[HN Gopher] The future is not self-hosted
___________________________________________________________________
The future is not self-hosted
Author : drew_lytle
Score : 196 points
Date : 2025-07-25 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.drewlyton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.drewlyton.com)
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _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.
|
| But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Totally agree that without economic infrastructure supporting
| the model, it's completely unsustainable. Good-will is not a
| business model. Thanks for reading!
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's just like any other expense. You can get lunch delivered,
| or have a cafeteria onsite.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think that cycle will break one day.
|
| It's easy to trust a corporate overlord with your pictures or
| your email, because the immediate damage doable by somebody who
| has compromised those things is relatively low. Privacy is
| important I guess, but not when compared to things like whether
| your car or your insulin pump does what it needs to to keep you
| alive.
|
| Eventually, the bad guys will be sophisticated enough, and the
| tech will be integrated enough, that it's no longer safe to
| trust economic incentives alone. You're going to want your
| sysadmin to share your interests (in a more specific way than
| you get from they-also-like-money).
| dylnuge wrote:
| I'm part of several small/mid-sized communities where people
| voluntarily do sysadmin work so that the group can have some
| nice shared services, and that's to say nothing of the number
| of people I know running personal homelabs/self-hosting setups
| at decent cost just for fun. You could of course say that fun,
| maintaining something for friends you care about, or having a
| dream of less corporately locked-in software are all
| incentives, but they're not monetary ones.
|
| Really, it's easy to get sysadmin types interested in this; the
| problem is that most people aren't sysadmins and don't know
| any. If you really wanted a business model out of this, it'd
| probably be a managed service that lets non-tech-savvy users
| spin up their own versions of this without learning the
| details.
|
| > Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open
| source works --- without any guarantees or commitments
| whatsoever.
|
| There are plenty of successful economic models around open
| source, and plenty of open source software is used in high-
| reliability contexts. What comparison are you trying to make?
| cmilton wrote:
| I agree better incentives are needed for community hosting.
|
| Co-location is still readily available. Which service and
| reliability improvements are you looking for that competent sys
| admins couldn't provide with multiple co-lo's? Not everyone
| made the cloud jump.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| In the days of old, I had 2 different co-lo's shut down on me
| with minimal notice.
|
| I moved to AWS and haven't had that problem since.
| sgarland wrote:
| > What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-
| time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
|
| I'd do it for free. I've long been frustrated that I have more
| reliable infrastructure in my homelab than most companies I've
| worked for, and that none of them have any interest in shifting
| out of the cloud.
|
| I don't see a market for it, though. Most people are generally
| happy with Google, Apple, etc. to host their stuff, and I get
| it - it's quite reliable, integrates with the rest of their
| respective products nicely, and Just Works. Add to that the
| economies of scale, and it's a non-starter unless you find a
| niche group of people.
|
| Google One is $99/year for 2 TB of storage. For me to have
| confidence in uptime to offer public storage, I'd need at least
| 4U of colo rack space, and ideally 6U (2x 2U for HDD servers,
| 2x 1U for hosting applications in HA-ish). That would cost a
| few hundred USD/month, not to mention an initial outlay of tens
| of thousands of dollars for servers and drives (mostly the
| drives... high capacity enterprise-rated HDDs aren't cheap).
| And that's only for one site - ideally, of course, there are at
| least two, or at the very least, off-site backup like
| rsync.net.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _I'd do it for free._
|
| And if you get hit by a car? Or worse --- maybe you get
| married and have kids<g>?
|
| One big reason people *buy* service is
| sustainability/longevity/redundancy.
|
| There are no absolute guarantees but I think most commercial
| endeavors nowadays would bet on AWS/Google/MS/Apple over
| "Hosting by Joe and Friends".
| esseph wrote:
| There is no guarantee that the service you buy will exist
| tomorrow, and if they go out of business, there is no
| guarantee you can get your data out before they close the
| platform.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Yes, exactly as I stated --- there are few guarantees in
| life. So use your best judgment and place your bets
| accordingly.
|
| Personally, I'm betting on those who are highly
| incentivized and have the resources and structure needed
| to sustain reliable service.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Who is more highly incentivized than oneself, to keep
| their valuable data and treasured memories safe and
| sustained?
| sgarland wrote:
| I have zero desire to host things commercially, as in for
| businesses; the point of TFA (at least, as I read it) was
| community-based, for people.
|
| Also, FWIW I am married and have kids. Hasn't stopped me
| from homelabbing.
| esseph wrote:
| Woah woah woah I thought as an industry we clearly didn't need
| sysadmins anymore /s
| fragmede wrote:
| > When you need something more with service and reliability,
| well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
|
| Not all corporate overloads are equal. Or rather, if you and
| your buddies get together and pay the $350+fees to legalzoom to
| start a corporation, you too, can be a corporate overload.
| There's still miles to go before you're Facebook, but
| congratulations, you're now... still the same person you were
| before you clicked that button on legalzoom's webpage and spent
| $500 or whatever.
|
| Where is the problem of people turning into corporate overloads
| for you? Is it at 10 employees? 100? 1,000? 10,000? If we're
| too stupid to differentiate specific corporations because their
| legal structure means they're all exactly the same, then yeah,
| I guess there's no hope and we're all doomed.
| bix6 wrote:
| 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.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > I don't think most people realize how much they've given up.
|
| I think many are overstating how much people are giving up.
| People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had
| any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's
| why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.
|
| > Unfortunately it's a fair bit of work to reclaim everything
| as your story shows.
|
| This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason
| why people prefer letting other people doing this work.
|
| > I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy
| from my ISP
|
| I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is
| already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking
| here about separate modem & router?
| garciasn wrote:
| > People exchange control for comfort, but most people never
| had any need or ability for this control in the first place.
| That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.
|
| I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and
| maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP,
| httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and
| went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing
| many of the same things I did at home.
|
| I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to
| manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better
| things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab
| (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with
| work, I just want to go outside or read a book.
|
| I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications;
| but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more
| to me at this point in my life.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I do the same things (self-hosted server, NAS storage, DNS,
| email, http for a handful of domains, some development VMs)
| and it's really set-and-forget. It doesn't require
| maintenance. Every once in a while LetsEncrypt's certbot
| falls over and I have to log in to manually refresh ssh
| certificates, but HN commenters tell me it's user error, so
| it's something I can also fix to be set-and-forget if I
| really cared.
|
| My self-hosting infrastructure will probably outlive me.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| The person you're replying to said they maintained a
| homelab for 15 years. I'm sure they have the experience
| to correctly gauge the amount of effort required. What
| you're arguing is qualitative. There is _some_
| maintenance, as you admitted, and the OP has other
| priorities.
|
| I personally relate to the person you're replying to. I
| sleep better not worrying about HDD health or if my APs
| can reach their controller. Tried it - not for me.
| bambax wrote:
| > _most people never had any need or ability for this control
| in the first place_
|
| Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read
| a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to
| search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies
| any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any
| media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or
| politics.
|
| I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and
| if it can't be, I return it immediately.
|
| Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not
| that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done
| via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if
| you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who
| is.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| > _most people_
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-
| read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my
| desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch
| good movies any time.
|
| That's your demand, not everyone's demand. And it seems are
| also indirectly assuming here that this is impossible
| without self-hosting, which also is not necessarily true.
|
| The problem, is, we don't know. Self-hosting is like
| backups, it's working for a situation which might or might
| not happen; it's annoying, and it can save your ass, but
| most of the time you will never know if it ever will save
| your ass, until it actually happens. And until that point,
| it's just annoying. So we usually don't know if we really
| want to re-read a specific book and whether it has been
| become unavailable for us. We simply don't know that, until
| it happens.
|
| > I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I
| produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or
| politics.
|
| True, but that's why you should have backups. You don't
| need to manage a whole infrastructure for all your stuff,
| when you can also just make regularly backups. Of course,
| to be fair, most people don't even make backups, or know
| how to manage them well. But I would say those people can't
| (or should?) self-host their infrastructure anyway, they
| would probably blow their own data up in one way or another
| and lose them anyway.
|
| > I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I
| return it immediately.
|
| See, that's your stance, most people don't give an f**
| about this. They want things now, and don't care for some
| uncertain future.
|
| > but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical.
|
| Which most people are not. But it's not about the technical
| ability, self-hosting is mainly a problem of time, money
| and habit. Yes, many people can get it done if they invest
| into it, but they don't, many can't. And that won't ever
| change.
| bix6 wrote:
| If it was easier to do the work yourself I think more would
| out of privacy, price, and longevity concerns.
|
| Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my
| ISP from individual MAC so they can't see as much device
| level info. Plus they wouldn't let me setup a guest network.
| And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for
| fun. I run a device VPN when I don't want them to see traffic
| but I'll likely set it up network wide when I have time,
| which I couldn't do on their system.
| mihaaly wrote:
| > That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain
| popular.
|
| Or, because they do not know and do not care what is
| happening. Yes, they only care about comfort, who reads TOS
| anyway, right?! : /
|
| But if the same was happening to their physical not digital
| properties then they might be furious.
| jahewson wrote:
| Most traffic nowadays is HTTPS so as long as you configure
| your router to use a non-ISP DNS resolver such 1.1.1.1
| (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google) then your ISP cannot see
| your traffic.
|
| However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are
| completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees
| for remote support. As they are your router they also get to
| see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains
| encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP
| have access to my hardware.
| bluGill wrote:
| It is not just that it is a lot of work, it is that you lose
| power, or add a lot of risk. The example doesn't mention
| backups at all - when (not if) the computer fails then what?
| How do you access this cloud when not at home - again I didn't
| see this. How do you share data (only some please) with
| friends? How will you handle zero-days if the attacker decides
| to attack you - will you even notice or be the bad guy on the
| internet enabling attacks on others? Once you get things
| working when/how will you update - I've had several services
| that worked good until I updated and something in the config
| didn't migrate correctly and so it doesn't work.
|
| I have some self hosted things, but because of the above I'm
| realizing that it is better to find someone to pay to take care
| of things for me. Someone large enough to get a sysadmin around
| 24x7, do trail upgrades, write the software/features...
| Unfortunately finding someone you can trust to do the above is
| important, and for many things there is no option.
|
| I will likely always run jellyfix (or similar) for legal
| reasons. However for most things it would be better to pay
| someone I trust.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| - Backups can be sent to the commercial cloud (encrypted)
| using Duplicati among other solutions. Or just a separate
| hard drive.
|
| - You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned
| it.
|
| - You can allow external access to your apps safely using
| cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google
| photos and there's even a really good app!
|
| - Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic
| hygiene and monitoring it should be fine. And you aren't a
| profitable target anyway.
|
| - Update require to restart the container with the latest
| release, your data isn't erased. Solutions such as Umbrel
| have a community of open source devs doing the updates for
| you.
|
| Overall, it's not about removing all of our dependency to
| commercial services, but to do the switch slowly and regain
| autonomy. Having an alternative, however how imperfect it is
| (Jellyfin often freezes for me!) is worth it - otherwise the
| future is bleak.
| chneu wrote:
| Immich rules. They just dropped a pretty big release that
| improved the android app experience quite a bit.
|
| Everyone go checkout immich.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Interesting! I'm planning on running PiHole in the near future
| to block ads at the network level. Excited for some more, "It
| was DNS" moments.
|
| To the point about people not knowing how much they've given
| up, I think another way to phrase this is that people don't
| know how much has been taken away from them. This is why we
| need better consumer protections for internet services.
| pimlottc wrote:
| For every person that has "giving something up" compared to
| what they had, there are five people gaining what they never
| had before. That is why these hosted services are popular. They
| bring cutting edge tools and platforms to people who would
| never have been able to set them up and maintained them
| themselves.
|
| That's not to say there aren't issues of ownership and control
| to be concerned about, but they are providing real value to
| many users, especially those who aren't technically minded.
| jmclnx wrote:
| It is nice that he created a cloud environment for a
| pointy/clicky people :)
|
| But if I where to do such a thing:
|
| 1. Cloud only used to send and store locally encrypted compressed
| backup data
|
| 2. Open an ssh port to the public, but deny logins. Only allow
| logins using ssh keys.
|
| 3. Download data from my system using sftp/scp
|
| This protects you from being chased by DRM lawyers because the
| system is not public. Plus it is very simple to setup.
|
| Setting up a Cloud System like described here is very great for
| end users, but it could get you into court, or at the very least
| lots of take-down notices.
| JimmyBiscuit wrote:
| The dude set it up to use Tailscale, so not really public. But
| it was only mentioned in passing.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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?
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > And I don't remember any story of them ever doing it even for
| the NSA. Do you?
|
| Is this meant to be tongue in cheek?
| EGreg wrote:
| No, I am serious.
|
| Do you have links to stories of AWS breaking into EC2
| instances to eg read RAM for data that is encrypted at rest?
|
| And even if they do, this would present an issue for privacy,
| but the protocols would still enforce their own permissions
| (eg no custom amazon DRM for books).
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Most of how the NSA operates is classified but this does
| not sound far-fetched to me in the slightest. Cloud
| providers frequently provide law enforcement information
| via subpoena. It's not really "breaking in."
|
| From 2015, AWS asserted they were not involved in the PRISM
| program, but they would be under a gag order if they were,
| so you've gotta take it with a grain of salt:
| https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300077146/aws-finally-
| release...
|
| Meanwhile:
|
| > From the start of this calendar year through May, AWS
| received 813 subpoenas from the U.S. government seeking
| access to customer accounts. In those five months, the
| Seattle-based cloud provider fully complied with 542 of
| those court orders, submitted partial information in
| response to 126 and didn't respond at all to 145.
|
| > Through the same period, Amazon received 25 search
| warrants from federal authorities and turned over all the
| data sought by about half of them, partially fulfilled
| eight others and withheld information requested by four of
| the warrants.
|
| > AWS fully responded to only four out of 13 court orders
| that weren't subpoenas or warrants, while refusing to turn
| over any data related to four of those.
|
| > Foreign governments were more successful with their
| solicitations to Amazon. Of the 132 non-U.S. requests
| fielded by the cloud provider, more than 80 percent yielded
| complete data disclosures, while just 13 percent hit a dead
| end. Amazon also complied with the only request it received
| during the five months under review to actually remove a
| user's data from its servers.
| EGreg wrote:
| Alright mate, so for the 99.9% of cases encryption at
| rest is enough. For data you truly don't want cloud
| providers to see, just use end-to-end encryption.
|
| But no one has to run their own servers. The only reason
| I see them doing so is to provide redundancy in case the
| cloud providers want to DELETE some data or take nodes
| offline.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Wow! Thanks for sharing! I'll check this out!
| webdevver wrote:
| sad but true.
| MoreQARespect wrote:
| 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.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Unlike with smartphones though, I don't really see that anyone
| has a strong enough incentive and deep enough pockets to bridge
| that gap.
| slightwinder wrote:
| I think, money is not really the problem here. Self-hosting
| is a shitshow on the same level and for the same reasons
| because of which package-management on python has been such a
| shitshow for so many years. There are too many conflicting
| usecases, and not enough effort for standardization.
| lowwave wrote:
| They however can run their own app or desktop app that can to
| peer to peer communication. The whole point of self hosting
| is that we can have data and network sovereignty.
| theamk wrote:
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| Isn't Organic Maps the open source successor of Maps.me?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| And CoMaps the successor of Organic
| jeffbee wrote:
| This did not happen with the iPhone. It happened with the
| BlackBerry.
| xnx wrote:
| > It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
|
| Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on
| phones?
| kamarg wrote:
| Mostly battery life I would think
| the_snooze wrote:
| For single-user single-device scenarios, that's totally
| doable. It's called a purely-local app.
|
| Where it gets complicated is there's a (totally
| understandable) expectation these days that your data is
| synced across multiple devices, and you can collaborate with
| other users, who may also have multiple devices themselves.
| In practice, that necessitates some kind of always-on server
| that maintains state for everyone. A phone can technically do
| that, but you'd probably kill your battery in the process.
| fragmede wrote:
| What happens to the site when that phone gets lost or stolen
| or falls on the floor and breaks?
| xnx wrote:
| Phone apps could backup data to another location the same
| way a laptop can.
| fragmede wrote:
| but then why not host from that second location?
| potatolicious wrote:
| A whole host of reasons:
|
| - Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as
| long as it does is because it _severely_ restricts the
| ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an
| email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to
| the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its
| original purpose.
|
| - Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is
| intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local,
| but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the
| internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to
| talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into
| the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP
| server tried to connect to it.
| xnx wrote:
| Right, but you can leave a spare phone plugged in and
| connected to wifi just like a laptop.
| the_snooze wrote:
| The point is that while phones are _able_ to do what you
| suggest, they 're not fit for purpose. A phone shouldn't
| be used as a long-term server because it turns into a
| fire hazard as the battery degrades. And you can't just
| remove the battery because most phones won't even power
| on without a battery (even when plugged in).
|
| At that point, you're better off going with some N100
| mini-PC or such. But that's not a phone.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Yep, at that point we've circled back to the original
| years-long conversation about home servers, except now
| instead of a cheap mini-PC it's a phone. The distinction
| isn't meaningful.
|
| And I'll remind folks that we've been talking about the
| power of people owning their own servers in their homes
| for decades, and yet the vast vast vast vast majority of
| users aren't doing it.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| > Battery life Would it be any more battery life consuming
| than having an always on connection for push notifications?
| I used to have a local http/ftp file server running on my
| Nokia N9/N900 and even on my early Android phones back in
| the day. I used to still get an all day battery life.
|
| > Imagine losing an email because you walked into the
| subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP
| server tried to connect to it.
|
| Dont SMTP servers already retry a few times before giving
| up? Plus it is not like you're using the phone to host
| content for the whole of the internet. It would be just for
| your close circle usually.
|
| I am not saying phones make the perfect servers for all
| kind of applications but for certain kind of workflows... I
| think Phones are pretty good. Our network infrastructure
| (NAT, firewalls etc... limited data plans etc..) is the
| main headache for most of these use cases. But the network
| infrastructure is a problem even for our laptops, home
| computers etc..
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| What kind of apps would you want to self host on phones?
| albus0x wrote:
| 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
| cryptonym wrote:
| The very first thing they show on the website is a list of
| cloud providers.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I don't think that's a gotcha. Using a cloud provider in a
| way that provides easy migration options can be valid on
| the spectrum of self-hosting options. The ones they list
| specialize in renting virts by the hour/day/month, not
| lock-in services with no external equivalent.
| blactuary wrote:
| 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
| drew_lytle wrote:
| 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!
| subarctic wrote:
| 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
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Synology is getting there with their one click install of lots
| of apps, and a "drop a dockerfile here" for anything else.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I suspect that's just a temporary sweet spot before they
| start locking things down to their "trusted" (i.e., paid-for)
| partners.
|
| They're already doing that on the hardware side.
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/synology-confirms-
| ne...
| lloeki wrote:
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| Basically a Mac Server would have fixed 99% of our needs.
| Apple could make a Local iCloud Server / iOS Time Capsule
| where I still have all the content, but would require a
| subscription just for the backup services. And Apple could
| charge 3x the Amazon Cold Storage pricing just for reselling
| it.
|
| I do think this is within realm of possibility if Steve Jobs
| is still alive. Or at least could be convinced.
|
| Tim Coo only cares about services revenue. And iCloud it is.
| wmf wrote:
| Apple explicitly called it the Digital Hub strategy. But they
| never went all the way.
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| mystraline wrote:
| That all depends if you're willing to run stuff yourself, or be
| subservient on the good will of companies not to enshittify (pro-
| tip, they always will).
|
| I self-host the following: Video: Jellyfin
| Audio: Navidrome Audiobooks: Audiobookshelf
| Phone image sharing: Immich Home automation:
| Homeassistant Office suite: NextCloud
| Monitoring: LibreNMS Compute: Proxmox AI/LLM
| local: open-webui
| crashabr wrote:
| What kind of machine do you need to run all of this
| concurrently?
| jerf wrote:
| I'm running Immich, syncthing (watching about 2TB in 150,000
| files), jellyfin, and pihole, as well as remoting in to a
| browser session, on this:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH81C4K3 which is a $125 NUC with
| 8GB of RAM and an Intel N150. I know from experience that
| adding NextCloud to it would work out OK for a family, and I
| imagine you could shove most of the rest of that list on to
| this system as well, though in the case of ProxMox I'm just
| talking about the management. Obviously I'm not running very
| many full VMs on that before it runs out of RAM. (I don't
| even know if it can run VMs. Everything's docker in this
| setup.) The bottleneck appears to be RAM as that is eating
| about half of it right now. The CPU only works when someone
| is doing something, and there is some contention at startup
| as all of the services start scanning their storage for
| changes, but it gets through it.
|
| jellyfin is configured to not transcode anything. The vast
| bulk of my library is DVD/BluRay rips of my own creation and
| I just ripped them in the desired format in the first place.
| This could probably keep up with a single DVD-quality re-
| encode, I dunno about Blu-Ray (depending on config, perhaps),
| but I just have it serve the correct files in the first
| place.
|
| There's a ~$125 5TB USB drive hanging off of it for the media
| storage, which syncthing syncs to another 5TB drive in the
| house. (I don't actually "back up" my media storage in the
| full sense; everything else is actually backed up in the full
| sense to S3 via restic.) The "contention" I mentioned above
| is because all the big data sets are mostly on that spinning-
| rust drive.
|
| The Immich AI features worked fine on this, though it did
| take overnight to process my initial load of ~20 years of
| photos. However once it chewed through that, the
| responsiveness is fantastic.
|
| If you want responsive AI that uses GPUs this isn't anywhere
| near enough, but for any "conventional" app, $125 or $250
| buys you a _lot_ nowadays.
| chneu wrote:
| Chiming in to say I also run an n150 with mostly the same
| software. It does fine. Storage is 50tb of old server HDD
| so pretty cheap.
|
| I ran an n100 until last week. Worked fine.
|
| I have plex setup to transcode and it serves about 10 users
| just fine. My plexamp sonic analysis took like 4 days
| though, lol, but everyone says it takes forever.
|
| My immich import took about 20 hours? So not bad.
|
| I run all my home automation off it. 100+ devices, logging,
| etc. no issues.
|
| I also sometimes run an OBS stream on it to transcode for
| YT. The n150 does fine.
|
| Total cost for me is about $550. I saved a lot on HDD by
| going used server drives. $140 for the n150, $300 for
| drives, then a cheap UPS and router running openwrt.
|
| As for difficulty, most of this is deployed in a few
| minutes using docker or install scripts. The hardest part
| is the choice between various solutions.
| mystraline wrote:
| I bought a dell server from a refurb dealer. 40 core, 128GB
| ram, 48TB storage, rack sliders. For $1000.
|
| It handles all but the AI/LLM. I have a throwaway box with
| 32GB ram and cores with a nvidia 2080 that does the LLM side
| of things.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Which raises the question: do they even own those books?
|
| nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought
| without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no
| matter if you bought a license or not
|
| in additions license with clear deadline should always be
| required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited
| guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which
| you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another
| checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no
| reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly.
| It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything
| harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices
| or violence .)
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Couldn't agree more - thanks for reading and commenting!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Yes! And I think this way of building software is having a
| come-back with the local-first movement! https://lofi.so/
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| It's a shame they're using Discord, a centralized silo of
| proprietary ownership, for community.
| yonz wrote:
| I hear you. What platform would you recommend? Is discord a
| blocker for you?
| rs186 wrote:
| > My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open-
| source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible,
| Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured
| behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us.
|
| Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero
| gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full
| of negative impact.
| arscan wrote:
| A danger with the arrangement of this article is that it takes
| awhile to get to the point, which actually in line with your
| view. He hints at it in the title and the very next paragraph,
| but maybe you didn't get that far?
|
| > And this week, I want to share with you how I did it, what I
| learned, and why I think self-hosting is NOT the future we
| should be fighting for.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Haha yes I have a tendency to bury the lede a little - thanks
| for reading!
| kwanbix wrote:
| While I know what you mean, money is one positive thing. The
| rest, you only realize the day google blocks your account
| because some stupid AI flagged a picture and they think you are
| a risk and kick you out.
| chneu wrote:
| Zero gain? Say that when your Google account is flagged because
| of any number of nonsense reasons. Or there's an issue that
| simply wipes your data from any number of services. Or a court
| requests access to your data and you have no idea.
|
| You're leaving your entire digital existence up to companies
| who will and have ruined people's lives.
|
| I think it says a lot about how much we've given up that
| control over your data and access to your data is seen as "zero
| gain" or "full of negative impact."
|
| It's wild how little people care about their own rights.
| Capitalism and hustle culture make it so easy to give up so
| much while receiving so little in return. The pressure to give
| up more is constant and people willfully lean into it.
| QuiCasseRien wrote:
| > The future is community-hosted
|
| That's old school P2P since 25 year. this is not new and not
| future...
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The reason why giving this storage and control over to any
| company doesn't work is because their incentives are always
| towards enshitiffication. The issue of community access can
| always be solved by self hosting on a rented cloud server, its
| still your data under your control its just someone elses box
| with a high speed internet connection and global accessibility,
| self hosting gives you the choice who sees and uses it and how.
| The hardware isn't actually the important bit, its the software.
|
| I think its not the future in its current form either, because it
| requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical
| users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays.
| But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the
| maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the
| internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data
| theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Couldn't agree more! Thanks for reading and leaving a comment
| Paul!
| redog wrote:
| Hybrid runners are self hosted... it's like paying to cook things
| on your own stove.
| skeezyboy wrote:
| it effing well is
| skeezyboy wrote:
| plus it appears to be cyclical as we began with mainframes,
| then to pcs now back to the cloud, and given how arm is
| beginning to dominate i bet well see miniaturization push us
| back to local again
| riffic wrote:
| pendulum swing
| meonkeys wrote:
| Well-said, Drew! This is inspiring.
|
| The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is
| brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-
| hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and
| perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes
| end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah,
| that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the
| hard thing because it's the right thing. Heck, maybe the right
| thing will also be the easy thing if we come up with better ideas
| like yours.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Thanks so much for reading a commenting friend! Here's hoping
| together!
| VikingCoder wrote:
| So, the thing we have right now is Tailscale - and it's freaking
| awesome.
|
| But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for
| people, not machines.
|
| I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and
| which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if
| they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to
| federate together.
|
| It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this.
|
| I get that you can basically do this with Tailscale. Basically.
| But I want the next thing to be designed from the ground-up
| around this kind of design. People, sharing apps with each other.
| nicman23 wrote:
| that is just usenet with extra steps
| VikingCoder wrote:
| No, thanks. I want to limit the number of people I share
| content with. Not broadcast to the world.
| fragmede wrote:
| You can invite other users into your tailnet.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Right, but that doesn't work when I have a hundred friends,
| and they each have a hundred friends, and etc.
|
| If I "Share" nodes on my tailnet with a hundred people, it's
| way closer to what I want.
| fragmede wrote:
| Tailscale lets you grant various admin roles to other
| users, but it does also let you share individual nodes to
| people. Maybe that suits you're needs? It's on you to
| manage the human trust relationships though, but no
| technology can fix that problem for you.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Sounds interesting and kind of similar to
| https://solidproject.org/. Thanks for reading and commenting!
| kreco wrote:
| I strongly agree with the global sentiment.
|
| 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.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| Exactly. It's a great article, but the depressing part is that
| there's a very limited catalog of legal media available to use
| these services with (except for immich, I suppose).
|
| For games, there's GOG. Good luck finding bigger releases.
|
| For music, there's Bandcamp and CDs and vinyl. Fortunately,
| most albums still release on either one of these.
|
| Audiobookshelf can be used for most podcasts (some do not have
| a traditional RSS feed and are in some walled garden) and some
| audio books are available DRM free, but tons of books are
| Audible exclusives. I'm relatively sure that they also stop
| authors from publishing e.g. on Royal Road once they're on
| there.
|
| The same is true for e-books - HumbleBundle and co are great,
| but good luck finding certain titles. I regret buying a new
| Kindle, but at least had the foresight to download all my books
| before they stopped allowing that. Physical books are an
| option, but that's not an equivalent to en e-book.
|
| I stopped caring about TV shows and movies a long time ago
| (largely due to the atrocious streaming fragmentation, pricing,
| and the sheer audacity to include ads in paid plans), but I
| assume 95% of all shows are exclusive to some streaming giant,
| too.
| esseph wrote:
| Can't backup game save on switch, then what am I doing with
| these memory cards with switch games data on them?
| kreco wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| The website [0] is pretty clear that the content of the game
| can go into a SD card, but the game save resides only in the
| internal memory.
|
| You can find some ways to get them with some modding but
| nothing official.
|
| [0] https://www.nintendo.com/ph/support/switch/data_managemen
| t/i...
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Totally. There's a whole other article somewhere in there about
| the, "If buying isn't owning than piracy isn't stealing"
| sentiment online. Thanks for reading!
| mmstgshj wrote:
| I don't know if this idea was inspired by the Library Socialism
| movement or if it is an instance of "great minds think alike",
| but people who like this idea, may find Library Socialism
| appealing as well
|
| https://librarysocialism.org/
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Seems _very_ inline! Thanks for sharing!
| kbody wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos
|
| [2] https://apps.umbrel.com/
| slightwinder wrote:
| There are many solutions like Umbrel, but they all suffer from
| limited amount of apps, and depending on someone maintaining
| them. You basically have to choose them by which apps you want
| to use, and how that it will get maintained long enough.
|
| What we need is something more universal, like a more
| userfriendly docker, or something like flatpak+hub for server-
| apps.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| So interesting! I'll have to check those out! Thanks for
| reading and commenting!
| torium wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Interesting! Thanks for sharing! Stallman was, indeed, right
| lol
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating
| self hosting with having a physical server in your house.
|
| Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my
| server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your
| server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's
| server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self
| hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| > Self hosting and community collaboration need to be
| incompatible.
|
| Totally agree, but there's a lot more nuance here. Giving each
| friend an account on my server would require it be exposed to
| the public internet which is difficult to manage securely. And
| SSO doesn't really make this very convenient because that means
| everyone would have to sign in and sync to everyone's servers
| which is a lot of work for the user. It's a UX problem.
|
| The solution as I see it here is services that can interoperate
| and sync files across hosts. So, my friend's Alice and Bob can
| both have their photos synced to a separate server and can
| choose which photos to share to my server. Separate but
| connected.
|
| Thanks for reading and for your comment!
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Right, the services should allow federation, but _that doesn
| 't mean you need to federate with the entire world_. You and
| your friend should be able to just click "invite" in your "My
| Home" app to get a link to text to each other like
| `myhome://invite?domain=<random>.services.frienddomain.com`
| (or a QR code flow). Under that TLD you have well-known
| subdomains and TXT records for e.g. wireguard config, oauth
| server location, etc. When you open the link in your "My
| Home" app, it adds the wireguard peer and starts trying to
| perform oauth client autoregistration and federate any
| services you run. When your friend clicks your link, it'll
| set up the other half of those connections. Once you've both
| clicked, things start talking to each other. This all stays
| invisible to the normal Internet for anyone that doesn't know
| the root domain to search for records under.
|
| This could all run on one of those $130 N150 minipcs that
| uses like 8W and could run 24/7. It's a lot of integration
| work, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a fairly off-
| the-shelf product.
|
| You could also explore other service discovery patterns since
| buying a domain name is a pain. Like have the URL provide the
| initial wireguard config (including outside IP) and DNS
| search domain, and then the servers on each end can query
| (private) DNS on the other end via the tunnel for services.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| > our friends can't access our server
|
| You're almost there with your excellent lineup of self-hosted
| tech. Just throw in Headscale and some Tailscale clients and
| you'll be there. (Or any number of mesh VPN alternatives, like
| NetBird)
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > but isn't suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and
| associated costs.
|
| Complexity, sure. But for most people, the cost of Netflix,
| Spotify and whatever will quickly add up to a 500usd server.
| With 1-10 users you don't need much.
| chneu wrote:
| Docker has basically solved the deployment issue.
|
| For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up in ~5
| minutes with a docker compose and env file.
|
| There are whole OSes built around it, like casaOS which gives
| users a neat front end/dashboard for their self hosted stuff.
|
| Also for cost eh idk. For $300 you can have enough hardware and
| storage to self host everything, even a Google photos
| alternative. Most people spend much more than that on
| subscriptions for storage, streaming, etc. I guess a UPS is
| necessary and adds a bit of cost. There are also plenty of pre-
| built kits for this.
|
| I do agree that it isn't for everyone. Its finicky to get just
| right and security can be very annoying. Security is already a
| crapshoot though so I'm not sure that's necessarily a ding for
| self-hosted.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| > For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up
| in ~5 minutes with a docker compose and env file.
|
| That is a very small part of operating. How about keeping it
| update and running? Data backed up?
| stego-tech wrote:
| Docker is still too complex for the layman, and that's
| ultimately who we have to win over anyway. Big Tech makes
| it super easy to surrender privacy and sovereignty by
| giving them your e-mail and a password to create an account
| and use a new thing. Apps make it easy to do the same, but
| now for your physical location and device identifiers as
| well.
|
| Until setting up a private chatroom for your family is as
| easy as downloading an app on your phone, people are going
| to keep going back to Big Tech. UX for IT folk and UX for
| the layman are entirely different beasts, and the UX for IT
| is only recently improving thanks to things like Docker and
| the containerization of software making it more widespread
| and commoditized.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand
| different companies offering hosting, all over the world.
| That's a bunch more diverse than the government doing hosting,
| as per your suggestion. Or having towns contracting Microsoft
| for it, which would be the result with kolkhoz or sovkhoz cloud
| hosting.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand
| different companies offering hosting, all over the world.
|
| Last time _I_ checked, AWS was estimated to have ~5% of all
| web sites in the world hosted in its infrastructure, while
| AWS+GCP+Azure _combined_ equate to ~66% of the _global_ cloud
| compute market. That doesn 't even get into the "providers"
| who are really just reselling major providers at a markup
| (like Vercel).
|
| It doesn't matter if your town has hundreds of storefronts if
| one subsidized Walmart is putting them all out of business.
| Likewise, if every business in town is dependent on the
| Walmart, then it's really Walmart that controls things and
| not individual or collective business owners.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Thanks for reading and for the kinds words! Would love to read
| more about the USPS concept and couldn't agree more about the
| UX gap.
|
| Lets connect! Send me an email - hn@drewlyton.com!
| V__ wrote:
| I disagree with some of the authors takes here:
|
| > Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those
| same things
|
| Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto
| a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of
| services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of
| the data and software, than the location of the hardware.
|
| > Well...since our friends can't access our server, the only good
| way to do that would probably be using an app like Google Photos
| or iCloud
|
| Get a domain and set up a subdomain for Immich (maybe add a
| tunnel if it is a home server). I have friends using my Immich
| instance without problems, it's just another app.
|
| > I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-
| services.
|
| I can't see how one can convince people to switch to a community
| cloud if Apple Cloud etc. exists. Most people just won't
| understand the difference or benefits.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Thanks for your comment! Yes, I ignored the VPS angle simply
| for ease of narrative, but you're right. I also updated the
| shared album example to hopefully better explain why this is
| hard from a technical and UX perspective.
|
| As to the "convince people to switch" angle, I think the
| benefits of data interoperability would be pretty significant
| and eventually lead people to switch to providers that have
| that _or_ would likely incentivize providers like Apple to
| implement that into their products.
|
| Ideally, no one would have to switch and everything would just
| get better.
| V__ wrote:
| I like the vision though and would love to see it become
| reality, if just to have the alternative.
| will5421 wrote:
| Could the friends access the server through the VPN?
|
| > It's secured behind our own VPN.
|
| > So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where
| we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Well...since our
| friends can't access our server
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Definitely! But even if I could convince everyone I know to do
| that, that feels like a nightmare to manage haha. Thanks for
| reading and commenting!
| mmstgshj wrote:
| https://disroot.org/ is already doing this, though not all its
| services are end to end encrypted. They are explicit about what
| is e2ee though.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Looks super interesting! Thanks for sharing!
| palata wrote:
| I sometimes wonder about "managed hosting" (or whatever it is
| called). For instance, some providers like Hetzner or Infomaniak
| offer a "Nextcloud managed instance". So you pay a subscription
| and they maintain your Nextcloud instance for you. Which is
| presumably simpler and safer than doing it yourself at home.
|
| On such an instance, one can share a folder with a friend, for
| instance. And I think Nextcloud is even working on federation
| (?).
|
| One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at
| least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is
| in your country).
| bayindirh wrote:
| > One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but
| at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that
| is in your country).
|
| You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at
| Hetzner. I host my own Nextcloud, and I know it supports
| encryption, but apparently Hetzner also allows you to do so.
|
| On the other hand, if you want a standard cloud provider,
| pCloud provides good encryption support. Also they have a nice
| FUSE based client, and they're interoperable with tons of
| tools, too.
|
| Returning to Nextcloud, you can share files/folders directly
| (with expiration/password) or add more users with limited
| access to your folders.
|
| BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy, let it be
| container based or bare-metal install. It never let me down
| over the years.
| palata wrote:
| > You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at
| Hetzner.
|
| Doesn't it mean that they can still access your data while
| the server is running? I mean, they run the server, they must
| have access to it, right?
|
| > pCloud provides good encryption support
|
| You mean e2ee? If it's about sending files to an untrusted
| server, I use restic. Works with pretty much everything
| (including pCloud) :-).
|
| > BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy
|
| Sure, but what I was saying is that either you do it at home
| and it makes it harder (you want your home LAN to be secure
| :-) ) or you do it on a VPS, and _someone else_ has access to
| your data.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is a super interesting path! Federation of
| Nextcloud would be _crazy_. Thanks for reading and commenting!
| hengheng wrote:
| I can't see _community-hosting_ taking off. I do not trust
| anybody telling me about E2E encryption that I can not prove.
|
| _I barely trust Google_.
|
| I trust the long bearded neighborhood nerd much less than most
| companies. Even if I probably am that person in my neighborhood.
| But nobody should trust me, and I am not going to tell them to
| trust me.
|
| Even if everything is encrypted, I can almost guarantee that the
| community shared server will be confiscated by the police once in
| the next three decades.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Yeah, trusting people and systems is hard. But _we live in a
| society_ and trust is just part of the game. For me, I am far
| more likely to trust a community of people that all build,
| operate, and own a service we all rely on than a company that
| will sacrifice anything for profit.
|
| Thanks for reading and commenting!
| armchairhacker wrote:
| It seems like the main benefit of self-hosting (and community-
| hosting) is "what if the bigco SAAS enshittifies"? i.e. it's a
| backup plan.
|
| What if instead, you just store local copies of your data,
| possibly organized and synchronized? If necessary it can be done
| manually, just download anything important enough that you might
| want it later. If a service decays, then import it into another.
|
| A big point the author makes is that many cloud providers don't
| let you download the data. But any media that can't be accessed
| outside bigco's cloud can't be uploaded to your cloud in the
| first place. If bigco's cloud prevents you from downloading data
| that you create or upload, only _then_ the solution is to use a
| (possibly self-hosted) alternative. However, in practice I rarely
| see this happening, for example downloading from Google Workspace
| and OneDrive is very easy (it can even synchronize a folder on
| your local machine), and if you're worried about it happening in
| the future, again, you can backup important files.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| #LocalFirst baby! I agree that that would be ideal, but as
| someone who spent two days using Google Takeout to transfer 4
| TB of photos from Google Photos to my server, even with easily
| downloadable file formats, they still make it a nightmare haha.
| 9x39 wrote:
| I agree with the title, but not the solution and that's okay. Is
| the future endlessly tinkering with and running stuff out of your
| house? I think nope, that's just your hobby.
|
| I think of the centralization of content and the licensing as
| something that works so long as it's a commodity market, that is,
| it's hard to 2x the price of an ebook over a dead tree which I
| can own. Investors may wish otherwise, but they have to add tons
| of value to get consumers to play along.
|
| I'm fine with commodities in my life. Power and water and gas
| come to mind. They cost what they cost and I don't have problems
| with it.
|
| I could build a nas and run software and admin it, or I could pay
| $20/mo to Adobe and another $33 to Apple for my family's shared
| storage. Done. Of course, if the benefits of commoditization
| evaporate and it looks like the streaming market, then I'm wrong
| and would have to change track.
| meonkeys wrote:
| Will you clarify "centralization of content and the licensing"?
| Regarding DRM, specifically. If you _own_ said content then
| sure, you can E2EE and store it in whatever cloud you prefer
| while avoiding common attention /control/data hoarding (read:
| enshittification) of commercial online cloud & online services.
| If you're saying DRM is OK then you're conflating _commercial_
| commodities with _public_ utilities. The point of the former is
| to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care
| of basic human needs.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Centralized delivery of content licenses might be more
| accurate. Similar to your point about using public utilities
| as examples, I think it's a distinction without difference
| for what the OP was talking about.
|
| I think the point is in a delivery of commodities (storage,
| IP licenses, water, power) there is some benefit from the
| generally fungible nature of the commodity, which makes it
| harder to put high prices on them, which makes doing it
| yourself more expensive and inefficient unless you value
| something very specific.
|
| It's true I don't own the water from my city nor own access
| to it (it's a license, effectively), and I pay a delivery fee
| and purchase units of water. But like most people around, I
| don't value the intangible of truly owning access to the
| water under my land and drill a well, I just use the
| commodity. So it goes with e-book licensing and video
| licensing, too, and I don't think that they're regulated
| utilities affects this decision whatsoever - enough people
| value cost and convenience sufficiently to think licenses are
| fine for their use case instead of ownership.
|
| >The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to
| enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs.
|
| The former could say they make money by enriching lives in
| their own way.
|
| Is this arguing basic human needs should be charity? If so,
| even the most humble city will charge for water. Further,
| companies are often created to make money by providing
| production and distribution of that human need. Utilities are
| not altruistic but can be fair enough when held in check by a
| state.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Couldn't agree more! And most of those commodities/utilities
| you mentioned are _usually_ either publicly funded,
| cooperatively owned, or regulated to keep prices down and
| protect consumers
|
| Thanks for reading and commenting!
| enobrev wrote:
| This is what I imagined when reading Neuromancer and other sci-fi
| of that time. A public online space that we share. Sure, some
| corners will get gross and dangerous. But that's what humanity
| looks like.
|
| It's strange to me that we never included public spaces in our
| growth and innovation of the internet over the past 30 years. Of
| course I expect companies to do their thing as they've had free
| reign to do, but it wouldn't have taken much cost or effort to
| add a couple publicly funded data-centers where everyone gets a
| little space for themselves.
|
| At least in the US, I think it's because we've allowed those who
| run our government to get far too old. The people running the
| country have not really understood the public good of the
| internet outside of commerce. Don't get me wrong, I've benefited
| from said commerce for my entire career, but I think we, as a
| society, have lost quite a bit of ground by not collectively
| owning a piece of this thing as it grew.
|
| Once upon a time the airwaves were ours, and music thrived
| because of it. These days the airwaves are all practically walled
| off with massive monopolies controlling them. It's an overall
| detriment to our creative progress.
|
| I know I'm an old man barking at clouds, but I miss the radio
| from when I was young - there was actually new and interesting
| music there. The internet feels the same way for very similar
| reasons.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Couldn't agree more - _bring back the radio_ - thanks for
| reading and commenting!
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| 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.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Super interesting idea! Thanks for reading!
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Wow! Thanks so much everyone for reading and creating a real
| discussion around my article! Means a lot!
| nirui wrote:
| > Imagine a world where your library card includes 100GB of
| encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration
| tools, and media streaming services -- all for free.
|
| But why should a (public) library be interested in providing such
| services? For funding? What about costs? On for example
| censorship/regulations/compliance/maintenance etc?
|
| I'm not so sure a publicly funded library would have any interest
| in doing that. Think about it, if libraries can/welling to do any
| of that, then Amazon would never have any chance to grow this
| big.
|
| I think that's why only private companies is capable of doing it,
| at least currently. They found out a way to make a profit while
| operating a sustainable (all things considered) cloud service.
|
| In fact, the at-cost service provided by the libraries will
| probably collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a
| cheaper plan.
|
| Also, host by a library still creates centralized service, which
| comes with all problems that a centralized service inherits. It
| only shifts the problem, not solving it.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Hey! Thanks for the comment!
|
| > But why should a (public) library be interested in providing
| such services? For funding? What about costs?
|
| Public institutions like libraries are usually funded through
| government mandates. We as citizens decided that having free
| access to books is a good thing and nations, states, and
| municipalities dedicate tax dollars to fund those programs. So,
| if we decided providing internet-based services through the
| library was also important, we'd enact mandates for that, too.
|
| Not saying that's _likely_ , but it is possible.
|
| > At-cost service[s] provided by the libraries will probably
| collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a
| cheaper plan.
|
| At-cost actually means it _couldn 't_ be cheaper (at least if
| economies of scale are equal). That gets a little hairy because
| companies like Google can provide services like Photos and
| Drive for "free" because they make so much money selling search
| data, but generally speaking that's the deal.
|
| > Also, host by a library still creates centralized service,
| which comes with all problems that a centralized service
| inherits. It only shifts the problem, not solving it.
|
| Totally agreed - if there was only one library. But, there are
| tons! And as I mentioned, if the services are based on
| interoperable standards, you could easily move your data
| between services and have them talk to each other so there's no
| vendor lock-in. Think ActivityPub for files.
|
| Thanks again for reading and engaging in the discussion!
| willquack wrote:
| 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
| drew_lytle wrote:
| You're not crazy! I remember getting one of those remotes with
| my first iBook!
| LaGrange wrote:
| > Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and
| forcing our friends to signup for our weird app...
|
| You do exactly that.
|
| "Oh but security."
|
| Any security you get from hiding behind a firewall is illusory at
| best. You still need to keep on top of updates and tech news. And
| I want to be able to access my stuff from wherever too.
|
| Most of my friends don't have to, because they have me and at
| least 3 other friends who also self host.
|
| There's a couple of things I won't let others in (like, my email
| domain. That's like my last name, so nope). But things like
| _sharing a video_? Yeah, I'll let them log in.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Interesting! Thanks for sharing!
| nsb1 wrote:
| For those interested in self-hosting, here's a site that
| maintains a collection of self-hostable services.
|
| https://selfh.st
| warkdarrior wrote:
| That website lists Hugo, the static site generator. What kind
| of self-hostable service does Hugo provide??? Confusing info
| like this makes me doubt the rest of the entries on that page.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Do you really need to self host all these apps just to "take
| ownership"?
|
| All my pictures are stored as plain files in various folders on a
| big networked hard drive. So is all my music, audiobooks, movies,
| documents, projects, etc. This is backed up 5 times over to more
| hard drives periodically. I give a couple to family that lives
| out of state when I visit.
|
| You might laugh, but I'm not really sure what I'm missing that
| would have me do something else. And yes, it's work to take care
| of it, but that's true of any of your possessions. Just give me
| my files, man.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Totally! Before going the full self-hosted route, I actually
| had an old computer I used as a simple NAS. For this project, I
| was just looking to make everything as easy to use as any other
| app my wife and I were used to.
|
| Thanks for reading and commenting!
| horsawlarway wrote:
| If this is the goal (and I think it's a perfectly commendable
| goal), you being afraid of the public web makes it basically
| impossible.
|
| Honestly - just make the service public. Let your wife share
| links to her photo albums with her friends - have them point
| to your domain.
|
| Make your friends make accounts on your services if they need
| to - or better yet, provision accounts automatically for them
| (I do this).
|
| I understand the fear here, and I get it, but I also think
| it's widely misplaced. Pay a small sum for backups, rotate
| them, and let it rip.
|
| The suburban web is actually pretty good these days (at least
| in real suburbs, I have 2gbs/down 1gbs/up in mine) and it
| basically only gets better.
|
| ---
|
| My experience comes from hosting several sites for my family
| (including extended family in several different cities and
| countries) and also several sites for my neighborhood. The
| vast majority of them are public (as in - there is a public
| domain that resolves to my services with no need for
| preshared secret [aka: tailscale or other wireguard based
| vpn]).
|
| Yes, you get clearly bogus traffic scanning for the lowest of
| low hanging fruit (ex - php_myadmin/wp-admin/etc) but auth
| solutions have come a long way, and I don't even bother
| blacklisting/fail2banning anymore. It's a waste of time and
| effort for small peanuts.
|
| It's pretty easy to configure SSO pointed at something like
| Keycloak/Authelia and then have your friends get a centrally
| managed account with 2fa required. Ex - Jellyfin, Bookstack,
| Gitea, Immich etc... I host all of these (and lots more) and
| SSO support is pretty good these days.
|
| Personally, if all your public infrastructure is behind a
| keycloak login form... I don't think you're going to have
| many problems.
|
| ---
|
| Side note - this is one perfectly acceptable strategy to
| reach the point you want (community based self-hosted
| solutions). I host services for my neighbors & family. Not
| every household needs to be an expert, and no need to get the
| gov involved (not that I mind the idea of a new digital
| services library, either).
|
| But fear of the public web means you can't ever reach that
| spot.
| aborsy wrote:
| How about an all in one box, like phones or synology boxes that
| come with packages maintained by the manufacturer? If update goes
| wrong, it will be on support. They require almost no maintenance.
|
| You would put two in different locations for redundancy and it
| begins to be a personal "cloud".
|
| Another option is an app like nextcloud. You learn it and it does
| everything 80% as good as possible, which is often more than
| enough!
| nine_k wrote:
| The future is not uniform.
|
| Certain things will be cloud-based or otherwise provider-hosted.
| Some things will remain self-hosted, for those who prefer it.
|
| It's like owning a car: you take the trouble to maintain it, but
| it's yours and will take you where you want, without the
| limitations of a taxi or even a rented car. I live in NYC and
| don't own a car, for I have too little use for it. OTOH if I were
| a plumbing contractor, I most definitely would own a car, or
| maybe a light truck. One size does not exactly fit all.
| ingohelpinger wrote:
| > So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where
| we can all upload pictures from our latest trip?
|
| Who is doing this anyway? Nowadays everyone has his instagram
| profile on private and if you need to share some pics, you do it
| via Airdrop. lol
| v3xro wrote:
| There's Immich https://immich.app/ and https://ente.io/ which
| are both E2E encrypted and not locked to any ecosystem
| (besides, e.g. Apple only has E2E encryption when you have
| Advanced Data Protection enabled, and even then not on shared
| albums). So those apps are strictly an improvement (and I use
| them). I also do not have Facebook/Instagram/whatever else
| people are using that don't care about their own or related
| people's privacy.
| ingohelpinger wrote:
| I'm neither using apples cloud, I just find the argument for
| not self-hosting a bit silly, since nobody is actually doing
| it.
| voxleone wrote:
| 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.
| drew_lytle wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better myself! Thanks for reading!
| Aurornis wrote:
| I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and
| having local copies.
|
| But if I'm being honest, I think this claim that if you don't
| own the book you don't have the knowledge and society will turn
| into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating
| faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it's
| easier than ever before to get the info that you're searching
| for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I'm going to
| lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears
| from my library just doesn't track. In fact, it's rare that I
| return to my physical books these days because I can find
| equivalent info faster from a quick search online.
|
| Don't get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on.
| However, when people start throwing around concepts like
| "digital feudalism" and trying to draw parallels to the
| enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract
| philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what's really
| happening in the world.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Knowledge is not proliferating faster than ever. It's being
| gobbled up and locked down by companies whose sole interest
| is making as much money as they can instead of improving the
| world and profiting from the improvement.
|
| Media is being deleted or locked in vaults.
|
| Games are being shut down with no way to restore them.
|
| The written word that has been vetted by people with domain
| specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not
| being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the
| curious and the seekers of knowledge.
|
| I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit
| something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
| Zak wrote:
| I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually
| mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are
| increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for
| their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to
| align perfectly with historical feudalism.
| veqq wrote:
| > from a quick search online
|
| I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google,
| DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many
| irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives:
|
| - https://wiby.me/ - https://clew.se/ - https://kagi.com/
|
| But that's not the majority experience and more importantly,
| it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| > Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more
| accessible than ever, and it's easier than ever before to get
| the info that you're searching for, even in this streaming
| world. The idea that I'm going to lose knowledge from a book
| I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just
| doesn't track. In fact, it's rare that I return to my
| physical books these days because I can find equivalent info
| faster from a quick search online.
|
| The real problem with this is that there are vested interests
| at play in managing what information you see first - push
| something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it
| becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages
| and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that
| those vested interests want you to see.
|
| I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell,
| information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged
| systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a
| haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted
| specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.
|
| So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if
| it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from
| something that might upset those who benefit from the status
| quo.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The blog post talks about our self-hosting movies, photos, and
| podcasts, in nice Netflix-like interfaces. Sharing photos. That
| sort of thing.
|
| You are talking about preserving intellectual independence.
|
| Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems,
| right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be
| solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of
| digital textbooks.
|
| IMO one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to
| assume we need to start by matching the centralized services
| look-and-feel and polish (which is getting worse every year
| anyway).
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| > one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to
| assume we need to start by matching the centralized services
| look-and-feel and polish
|
| That's an interesting take. I think matching these services
| isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just
| helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and
| everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit.
|
| My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google
| or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a
| private selection of media with a strong personal preference
| - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes
| stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink
| and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes
| the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to
| reconsider my preferences.
|
| Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't
| ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-
| indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely
| approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves
| the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in
| the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality
| approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can
| self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a
| personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.
| movedx wrote:
| > includes stuff that documents my own individual history.
|
| By this do you mean family photos and the like? I'd like to
| hear more about this. I'm building up a personal library
| like this too.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Family photos, letters, contracts, receipts etc.
| wwwtyro wrote:
| I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less
| they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music
| - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty
| safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can
| really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that
| convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline
| availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will stop
| paying and do the more convenient thing. There's a tension
| there that I don't think they can ignore.
| m463 wrote:
| After reading the article, I think this is a clickbait title.
|
| (and many comments here didn't seem to read it)
| v3xro wrote:
| What I see is that it's trivial to 'self-host' locally - go buy a
| product from Synology/QNAP etc. - they have an ecosystem, easy
| setup, apps, everything. Three issues from my perspective: 1)
| cost and 2) security+privacy 3) not so easy to integrate
| networking (visibility from internet side) for things like email
| hosting.
|
| I can also see it possible to 'self-host' things once you use a
| cloud where you can do 'confidential computing' stuff aka. the
| hosting provider does not have access to whatever it is you're
| running. That functionality is there on the major clouds now
| (EC2, Azure, GCP) all have the Intel/AMD/Arm TME/SEV/RME stuff
| implemented but finding it on a device that you can self-host in
| your little storage cupboard is impossible right now (EPYC 9004
| seems to be the lowest available with that technology). At a
| minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption if
| you are not in control of the hardware space itself.
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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.)
| rel_ic wrote:
| 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.
| scubbo wrote:
| > It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard
| stuff of working towards their values
|
| Unfair IMO. The author _did_ the hard work. And recognized
| that most other people, not similarly motivated, would not.
| smeej wrote:
| And, the author is right.
|
| Most people do not give a rat's ass about the security of
| their data. They know their social media apps are tracking
| where they go and who they meet, and they'll say it's
| creepy if you ask them, but they don't actually care enough
| to lift a finger to do anything about it.
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I disagree. From experience (see my username), self-hosting
| is hardly expensive. A $50 ex-corporate SFF with a couple of
| large M.2 or SATA SSDs will be a lot more powerful and easier
| to set up and manage than a Raspberry Pi, while not drawing
| much power. The ongoing costs are larger than not self-
| hosting, but not terrible - unless you want a symmetric
| connection, the domain name renewal is the expensive part.
| smeej wrote:
| The one thing I desperately wish Umbrel shipped with was an
| easy way to network with other Umbrel users for backup and
| accessibility. Let people set limits in terms of how much
| storage they're willing to allocate to others. REQUIRE end-
| to-end encryption on backed up files. But help people create
| their own community micro-clouds using each other's
| computers.
|
| To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too
| high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in
| my own _town_ regularly enough to rotate my backups is too
| high. But if my family members and I could easily back up
| each other 's systems from our various states? Or my group of
| dorky college friends who are now all over the world could
| easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.
| scubbo wrote:
| > exposing our services to the public internet
|
| 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 _net_ work 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)
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Apparently I'm utterly insane for years with no consequences.
|
| SaaS/cloud providers propagate this FUD 24/7 and then Okta,
| which should be pinnacle of security gets hacked and has
| issues with disclosure.
|
| Relax. Most companies has security team incapable of
| operating beyond checklist.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> you 'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer
| without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted
| application to the Internet._
|
| You don't have to. The article mentions Tailscale--the whole
| point of which is to _not_ have _any_ Internet-facing app
| exposed. Everything is done peer to peer between clients that
| are behind firewalls. There 's nothing listening on an
| Internet exposed socket for random connections to come in.
| purpleidea wrote:
| This article misses the point. The future will be self-hosted (or
| local community hosted) when automation technology actually
| matures and shows some real innovations.
|
| That's one reason we're building
| https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| The fundamental problem here is that bad apples don't respect
| common sense agreements. If everyone who owned a kindle book,
| agreed to never share the downloaded version of the book for free
| on the internet, companies would not have to do this. I don't see
| what's the solution, if buying a kindle ebook is allowing you to
| share it for free on the internet. In the past people were
| limited by a physical copy, they could give the copy but only 1
| copy could exist at a time, now without that limit, people need
| to do something to protect against piracy. I don't like this
| solution, but I don't see what's the alternative?
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| I see this claim often but bypassing DRM is an inevitability to
| the point where it's commonly done within hours of a new
| release simply for the fun of doing it.
|
| And to quote Gabe Newell (founder and owner of Valve, the
| company that operates Steam):
|
| > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy.
| Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing
| problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in
| the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your
| personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is
| region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US
| release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store,
| then the pirate's service is more valuable."
|
| > The proof is in the proverbial pudding. "Prior to entering
| the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of
| time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now
| about to become [Steam's] largest market in Europe," Newell
| said.
|
| from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-
| Pir...
|
| ---------
|
| There are certainly cases where people will pirate to avoid
| paying but in the event that the option to pirate is not
| available, they will generally just go without instead. The
| only situations where piracy really becomes a matter of pricing
| is in the openly exploitative services like Academic Journals.
| grishka wrote:
| There are different kinds of self-hosting.
|
| 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.
| bitbasher wrote:
| > You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting
| company, and even that would be self-hosting.
|
| That's what I do. I use Linode/Akamai, which now has encrypted
| VPS instances.
|
| Ideally, I'd have my own hardware but I don't want to deal with
| the maintenance and failure cases (house fire, etc). I think a
| VPS is a solid tradeoff.
| thbb123 wrote:
| I disagree that you need a lot of space for self hosting.
| Unless you want to host streaming content for thousands of
| users, Intel NUC or raspberry PI on top of your router is
| plenty enough to host nextcloud, some webservers with decent
| traffic (assuming you have gigabit connection, which is now
| commonplace), email, backups and media server for family and
| friends.
| grishka wrote:
| Wouldn't it be rather awkward to set up a redundant RAID
| array on one of those though? Which is something you
| definitely want on a server that stores backups. I know you
| can obviously connect as many hard drives as you want to a
| Raspberry Pi via USB, but that _feels wrong_ for a server.
| Intel Nuc at least has Thunderbolt and probably some internal
| SATA ports.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Absolute bullocks.
|
| For most people running a home server, a Raspberry Pi is plenty
| and is about the size of a deck of cards, maybe two decks if
| you want extra storage and use an external storage device.
|
| If you need something beefier, you can probably just use an old
| laptop, or maybe a full second PC under your desk if you need
| more. You could easily fit a Threadripper or Xeon system with
| 128 GB of RAM, multiple drives, and a GPU or even two in a
| single ATX PC case.
|
| If you need a full server rack, you're an extreme outlier
| beyond even 99% of homelab creators.
| waldopat wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| rel_ic wrote:
| > Either you own and control something, or you do not,
| there's no third option.
|
| I think there's a full spectrum you're missing. You can own
| something with other people, and your level of control can be
| continuous, not discrete & binary. For example, my public
| library is funded by my local government, which I can
| influence with lobbying and voting. I can join the board of
| the library, and I can just go and talk to the librarians in
| charge to influence their decisions.
|
| In an individualist consumerist mindset things are pretty
| stark : full self-hosting or full submission. If you reject
| that mindset there are many more options.
| waldopat wrote:
| Yay civic engagement!
| waldopat wrote:
| As a public institution you, the citizen, own it. What you
| are talking about is hoarding access. You want complete
| unfettered access to content without barriers and without
| friction. Typically the only way to do that is via pirating.
|
| Let me remind you of the open source credo about free as in
| freedom not free beer. You are right that there may be
| exchanges or compromises at play, but it was a bit shocking
| to me when talking about what is essentially the digital
| commons that no one mentioned a library, which exists.
|
| I'm also saying from a practical perspective if you want to
| stream movies without giving money to big tech, you can
| literally do that tonight with a library card. The
| infrastructure already exists.
| amdivia wrote:
| People don't want to "actively spend effort and mind power" to
| run their own servers
|
| But purely outcome wise, many people want the benefits of
| hosting their own servers
| waldopat wrote:
| Totally. You see this happen a lot. Centralization happens
| for a reason, even if it's a bugbear of a concept these days.
| It's because the market is demanding it.
| ainiriand wrote:
| 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!
| waldopat wrote:
| That's amazing. Do you have a reference to it? I'd love to
| learn more. I also have some extended family in Spain.
| koolala wrote:
| If home networks easily let you have a public server I bet they
| would be more common. They could of been built into modems.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| smeej wrote:
| I want something easy to set up that lets me easily backup
| things like this within a user-chosen circle of family or
| friends. Build my own trusted "micro cloud."
| lugu wrote:
| I don't agree with the premise that people don't want to be
| part of the infra. The real problem is that gate keeping is a
| great business model. It is so profitable to create a wall
| garden that companies compete ferocely to take care of you
| content.
| neutronicus wrote:
| LLMs slot into this conversation in a really interesting way.
|
| The things the author set up are technologically mature enough
| that, as long as you have the media, or as long as you can get
| your friends to use it, the self-hosted versions are largely
| _better_ than the commercial ones. The last decade or so of
| innovation has really been about figuring out how to monetize
| these technologies, at the expense of UX.
|
| This is in contrast to LLMs, where the commercial ones kind of
| wipe the floor with the self-hosted options.
|
| On the other hand, LLMs essentially give average people
| superpowers for self-hosting mature technologies. My wife used
| Claude Code to vibe-code an educational game for our five-year-
| old, tailored to his preferences and the skills he needs to work
| on (she's a UX designer and now, a couple weeks in, reads enough
| Javascript to understand when Claude is doing something stupid).
|
| If we want to buy a computer to use a server, write, and host a
| bespoke family to-do-list / photo store / knowledge base /
| calendar that syncs my wife's Google Calendar with my .org files
| ... we are so much more able to do that than we were even two
| years ago.
| dboreham wrote:
| Hosting without vendor lock-in is fine. However after a bit of
| thought, you'll realize that's the same thing as self-hosting.
| Self-hosting with an agent doing your hosting.
| ksec wrote:
| I think Synology NAS is already 95% there. So the technical
| difficulty isn't much of an argument. Sharing of Photos also
| isn't a hurdle, mostly because I use Whatsapp for it.
|
| I think the biggest pain point is that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple
| and Google all wants services revenue. And they will go out of
| their way to force everything on their platform to become
| subscription based and you dont own anything.
| Sirikon wrote:
| - Post about self hosting and how centralization is bad - Uses a
| centralised service for VPN: Tailscale
|
| Name a more iconic duo
| wmf wrote:
| Just say socialism, this is taking forever.
| nope577 wrote:
| Yes, it is.
| nirav72 wrote:
| 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.
| movedx wrote:
| I'd be interested to know what you run on your home lab thats
| assisting with your professional life :)
| jtrn wrote:
| 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| And the future isn't growing your own food at home. But we all
| know a garden in the yard is a wonderful thing and often better
| than what you can get at the store while being rewarding to tend.
|
| There are two "futures" to disambiguate here. The future for for-
| profit and institutional entities, which is not self-hosted. And
| the future for human persons, which is. The former will probably
| be HTTP/3 (quic over UDP) exclusively with CA TLS required while
| the future for humans remains on HTTP+HTTPS HTTP/1.1.
|
| I won't be too many more years before the corporate future
| completely divorces itself from the actual web and goes full
| HTTP-IS-JUST-A-TRANSPORT-FOR-JS-APPS and becomes unable to even
| visit normal websites. For "security" reasons, of course.
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