What is DISH?
Have you ever sat back and thought which companies are involved with your online life? Count it, right now! Bet it didn't exceed the number of fingers on your hand! Your data flows through a select few companies. That list definitely has Google, Microsoft and Meta on it.
When you were a young kid in elementary school, your parents must have warned you never to interact with strangers. As you have learnt by going to the ice cream truck back then, you know nothing in this world is free. Think to yourself now — are you paying even a single dime to Google? Do you know anybody at Facebook? Would you consider them friends?
Every single mail, every single photo, every single message, every single file and every single call in your lives go through these complete strangers that you aren't paying. Fun fact — they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their heart! Running services the size of Google requires money, and the way Google, Facebook and Microsoft make money is by selling all of your personal data to shady data brokers! Think about it — that photo of your kid as an infant is probably in places you never imagined, probably with people who value that photo for very different reasons. That call you had with Grandma was used to make the same voice generator that now scammers use to squeeze every single dime of her bank account. Your monthly statements emailed by the bank are used to see your spending habits and accordingly make items on Amazon more expensive. To them, you're simply an asset. You're the product they get a value from!
This is exacerbated by the fact that these companies really don't care about you or your experience with the product — they will do whatever it takes to make that juicy money. If you use Windows, you would have noticed the Recall feature, which takes screenshots of your desktop every 5 seconds and uses it to train an AI model. Nobody ever asked for it. Similarly, Google added AI overviews that suggested that pregnant women should eat rocks and recommended using Elmer's Glue (the American equivalent of Fevicol) as a pizza topping if the cheese was sliding off. Even today, most of the "AI Overviews" Google show you are factually incorrect. From a user's perspective, you would trust them. If Google told you that putting nitroglycerin in your jalebi recipe makes it tastier and you didn't know what nitroglycerin was, Google is not going to take responsibility — their cheeky lawyers will correctly point out that there was a disclaimer in a font meant for ants which stated that AI Overviews are not to be trusted! (This trend in products is so common these days that it even has a name: it's called enshittification!)
You might now be wondering how to get out of this dystopian hellscape. Luckily, there's no need to wonder — we have the solution ready for you!
The Data Independence and Self-Hosting Project, simply known as DISH, was created by people you know and love from your family to solve this problem. Unlike Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta, you not only know who runs DISH but also get clear visibility into how all of it works. Transparency is very important to us, so every single time there is an upgrade or an outage, we have very clear explanations with precise timeframes. The explanations guarantee the same mistake is never to happen again. (Looking at you, Facebook, for having multiple LONG outages on WhatsApp!) Since DISH is built by us, we control the features on our apps. For example, if we were to make a browser, unless every member wanted to have a chat-based interface with it, it wouldn't exist. We also don't sell your data to anybody, and we can prove it to you. Heck, even sysadmins can't snoop on your data without you knowing! All your private data is securely stored on family premises. We can show you where your data is stored physically!
And, the best part for last — we are here to help you. We know moving emails and photos across the years is a massive undertaking, but unlike Big Tech where you can forget about even getting an AI bot to answer your query, we will get on to a call and guide you. Since most of the systems are designed around your feedback, (which we take very seriously!) they should be pretty easy to navigate or understand. (or will become easy to navigate once we incorporate your feedback!)
Does it cost anything? We all know that nobody would use WhatsApp today if it hadn't been for the fact that your friends/family use it. This effect is called the network effect and it also explains why products cause a lock-in even if they aren't actually that good. Switching is hard when no one uses it, and no one wants to use it when there is nothing game-changing from a user's perspective. With DISH, it's mainly a change in principles and philosophies. This is similar to Arattai, the chat app made by the venerable Zoho Corporation, which failed catastrophically simply because it couldn't pull enough users by saying "we made this in India". We want to try a different approach. We will bear expenses out-of-pocket for members who join DISH while it is in beta (sometimes called "pilot phase"). Not only that, but as previously mentioned, we will help you through the process of moving to it and also add features that you want. This way, we develop a collective value in the DISH network for each other, making it our own cozy, unique, and useful corner of the otherwise generic Internet.
Once DISH is out of beta, we will collectively decide a fair price that can be paid to cover infrastructure costs.