users -- as they say if the offer appears too good to be true, it probably is. If you read the user agreement, they have no long-term obligation to host it. They probably don't even have to give you a copy of your own stuff. People ask how I use River2 while I travel. Well, my ISP, AT&T, offers a plan where you get five static IP addresses. I'm pretty technical so I know how to set it up, and I have an old laptop in my house that runs River2. I log into it even when I'm getting on from the house, but I can check what's new from an airplane at 35000 feet, where I am right now. I've not mentioned this before, but a couple of people asked me how I do it, and I told them, and neither thought I was crazy. That's a good sign.

This isn't wrong so much as overly optimistic. Setting up a server is a distinctly non-trivial exercise. Doing so in a secure fashion is even harder. Right now, lots of home PCs are unwitting members of botnets simply by being insecurely on the net as clients; having end users trying to set up home servers would likely make this even worse - configuring IIS or Apache is not a task for the typical non-techie.

Think about backups: everyone knows they should be doing them, but how many do? On Windows systems, I'm guessing a tiny percentage, because it's not at all obvious what you need to do. On Macs, it's started to get more widespread simply because Time Machine is dead simple. Before we get home servers, someone is going to have to create the equivalent of Time Machine for the end user...

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