Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*.
During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone.
Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".
SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game:
- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing
- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on
- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.
- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.
- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini
- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.
- The Mac App Store was introduced
- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks
And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"
Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.
> This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.
Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.
It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.
At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.
I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.
I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.
Yeah, at one point in writing this article I had a brief aside about more "off-the-shelf", accessible solutions to self-hosting like Synology. But I cut it because I honestly don't think they make the process that much easier. They help with hardware, but the software setup I think is still pretty difficult. Thanks for reading!
Pre-iphone I had my MythTV server recording and transcoding TV shows and then adding them to an RSS feed that my flip-phone would sync whenever plugged in. Unplug my phone in the morning and watch last night's Daily Show on the bus ride to work. Kind of crazy to think of what we could do even back then
My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that also died as they stagnated). I thought people were a bit silly for spending so much on a phone then, and still do, because by the time I eventually got a "smartphone" with a touchscreen, there was enough competition in the market that still to this day I've never felt compelled by any phone product >$600
This still exists... OsmAnd, offline map app for Android, has 10M+ downloads. Maps.me has 50M+ downloads. Sure, that's not 10B+ of Google Maps users, but still a lot of users.
I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.
Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benefit like that from self hosting. I only see better privacy, more control and ownership over your data, and in some cases lower cost (but often higher), and those aren't nearly as powerful motivators for people.
I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
I think there is an effort being made for this. Some folks have created https://selfprivacy.org/ and continuously developing it. I follow this project by heart
> I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.
So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.
I set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here:
The author mostly just hand waves away self-hosting. There's an analogy that compares it to suburbia, but unlike the suburbs where you have to drive 40 minutes to get anywhere interesting, … an Internet hosted service is just as accessible, anywhere. It's a vapid analogy.
The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.
One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)
(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
I've thought deeply about this topic but from the pro-suburbia side and I actually agree with the analogy. At a bare minimum if you want to be independent you need a domain which is ~$10/year. That's a small amount but it's already more than most people will pay. (IMO this is irrational if you're paying >$500/year for cellular service but I digress.) Good home servers like Helm (RIP) or Umbrel are $300+ upfront. A good NAS that can also self-host is even more. As you said, if your ISP sucks maybe you have to upgrade to "pro" broadband that's more expensive. Ultimately you're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a worse replacement for services that are already "free".
Self-hosting is like spending money putting a swimming pool in your backyard when you could walk to a public pool instead.
I totally agree. I see this "people don't want to do hard stuff" argument used all over - completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff.
It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.
You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.
And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't negate the next part...
> and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
> in the standards, OIDC overcomes this
It's not the signup that's the hurdle. It's the fragmentation. Sure, if you implement OIDC, your friends can sign up to your photo app. And they can sign up to Sam's, and Joe's, and the app of the cute bakery on the street, and a couple others. What then? The whole value of a network is that the components are interconnected and can intercommunicate. If I have to upload my photos seventeen times to seventeen different partitioned applications for my various social groups to see them, I'm just as likely to not bother.
Fediverse-like ideas go some way towards addressing that, but they don't seem to be in any state of usability for anyone non-technical (I say that as someone who was using Mastodon as my only social media for the last couple of years)
I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think...
beyond individualism
What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.
In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
There has been a big move to web based apps (SAAS) as web-based software has improved. The biggest plus to web based software for the user is that there is no need to install anything.
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services.
I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.
This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.
Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits:
* Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite.
* Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain.
* Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers.
It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.
And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.
You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.
You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.
Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.
There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks.
I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
Moxie Marlinspike nailed this in his web3 critique from a couple years ago: "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as infrastructure... However – and I don't think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want."
That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience.
And to be honest, public libraries already do this, y'all. GO GET A LIBRARY CARD. You can stream from Kanopy at home.
Exactly! Here in Spain there is a network of web libraries that are proxies of your corresponding local library that allow lending as long as you have a library card. You even have magazines and newspapers, I know because I developed such network!
How come that a public library, one of the earliest examples of centralized information infrastructure, is not an example of outsourcing and relinquishing control? Instead of your own (small) books collection you get to use some external (huge) book collection. But now you only can borrow a physical book, or some recorded media. You have to return it, and making a copy for personal use only is still a bit problematic.
Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option. A best, you can outsource your stuff piecewise: run your own software on a cloud VM, or bring your own furniture into a rented apartment, or give a valet the keys to the car you own for parking, etc. But there's always some relinquishing of control in exchange to some other aspect of efficiency / comfort.
It's also easy to mistake what most people want for what everyone wants, and miss an important market.
> That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience.
If I were to run my own version of Google Photos and the like, I'd probably go with the hybrid option:
Run all the software I'd run if I was self-hosting, but in the cloud, possibly with a backup in a second cloud. ie, put my photos in Backblaze B2, with second copies in S3 or something.
Personally, half the reason I use Google Photos is so that if my house burns down, I don't lose my pictures. A self-hosted server running under my desk doesn't carry that guarantee. Backups are off-site for a reason.
Though maybe self-hosted at home with a single cloud backup would be good enough.
I don't feel like most people even know self-hosting is an option.
I wasn't aware of how most ingredients were made and what effect they had to my body. Once I learnt I started being way more careful with how I source food.
Same goes with technology: people don't understand that what they upload can be used against them or arbitrarily taken away from them, what they buy can be removed, that companies spy and abuse them. Once they do, many look into self-hosting or at least other alternatives from big tech. I've met many who want to self-host, but they lack the technical literacy to do so.
Moxie is wrong, he likes to project his own ideas as wisdom and always factually correct. P2P networks have flourished. Bittorrent, bitcoin, Tor just to name a few successful ones
Am I crazy or did my 2006 iMac come with a home media server for serving movies / tv shows / music photos from your filesystem. I think it even came with a slick looking remote!
You could stream content from it over your home network (as long as you were connecting from another Apple device)
Is this lost technology or just a figment of my imagination? I've long since switched to linux and run the typical Jellyfin setup etc
I’ve never had an iMac but my MacBook Pro circa 2009 came with a media remote. There was an infrared receiver on the body of the laptop in the front corner.
I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees.
To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.
I can also very simply assign a domain to it
and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.
> Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers
I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.
Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.
This is exactly what I’ve been building for a decade, but it’s not just a “community hosted cloud platform”, it is an entire reimagining of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram and all the other community platforms, for an open source world.
I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes.
If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu
For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
One company comes to mind that is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the current situation by offering a convenient self-hosting solution: Ubiquiti. Despite their pretty bad missteps 5 years ago, their UniFi product range is still very decent and user-friendly for SOHO/SMB networking, and they seem to have the appetite to continue expanding their product line into adjacent markets.
I have deployed simple UniFi setups for all my relatives, and they are very happy (though they couldn't have done it themselves). IMHO, they have the DNA to go further and offer a full self-hosted cloud, if they're willing to put in the effort to make it even easier and more integrated.
I like self hosting . It’s not just about privacy or owning something. To me a homelab is also a hobby. No different than previous generations that tinkered with their cars as a hobby. As someone who works in IT - there are also ancillary benefits. What I learn at work, I apply to my home lab and vice versa.
Couldn't this be solved by technical means? All those self-hosted boxes in people's homes could federate. That would allow the friends to upload their photos to an album. If you want to have copies of them on your local hard drive, a config flag could duplicate the data, automatically providing redundancy that's even useful for others. Not everyone wants to run a server at home and thoae who don't want to could rely on some third party, be it a public library, a non-profit, or even a for-profit offering some extra perks. The basic tech could be all the same, even the software stack.
I wonder if there are any startups in that space, there likely are. YC anyone? Whatare the obstacles?
Is Peergos the answer I'm looking for? If so, what's missing is a big push on the business/PR side. They'll need to replicate what Signal did for chat so that even my 80-year old mom can use it.
There have been solid efforts with niche adoption that have quite nice UX like Umbrel [1] that allows installing all the mentioned and a ton more open-source apps [2] just by using a UI. It was spawned as bitcoin node hardware+software combo but expanded and is now primarily about self-hosting.
The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.
Sure, you can own your server and have it at home. It must be nice to have enough space at home to dedicate some to a server room (servers are noisy btw). But many people live in small apartments in a city and so don't have that luxury.
You can own your server but rent some rack space from a data center to put it into. That would still be self-hosting.
You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting.
The author seems to not consider the fact that this is a spectrum but also, from a practical standpoint, mostly the same thing.
To me, the major issue of self-hosting (once overcome the tech barrier etc...) has always been protection. Not from external actors or attacks, but from incidents. By which I mean backups. Safest option is online backup, which is expensive and takes your data sovereignty away once again. Or I can once a year make a hard copy and take it to my parents (who live in a different country) for storage, and swap the backups out. Either way, very suboptimal. If anyone has a good way to achieve this, please lmk
[+] [-] voxleone|7 months ago|reply
During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
[+] [-] MoreQARespect|7 months ago|reply
Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".
SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
[+] [-] lloeki|7 months ago|reply
- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing
- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on
- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.
- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.
- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini
- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.
- The Mac App Store was introduced
- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks
And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"
Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.
[+] [-] Aurornis|7 months ago|reply
I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.
Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.
It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.
At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.
I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.
I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.
[+] [-] drew_lytle|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] blactuary|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|7 months ago|reply
I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.
[+] [-] subarctic|7 months ago|reply
I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
[+] [-] albus0x|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|7 months ago|reply
Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?
[+] [-] jazzyjackson|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] riku_iki|7 months ago|reply
if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.
So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.
[+] [-] NoboruWataya|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] m3nu|7 months ago|reply
https://www.pikapods.com/
[+] [-] jeffbee|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] youatme|7 months ago|reply
https://thebox.youatme.email/
Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.
[+] [-] deathanatos|7 months ago|reply
The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.
One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)
(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
[+] [-] wmf|7 months ago|reply
Self-hosting is like spending money putting a swimming pool in your backyard when you could walk to a public pool instead.
[+] [-] rel_ic|7 months ago|reply
It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.
[+] [-] Zacharias030|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] scubbo|7 months ago|reply
You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.
And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't negate the next part...
> and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app > in the standards, OIDC overcomes this
It's not the signup that's the hurdle. It's the fragmentation. Sure, if you implement OIDC, your friends can sign up to your photo app. And they can sign up to Sam's, and Joe's, and the app of the cute bakery on the street, and a couple others. What then? The whole value of a network is that the components are interconnected and can intercommunicate. If I have to upload my photos seventeen times to seventeen different partitioned applications for my various social groups to see them, I'm just as likely to not bother.
Fediverse-like ideas go some way towards addressing that, but they don't seem to be in any state of usability for anyone non-technical (I say that as someone who was using Mastodon as my only social media for the last couple of years)
[+] [-] bix6|7 months ago|reply
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
[+] [-] stego-tech|7 months ago|reply
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
[+] [-] jqpabc123|7 months ago|reply
What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.
In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.
[+] [-] hermitcrab|7 months ago|reply
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
[+] [-] jtrn|7 months ago|reply
I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.
This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.
Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits: * Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite. * Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain. * Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers. It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.
And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
[+] [-] kreco|7 months ago|reply
If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.
You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.
You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.
Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.
There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks. I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
[+] [-] waldopat|7 months ago|reply
That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience.
And to be honest, public libraries already do this, y'all. GO GET A LIBRARY CARD. You can stream from Kanopy at home.
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
[+] [-] ainiriand|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] amdivia|7 months ago|reply
But purely outcome wise, many people want the benefits of hosting their own servers
[+] [-] nine_k|7 months ago|reply
Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option. A best, you can outsource your stuff piecewise: run your own software on a cloud VM, or bring your own furniture into a rented apartment, or give a valet the keys to the car you own for parking, etc. But there's always some relinquishing of control in exchange to some other aspect of efficiency / comfort.
It's also easy to mistake what most people want for what everyone wants, and miss an important market.
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|7 months ago|reply
If I were to run my own version of Google Photos and the like, I'd probably go with the hybrid option:
Run all the software I'd run if I was self-hosting, but in the cloud, possibly with a backup in a second cloud. ie, put my photos in Backblaze B2, with second copies in S3 or something.
Personally, half the reason I use Google Photos is so that if my house burns down, I don't lose my pictures. A self-hosted server running under my desk doesn't carry that guarantee. Backups are off-site for a reason.
Though maybe self-hosted at home with a single cloud backup would be good enough.
[+] [-] myaccountonhn|7 months ago|reply
I wasn't aware of how most ingredients were made and what effect they had to my body. Once I learnt I started being way more careful with how I source food.
Same goes with technology: people don't understand that what they upload can be used against them or arbitrarily taken away from them, what they buy can be removed, that companies spy and abuse them. Once they do, many look into self-hosting or at least other alternatives from big tech. I've met many who want to self-host, but they lack the technical literacy to do so.
[+] [-] udev4096|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] drew_lytle|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] willquack|7 months ago|reply
You could stream content from it over your home network (as long as you were connecting from another Apple device)
Is this lost technology or just a figment of my imagination? I've long since switched to linux and run the typical Jellyfin setup etc
[+] [-] drew_lytle|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Shopper0552|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_engel|7 months ago|reply
To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.
I can also very simply assign a domain to it and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.
Am I missing something?
[+] [-] torium|7 months ago|reply
I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.
Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.
[1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch
[+] [-] EGreg|7 months ago|reply
Here is an overview of how the payments work: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
And here is the software you can try for yourself over a weekend: https://github.com/Qbix
If any of you do, let me know what you think!
I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179795
If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu
For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|7 months ago|reply
I have deployed simple UniFi setups for all my relatives, and they are very happy (though they couldn't have done it themselves). IMHO, they have the DNA to go further and offer a full self-hosted cloud, if they're willing to put in the effort to make it even easier and more integrated.
[+] [-] nirav72|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] teiferer|7 months ago|reply
I wonder if there are any startups in that space, there likely are. YC anyone? Whatare the obstacles?
[+] [-] teiferer|7 months ago|reply
Any other alternatives?
[+] [-] kbody|7 months ago|reply
The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.
[1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos
[2] https://apps.umbrel.com/
[+] [-] grishka|7 months ago|reply
Sure, you can own your server and have it at home. It must be nice to have enough space at home to dedicate some to a server room (servers are noisy btw). But many people live in small apartments in a city and so don't have that luxury.
You can own your server but rent some rack space from a data center to put it into. That would still be self-hosting.
You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting.
The author seems to not consider the fact that this is a spectrum but also, from a practical standpoint, mostly the same thing.
[+] [-] ggirelli|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] drew_lytle|7 months ago|reply