The future is not self-hosted

https://www.drewlyton.com/story/the-future-is-not-self-hosted/

by drew_lytle • 12 months ago

463 448 12 months ago

jqpabc1237• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Totally agree that without economic infrastructure supporting the model, it's completely unsustainable. Good-will is not a business model. Thanks for reading!

HPsquared• 12 months ago

It's just like any other expense. You can get lunch delivered, or have a cafeteria onsite.

__MatrixMan__• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

jqpabc1237• 12 months ago

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.

sgarland3• 12 months ago

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.

jqpabc1237• 12 months ago

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".

esseph3• 12 months ago

Woah woah woah I thought as an industry we clearly didn't need sysadmins anymore /s

fragmede5• 12 months ago

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.

bix62• 12 months ago

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.

slightwinder4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

bambax• 12 months ago

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.

bix62• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

fsflover9• 12 months ago

People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place

"People exchange free speech for comfort, but most people never need the former anyway, so it's okay".

bluGill• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

- 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.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

nicman233• 12 months ago

they do not even know anything else.

jmclnx• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

The dude set it up to use Tailscale, so not really public. But it was only mentioned in passing.

EGreg4• 12 months ago

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?

radlad2• 12 months ago

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?

EGreg4• 12 months ago

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).

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Wow! Thanks for sharing! I'll check this out!

programmernews3• 12 months ago

Maidsafe is one of the original crypto grifts that is still going and still hasn't made anything.

If the original funders kept their bitcoin they would be comfortably wealthy. Instead this company has wasted bitcoin that would now be worth billions over the past TWENTY years!

EGreg4• 12 months ago

What is the grift though?

What did they waste the bitcoin on? The actual project they raised money to do? If the founders became wealthy then it could be said to be a grift, but you just argued the reverse…

webdevver• 12 months ago

sad but true.

throwzasdf• 12 months ago

It is the future for those who want to selfhost and isn't for those who don't want to selfhost.

Decades ago no one pumped their own gas.

MoreQARespect2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

Unlike with smartphones though, I don't really see that anyone has a strong enough incentive and deep enough pockets to bridge that gap.

slightwinder4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

palata3• 12 months ago

Isn't Organic Maps the open source successor of Maps.me?

jeffbee• 12 months ago

This did not happen with the iPhone. It happened with the BlackBerry.

xnx3• 12 months ago

It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

kamarg• 12 months ago

Mostly battery life I would think

the_snooze3• 12 months ago

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.

fragmede5• 12 months ago

What happens to the site when that phone gets lost or stolen or falls on the floor and breaks?

potatolicious2• 12 months ago

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.

saidinesh53• 12 months ago

What kind of apps would you want to self host on phones?

albus0x• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

The very first thing they show on the website is a list of cloud providers.

blactuary• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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!

subarctic2• 12 months ago

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

MoreQARespect2• 12 months ago

privacy and control are things which people dont tend to think about until:

* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").

* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.

* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).

* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.

* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).

* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.

Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.

And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.

just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

jazzyjackson• 12 months ago

Synology is getting there with their one click install of lots of apps, and a "drop a dockerfile here" for anything else.

the_snooze3• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

ksec2• 12 months ago

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.

wmf5• 12 months ago

Apple explicitly called it the Digital Hub strategy. But they never went all the way.

Telemakhos• 12 months ago

SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

brailsafe3• 12 months ago

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

microtonal• 12 months ago

I had the iPod Touch and iPhone relatively early (well, much earlier than the general population). I don't remember Shazam being important at all, I think I only discovered it a few years later.

What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most smartphones at the time had clunky resistive touch screens or even little joysticks to move a mouse pointer. With the iPhone, you could scroll with your fingers and it was butter-smooth (at least for the day). The iPhone was a game-changer because you had a device in your pocket that you could browse the web with and it was at least as easy as on a desktop, if not easier.

Just for comparison, this is how you browsed the web at the time on probably the most iconic smartphone at the time (Blackberry):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NuQrjBIofo&t=6s

and on an iPhone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euNlVt60hwk

swores• 12 months ago

Not only were there Shazam apps on phones pre the first iPhone, but in the first place Shazam was a service you didn't even need a smartphone for! When I first started using it, they had a telephone number (in the UK, I'm not sure which other countries) to call up while music is playing, and 30 seconds or so later it would text you the song that it detected during the call.

I agree that "combining phone with one of the most popular / best in some ways mp3 player on the market" was a big part of it (with web browsing and video playing equally important), but Shazam wasn't a new thing that iPhones brought us.

(I also agree with danieldk that Shazam just wasn't a significant factor for most people on any devices, before or after iPhones.)

Aurornis2• 12 months ago

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.

hahajk• 12 months ago

It doesn't have to be difficult to self-host. Like another commenter said, in a diffe world that could be the default. iCloud gives apps an API to sync. The backend doesn't have to be a data center, it could be a time capsule in your living room. You could connect using a private wireguard lan. The protocol could even be built out to support redundant time capsules in case one failed.

But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.

m3nu• 12 months ago

I set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here:

https://www.pikapods.com/

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Looks cool! Thanks for commenting!

david-saunders• 12 months ago

I use your site and it rules! Thanks for building it. Was scrolling to see if someone was gonna mention it. Such a great idea and great execution

youatme• 12 months ago

A current delusion of mine is creating the iphone of self-hosting. Claude has me stuck in a manic state where I think I can do anything.

https://thebox.youatme.email/

Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.

riku_iki• 12 months ago

I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.

So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.

mystraline2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

What kind of machine do you need to run all of this concurrently?

jerf• 12 months ago

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.

mystraline2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Couldn't agree more – thanks for reading and commenting!

hermitcrab• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Yes! And I think this way of building software is having a come-back with the local-first movement! https://lofi.so/

mostlysimilar• 12 months ago

It's a shame they're using Discord, a centralized silo of proprietary ownership, for community.

rs186• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Haha yes I have a tendency to bury the lede a little – thanks for reading!

kwanbix• 12 months ago

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.

chneu4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

The future is community-hosted

That's old school P2P since 25 year. this is not new and not future...

PaulKeeble• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Couldn't agree more! Thanks for reading and leaving a comment Paul!

redog• 12 months ago

Hybrid runners are self hosted... it's like paying to cook things on your own stove.

skeezyboy2• 12 months ago

it effing well is

skeezyboy2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

pendulum swing

meonkeys2• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Thanks so much for reading a commenting friend! Here's hoping together!

VikingCoder3• 12 months ago

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.

nicman233• 12 months ago

that is just usenet with extra steps

VikingCoder3• 12 months ago

No, thanks. I want to limit the number of people I share content with. Not broadcast to the world.

fragmede5• 12 months ago

You can invite other users into your tailnet.

VikingCoder3• 12 months ago

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.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Sounds interesting and kind of similar to https://solidproject.org/. Thanks for reading and commenting!

kreco2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

esseph3• 12 months ago

Can't backup game save on switch, then what am I doing with these memory cards with switch games data on them?

kreco2• 12 months ago

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_management/i...

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

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!

mmstgshj2• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Seems very inline! Thanks for sharing!

kbody• 12 months ago

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/

slightwinder4• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

So interesting! I'll have to check those out! Thanks for reading and commenting!

torium2• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Interesting! Thanks for sharing! Stallman was, indeed, right lol

singpolyma3• 12 months ago

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.

torium2• 12 months ago

It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating self hosting with having a physical server in your house.

LOL right. I bought an ereader that works for me instead of working for Amazon. No need to run a server.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Currently working on jailbreaking my Kindle – thanks for your comment!

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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-tech4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

chneu4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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?

subhobroto4• 12 months ago

Docker has kida solved the "run application" issue. The real stuff most people care about is the data those applications manage.

If you don't realize what this means (and I won't fault you for it) just imagine what would happen if the $300 hardware and storage were burned down in a house fire or stolen by a burglar.

I self host and have offsite backups on rsync.net and a sneakernet network of people where we exchange a few TBs of encrypted storage with one another to hedge this risk but even then there are scenarios where we could lose valuable data.

carlosjobim• 12 months ago

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-tech4• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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!

subhobroto4• 12 months ago

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).

That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.

My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.

My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.

It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.

serbuvlad2• 12 months ago

Self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs.

What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.

As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.

That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).

whartung• 12 months ago

What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.

Support has costs.

Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay with a 50-100% markup. "Plug and play, self hosted. Plug in a TB drive for more storage. Total solution!"

And it's still not enough. They need a domain, they need a tunnel, they need to hook up with Lets Encrypt. They need to leave the machine on, and they need a backup strategy. Much less now having to cope with all of the Fine People that inhabit the wild interwebs and will soon come knocking...and knocking...and knocking.

This all has to be explained to folks that don't know, have no aptitude for, and simply don't care, about the mechanics of this process. They just want it to work.

It's not just a couple of dockers shoved onto a small Linux box. It's free like a puppy.

Self hosting is arcane, fiddly stuff. Fine for those comfortable with it, but a nightmare to those who are not.

V__2• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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__2• 12 months ago

I like the vision though and would love to see it become reality, if just to have the alternative.

will5421• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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!

mmstgshj2• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Looks super interesting! Thanks for sharing!

palata3• 12 months ago

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).

bayindirh2• 12 months ago

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.

palata3• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Yeah, I think this is a super interesting path! Federation of Nextcloud would be crazy. Thanks for reading and commenting!

hengheng• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

#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.

9x392• 12 months ago

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.

meonkeys2• 12 months ago

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.

9x392• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Couldn't agree more – bring back the radio – thanks for reading and commenting!

TimTheTinker• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Super interesting idea! Thanks for reading!

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Wow! Thanks so much everyone for reading and creating a real discussion around my article! Means a lot!

nirui2• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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!

nirui2• 12 months ago

Not saying that's likely, but it is possible.

I'm afraid that's not how things work.

For example, it is possible for everyone to self-host their own service, it's true and everyone can do that right now. However, that's not what happened.

In reality, people oped in to use these cloud services, with full understanding of it's downsides, in exchange for convenience and low cost for themselves.

And as I've pointed out in my last comment, the companies has optimized their services so well, it made it very hard for a library, which is a "outsider" in the service field to compete. The library and it's lacking of technical know-hows, political resources etc will eventually doom the service, making it a product people only buy with higher-than-market price as a show off of their goodwell. That's not a sustainable business model or any model, really.

You must know all these things if you want to change the world for the better. Dreaming on vague an idea is easy, making things actually work is hard.

Also, you need to reconsider the meaning of the term "self-hosting", because unlike what people widely believed, "self-hosting" is not equivalent to "setup and running a server by yourself". The definition is much wider.

In fact, if you ever downloaded something from the Internet and storing it on your computer for later use, that's self-hosting, you just not sharing it with remote access. And if you copied what you've downloaded to multiple computers, then you've just created redundant and distributed backups.

But if you taking that into consideration, that downloading is self-hosting, then there's even less reason to use self-hosting service provided by a library, because why should you pay extra for all of that if you have already done it with no added cost? Just for a expensive remote backup maintained by people who has other jobs?

    - "if there was only one library. But, there are tons!" - This is just empty dream. Not many will be welling to do it in reality.
    - "if the services are based on interoperable standards" - Designing protocol is not easy, and by simply defining the protocol you also restricts what the protocol can do. A file sharing protocol? Good luck getting it to also do bookmark or chat. So, empty dream based on empty dreams?

Sigh. Have you noticed this many "IFs" in your idea? "If some public institution is welling to do it", "If the institution can handle all the requirements", "If regular people are welling to pay for it" etc etc. These ifs are much much bigger than what you probably expecting.

I do feel you have a good heart and wanted a good change, but you look inexperienced. I would recommend that you learn the industry or simply work in it for a few years, then maybe you'll come up with something that actually works.

willquack• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

You're not crazy! I remember getting one of those remotes with my first iBook!

Shopper0552• 12 months ago

I’ve never had an iMac but my MacBook Pro circa 2009 came with a media remote. There was an infrared receiver on the body of the laptop in the front corner.

LaGrange• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Interesting! Thanks for sharing!

nsb1• 12 months ago

For those interested in self-hosting, here's a site that maintains a collection of self-hostable services.

https://selfh.st

warkdarrior• 12 months ago

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.

throw123xz2• 12 months ago

The comment you replied to said it was a site about "self-hostable services". The site doesn't claim to be just about "self-hostable services".

nancyminusone• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_k3• 12 months ago

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.

ingohelpinger2• 12 months ago

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

v3xro2• 12 months ago

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.

ingohelpinger2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_lytle58• 12 months ago

Couldn’t have said it better myself! Thanks for reading!

Aurornis2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

autoexec• 12 months ago

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

Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge.

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.

You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago.

It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.

ozim• 12 months ago

Physical book I can give to my children.

Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".

tempodox• 12 months ago

it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.

To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.

alexey-salmin• 12 months ago

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.

I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian.

If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.

jonhohle• 12 months ago

/People of North Korea entered the chat

Oh wait, they didn’t.

As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)

We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.

fn-mote• 12 months ago

Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever […]

Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).

bee_rider• 12 months ago

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-dev2• 12 months ago

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.

wwwtyro• 12 months ago

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.

eastbound• 12 months ago

Beware of believing everything is available over torrents: They’re probably hosting, waiting for every library to dwindle, so one day they will close the tap. There are already very few websites that index torrents. It’s a classing monopoly-then-disappear, Google-Reader-then-no-RSS situation.

dgjl• 12 months ago

Everyone who relies on digital content, especially served online, will be sorry one day.

It is only a matter of time before the grid goes down, the country restricts the internet, or the service you rely on goes away.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Poppin' in just to say thank you for your reading, commenting and inspiring such a thoughtful and interesting discussion!

RamblingCTO• 12 months ago

While I agree with your comment, is that really just AI output? Doesn't it take away from the content of your comment?

tpmoney• 12 months ago

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.

I get your broad point, but I would argue that for the vast majority of time most people did "rent ideas". Most people didn't have massive private libraries of books. Knowledge was locked in public or private institutions where if you were granted access by the owners of that institution, you would be allowed to go there and read the knowledge. If it was a public library you might even be able to take that knowledge home with you temporarily. But you wouldn't be able to keep anything you couldn't keep in your head, or transcribe yourself into your own documents. If the library closed, burned down, or you lost access to the institution, you also lost access to the knowledge contained within.

Which seems like then the argument should be for systems that allow you to take advantage of the ease and relative cheapness of copying and archiving digital forms of knowledge. To that end, "Print to PDF" being built into the operating system on mac OS might be one of my most favorite features. I have more than a handful of archived information from pages that don't exist anymore because of it.

jjani• 12 months ago

At least 3 of your last 4 comments are purely GPT-generated, which isn't great for discussion here. I feel sorry for the 37 others who took the time to genuinely respond.

And no, it's not just the em-dashes.

I do this for a living, FWIW.

PKop3• 12 months ago

Agree, this is annoying, these comments shouldn't get elevated in the threads and moderators must flag these accounts. We can all use LLM's on our own people posting that output here is worthless and just pollutes this website.

PKop3• 12 months ago

This is AI slop. @dang this degrades this forum more than any flame wars. I can't stand people that outsource their entire thought process to an AI then post it like we can't use the tool ourselves. It adds nothing to the conversation.

fsflover9• 12 months ago

Even though it may be AI-generated, it clearly received a lot of upvotes, including from me, because it said exactly what I wanted to say. Why is AI a problem? You didn't explain how exactly it degrades the forum or adds nothing to the discussion.

m463• 12 months ago

After reading the article, I think this is a clickbait title.

(and many comments here didn't seem to read it)

v3xro2• 12 months ago

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.

tryauuum• 12 months ago

at a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption

that's an interesting statement. These all feel like patches to mitigate the evil maid problem, but they can never solve it fully

deathanatos• 12 months ago

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_ic3• 12 months ago

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.

scubbo4• 12 months ago

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.

bigstrat20032• 12 months ago

completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff

a) Just because humanity as a whole did hard things, doesn't mean that most humans did or were willing to. It's perfectly possible that all the hard things we did were accomplished by a handful of remarkable individuals, doing things that the majority never would have been willing to.

b) just because people in one age have been willing to do things, doesn't mean they are willing to do so in all ages. So it's not like the past necessarily proves anything here.

wmf5• 12 months ago

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.

selfhoster112• 12 months ago

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.

smeej5• 12 months ago

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.

tracnar• 12 months ago

I've always thought it would be great for the government to provide a free domain name for every citizen. There's really not much you can do without DNS.

pas• 12 months ago

you went from 10USD to thousands in a few sentences.

self-hosting has a lot of degrees. if you want your own TLD and peer with Tier1s, then it's astronomical, woo! But using dynDNS is also an option.

Especially if you compare to non-self-hosted services. You get a subdomain and that's it. (Or nothing, maybe some handle on Instagram.)

davkan• 12 months ago

Paying $10/yr for a domain is well worth the cost just to be free of attaching your entire digital life to a gmail etc account that can be easily taken from you with no recourse.

But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.

There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.

wobfan2• 12 months ago

for services that are already "free".

The problem is that people still believe that if they don't pay money, a service is free. But so many do not question why it is free. Hint: Not because Google just wants you to succeed and have a good life. And then, without any second thought, they literally upload their whole private digital life.

If you don't pay, usually, you're the product.

atoav2• 12 months ago

You get this wrong. The expensive part isn't the tech at all. You can self-host a lot of things on a old laptop in a drawer while you access it via your routers wireguard VPN connection, without any domain renting.

The expensive part is aquiring the skills needed to pull that off.

scubbo4• 12 months ago

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 network is that the components are interconnected and can intercommunicate. If I have to upload my photos seventeen times to seventeen different partitioned applications for my various social groups to see them, I'm just as likely to not bother.

Fediverse-like ideas go some way towards addressing that, but they don't seem to be in any state of usability for anyone non-technical (I say that as someone who was using Mastodon as my only social media for the last couple of years)

dzikimarian2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

Zacharias030• 12 months ago

Isn‘t the sweet spot for many things to just „host“ on hetzner or whatever, but not „self-host“ and then trip over the power cable once in a while?

illiac786• 12 months ago

Depends on the reasons you are self hosting.

If you want to be relatively certain hetzner cannot access your data, you need your own server and confidential computing enabled, that’s not cheap anymore.

purpleidea• 12 months ago

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/

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Sounds interesting! Good luck and thanks for reading!

sashank_15092• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

sashank_15092• 12 months ago

If you have 2 options, get the product for paying a market price, and get the product for free, I think 90%+ of all humans will get it for free. The only thing stopping them is friction and consequences. I’m not as optimistic as you, that the only reason people pirate is because it’s available in their geography (why not use a VPN and buy it then). Some people will pay for stuff, I never use pirated stuff, but I’m pretty sure that group of humans is a rarity.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Thank you for this!

isaacremuant8• 12 months ago

Hah. I love how you put the alleged rights of companies over the rights of people.

"If you buy our Hulu Movie you can only watch it up to 4 people. We'll install cameras in your house to make sure you're not sharing them with a partner. What else can we do if you don't respect our increasingly shittier terms and conditions?"

Come on, man. No one guarantees you total security. Make good products. The belief that you have a right to surveil and intrude to protect against piracy is just so ludicrous. Specially when companies are constantly abusing people for profit.

grishka2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

udev40964• 12 months ago

Agreed. I have shifted a lot of my services to VPSes just because it's easier to deal with. However, it comes with less freedom and control

thbb123• 12 months ago

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.

grishka2• 12 months ago

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.

Sohcahtoa822• 12 months ago

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.

udev40964• 12 months ago

What? That's the most ridiculous argument I have seen to justify not have a homeserver. Even in the smallest places, it should not be that hard to fit a few low-powered and high perf min PCs and few SBCs. It's all about how badly do you need that control and freedom

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

You're right! Having a VPS or similar offsite server is also totally self-hosting! Just for the sake of narrative and suburbia analogy, I chose to leave this detail out. Like you mentioned, practically they're mostly the same thing and come with the same pros and cons no matter where the server is. Thanks for your comment!

waldopat7• 12 months ago

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_k3• 12 months ago

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_ic3• 12 months ago

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.

waldopat7• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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

waldopat7• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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!

waldopat7• 12 months ago

That's amazing. Do you have a reference to it? I'd love to learn more. I also have some extended family in Spain.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Hell yeah! Thank you for your work!

koolala• 12 months ago

If home networks easily let you have a public server I bet they would be more common. They could of been built into modems.

Sohcahtoa822• 12 months ago

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.

smeej5• 12 months ago

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."

mindwork2• 12 months ago

When running your own backup server, you're forgetting about scenario(however less-likely) when Google Photos will loose your photos, or if your google account gets banned with no ability to call anyone in Google to dispute that. In this case you can safely rely on your own backup to have those files at hand.

I was skeptical about this scenario until one day Gmail lost 1 year worth of my emails. It's just gone. All other emails are there, but not this particular year. And there is no person who you can call to talk about that.

lugu• 12 months ago

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.

udev40964• 12 months ago

Moxie is wrong, he likes to project his own ideas as wisdom and always factually correct. P2P networks have flourished. Bittorrent, bitcoin, Tor just to name a few successful ones

jcgl2• 12 months ago

The size of the whole pie has grown, and, yes, so have P2P networks.

However, centralized networks of various kinds have grown too. From application-level networks (e.g. networks messengers from Signal to Discord; payment networks from Visa to AliPay) to transport- and network-layer networks (e.g. cloud-oriented client-server topologies; Tailscale), you see growth in the centralized world too. While I don’t have hard data, I’d casually assert that that growth is comparatively far larger than the P2P growth.

Also, if you’re referring to Moxie’s classic post about centralization vs. decentralization[0], I think you’re mischaracterizing it; it doesn’t claim that P2P is altogether inferior, wrong, or any such thing. I’d summarize his point as being that anchoring your application to a decentralized P2P protocol makes your application development less agile. In other words, there are engineering tradeoffs there, between centralization and decentralization. When he weighed the tradeoffs for making Signal, he came down on the side of a centralized architecture.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

fsflover9• 12 months ago

This. There's a good reply to Moxie's article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936929

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Exactly! Thanks for your comment! I actually propose what you recommend being provided through libraries at the end of the article. Libraries rules!

myaccountonhn• 12 months ago

I don't feel like most people even know self-hosting is an option.

I wasn't aware of how most ingredients were made and what effect they had to my body. Once I learnt I started being way more careful with how I source food.

Same goes with technology: people don't understand that what they upload can be used against them or arbitrarily taken away from them, what they buy can be removed, that companies spy and abuse them. Once they do, many look into self-hosting or at least other alternatives from big tech. I've met many who want to self-host, but they lack the technical literacy to do so.

neutronicus• 12 months ago

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.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Totally agree! I relied a lot on Claude Code to help me with issues I was having setting up hardware encoding in Immich. But I also think – as accessible as LLMs are as a tool – they still don't make the complexities of self-hosting trivial. Maybe they'll get there, but I feel like LLMs really are just another coding abstraction. It's like a programming language. You still need to know how the language works and how the underlying "bare metal" works to make anything reliably.

But, I could be wrong! Thanks for reading and commenting!

dboreham• 12 months ago

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.

ksec2• 12 months ago

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.

Sirikon2• 12 months ago

- Post about self hosting and how centralization is bad - Uses a centralised service for VPN: Tailscale

Name a more iconic duo

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Eh, I can see your point. But Tailscale is a very different kind of centralized. It's just fancy, more convenient Wireguard at the end of the day. If I wanted to move away from it, it's pretty easy. Moving off of something like Google Photos however, was much harder in comparison.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Sirikon2• 12 months ago

The convenient part is having a public IP address to connect to from anywhere. You would need either exposing your home infrastructure to the internet or a cheap VPS.

Not that hard to solve, but it's an extra hurdle in the setup for something as critical as the networking to connect to your stuff from anywhere. I just think everyone is over-reliant on Tailscale when it's pretty obvious they'll rug-pull as soon as they run out of VC money to burn or get acquired.

So, it's convenient... for now. A future migration is inevitable when using Tailscale, and I prefer to solve problems once.

wmf5• 12 months ago

Just say socialism, this is taking forever.

msla• 12 months ago

Self-hosting would not have been congruent with how the USSR edited history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Hahaha thanks for reading!

TacticalCoder• 12 months ago

Many in this thread are totally missing the point of self-hosting. It's not "self-hosting and hence not having an Internet connection". It's self-hosting in addition to having the Internet (yeah, no, I didn't post this very message on my self-hosted island: shocker, I know).

I understand that to some (maybe most) of you, those words meant nothing. That's kind of the point. All of that took 138 words to describe but took me the better part of two weeks to actually do.

I fully understand. I happen to also run a Proxmox server at home. I also installed the "I'm Mich" (immich) photo sharing app on it. I'm also running a Movies/Series/Music streaming service (Plex) (although I haven't containerized that one yet).

Private pastebin is sweet.

Private Git repo is always nice too.

Youtube downloader with a Web UI is convenient.

I run a serious ad-blocking DNS server: but when you self-host a service, it's zero ad by default.

Thing is: machines keep getting more and more powerful, so it only got easier and easier to self-host. Back then self-hosting meant buying huge used servers and put them in a rack. And you can still do that.

But you can also just a NUC and slap Proxmox on it and that'll already get you a long way (usual notice about lack of ECC / need for backups / RAID not being backups / ZFS not being backups etc. apply).

It got simpler to self-host, not harder.

Self-hosting doesn't mean you're a luddite with no Internet access. It just means there are a few services you host yourself. I don't know what's hard to understand about that?

Something has to be said too about what you'll learn in the process of setting all that up.

I understand you may need big corps to help you put your diapers on and feed you your baby bottle "because convenience": I do too.

Just not 100% of the time.

nope577• 12 months ago

Yes, it is.

nirav722• 12 months ago

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.

movedx4• 12 months ago

I'd be interested to know what you run on your home lab thats assisting with your professional life :)

nirav722• 12 months ago

Two quick examples that I can think from the recent past - I work in a fairly tech conservative IT environment for mid-size industrial company. We're slow to adopt lot of industry trends. So when containers became popular in the mid-2010s, we pretty much stayed away until around 2020-2021. I've been running containers in my home lab for years and had a very grasp of building and deploying containers. So I was able to drive that change and also pass on that self-gained knowledge to many on team that were to new to the concept.

Another example - for years we were mostly a Oracle shop. With some SQL Server thrown in. But management wanted us to trim our annual licensing cost. So we switched a lot of our in-house applications to Postgres. I was using Postgres for years at home and had gained a lot of experience with it. So again, it was an area I was able to contribute a lot when transitioning away Oracle and Sql server.

On the flip side there are things I learned at work, that I was able to bring home and apply to my home lab. One being Ansible and other being network segmentation. Specifically around using VLANs and access control

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Couldn't agree more! It's been a very fun hobby

jtrn2• 12 months ago

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.

isaacremuant8• 12 months ago

centralized provider for digital identity and authentication.

No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The war on drugs and the prohibition and many invasions also claim good intentions.

lotsofpulp4• 12 months ago

Are you against governments issuing passports too?

I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport.

Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who.

Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government cannot be trusted to maintain a database of all the people's electronic money accounts directly? (in the US, I know in some countries, the government does operate electronic money accounts and transfers)

jtrn2• 12 months ago

It's really hard not to become impolite with this kind of disrespectful comment, but I try. Let me articulate my thinking... The suggestion is not based on nothing; it's based on years of banging our heads against the wall with various governmental and non-governmental systems that we need to communicate with, in the context of our firm wanting to talk to government servers to, for instance, get money for providing health care, or communicate with a GP.

We already have a need to authenticate and communicate. In the same way we have passports and driving licenses, these kinds of basic utility services seem to be worth it.

I'm just advocating for the same thing, for the basic functionality, digitally, before we start dreaming of other kinds of solutions.

I'm really not happy with the solution that has emerged in Norway, where one private entity is basically the de facto identity provider for everything (BankID). Then there's a mishmash of all other providers with various levels of motives, usability, restrictions, technology, and cost.

The same way we found out national identity cards can be useful, to ensure we have proper basic communication and identification within our country when using that country's services and portals.

This is my logic: We already have to communicate and authenticate, no way around it. And our government is already mandating login and communication digitally. So, a service like I described would not affect the concern you seem to have, since we have already handed over the key, so to speak. But it would alleviate a lot of unnecessary and, frankly, security-reducing complexity.

I would assume you are extremely skeptical of anything governmental and centralized. Maybe you live in a country with more problems, so that your fear is more realistic. But here in Norway, we seem to have found a stable balance of powers and a stable relationship between the people and our government. So maybe your situation you live in makes the "tyranny" claim more palpable.

Sadly, this, to me, just reinforces my experience I have every time I run into libertarian values. There seems to be much more focus on angrily denouncing others' ideas and not contributing to any realistic or practical solution. And it's too bad you have to resort to absolutes, unnuanced ad hominem attack. I think a measured response would have been something like (my caricature of how I would have said it): "I see you want to improve inefficiencies, but I fear that you don't properly account for the dangers of abuse from the government." Instead, you come out swinging when all I suggest is that we just do what we are already doing, but better.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment! I think this is a great path to fight for. I think it's very funny that most people (in the U.S. at least) scoff whenever I talk about a "public, centralized provider for digital identity". There's so much governmental distrust. Meanwhile, everyone I know logs in with Google. Have a great day and thanks for reading!

superkuh• 12 months ago

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.

kocial• 12 months ago

It's all about the data, people and enterprise in many cases are not comfortable sharing in SAAS.

colinsane• 12 months ago

so you watch videos, listen to music, read books, and take/share photos on a phone, ipad, or tv. you seek a better experience doing those things, and your solution is to spin up some software _on a totally new device_ (a server).

that's a huge leap! i think most of us gloss over it, but the rest of the article is predicated on that leap.

the tv you're streaming video to probably runs Android by now. it has a stable internet connection, CPU, RAM, and probably a couple USB ports. why not install the Jellyfin server software on it, attach a USB hard drive, and let it be the machine that hosts all your media? why, actually, do you need to go out of your way to buy a completely new machine for this?

similar argument applies to Immich. you're wanting to co-edit an album among several contacts. you're probably all uploading your photos from a phone. why not just have one of your always-on phones host that album? i shouldn't expect the drain on your battery to serve an album to a few friends is that much more than it took to take those photos in the first place.

to a certain degree, you're "self-hosting" things on a physical server because that's the only platform on which we all still have the ability to run arbitrary workloads on. solve that problem and everything becomes a _lot_ simpler.

gerdesj2• 12 months ago

The title is showing quite a lot of ankle! OP is a proud self hoster.

I run my own email, DNS and the rest. Yes: email. I run several domains including my own company and my own vanity domain and several more for friends. I have been doing it for decades.

Goog, MS and co do follow standards and if you do too, they will be largely merciful if you keep your nose clean. I have even managed to run an email system from my home connection as a test IPv4 and 6. I'm UK based. It does seem that IP denylists do seem to be a bit brutal in the USofA, so that might explain the downer meme on self hosting email.

The future is and always will be self hosted if you give a shit.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Haha! "Showing a lot of ankle" – I've never heard that before! Thanks for reading and commenting – very cool that you've managed to successfully host email. I'm sad advertisers and spammers have turned that into essentially an unusable technology.

Definitely a proud self hoster, but the main point is really that I don't think we're going to live in a world where self-hosting is the dominant method of using internet-based apps and services. Would love to be wrong though! Maybe we'll all be self-hosting email in a few years!

gerdesj2• 12 months ago

Self hosting email will always be niche and frankly it was pretty niche in the noughties too.

I do find that if you carefully curate an IP address ... now that's the real problem. Most IP blacklists aggregate and generally end up roll up to cover entire AS ranges and allocations instead of actual individual perpetrators. However, if you can grab a "corporate ISP" static IP address, you are normally OK, at least in the UK.

Then you need to get a reverse DNS entry sorted out, although this only bit one of my friends recently after five years of not me not bothering. rDNS used to be rule one in anti spam. Oh well 8)

Modern (lol) email systems generally look for SSL/TLS and SPF, DKIM is nice and if you have DMARC then you are clearly a jolly good chap. Then they have a ... rule set, some of which are as old as my email management experience and some of which are down right odd (and probably based on Bayesian learning)

Anyway, email self hosting isn't impossible. Anyone who claims to be a nerd really should be able to manage it ... 8)

I don't want to live in a world where self hosting is impossible. It'll be the same one where I don't own a drill-driver and that would be bloody weird.

adamtaylor_13• 12 months ago

This feels like one of those very big problems in theory that so far has never materialized and likely never will.

I can read the books and acquire the knowledge from my kindle. If Amazon removes it, I can just pirate it?

I get the theoretical argument but as a very pragmatic person it just seems like tilting against the windmill.

coastalpuma• 12 months ago

I think people are dismissing the possibility of universally accessible self-hosting too quickly. We really need to be ambitious as engineers and imagine a future where people have sovereignty over their own computing. In 1990, we wouldn't have accepted someone else taking custodianship of our personal documents, memories, books, music, and films, and yet it's normalized today. With the benefit of hindsight, we need to brutally simplify every single layer of the stack and optimize it for being usable by non-technical people.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Thanks for your comment! I still think though that this puts way too much on each individual – no matter how easy you make the tech. But, I could see a world where just like running tech support for my parent's computers, I also do so for their server. That's an interesting take!

protocolture• 12 months ago

Which raises the question: do they even own those books?

No you never owned them, only a really permissive (for amazon) license that permitted access to them.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Thanks for commenting!

jrm4• 12 months ago

The actual solution is extremely simple in explanation, though really hard to pull off.

It's "skin in the game." Right now, cloud services fail horribly at much of what they promise or merely imply; safety, security, long term availability, etc.

And so, to make them not fail at this, they must be punished when they fail at this. The other side of this coin is probably "you have to pay them," but that's not so bad either.

setnone• 12 months ago

One thing i know about the future is that it brings more powerful chips, available storage and more tech in general. Which is much needed to come up with consumer level self-hosting solution so that 'cloud is just someone esle's computer' becomes 'this cloud is just my computer'

Nevermark• 12 months ago

Why not self-cloud, on the cloud?

Hardware: The Cloud

Applications, Data, Control: Self

dmje• 12 months ago

I’m never clear why the solution I have - a kind of hybrid of cloud and local - isn’t more popular.

I make use of google drive, apps and google photos and therefore suffer the knowledge that my stuff is probably being used to train AI (I’m personally comfortable with this) - but then I have local backups and sync for everything. InsycHQ gives me a locally (and NAS) backed up version of all my documents, I also backup all photos shot by my wife and I to my Synology, and then daily backup in 2x places that I own from there. My films and media are locally stored, and I buy a fair bit from BandCamp and I use Plex to serve but I also have Spotify for the convenience factor. …and so on

In other words - it’s a sort of multi-tiered approach. I’m not subject to the whims of cloud providers because if they change their pricing or terms radically I’ve still got all my stuff locally; ditto backups on infrastructure that I own and control in-house.

It’s always seemed to me like this is a pretty good setup, combining the utility of cloud with the reassurance of self hosting.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

I think that's a great setup! I actually am still using Google Photos for this reason. I think of it as a kind of "offsite" backup. I take a lot of photos and videos though so I'm probably going to have to move to a more affordable approach like Backblaze. Thanks for your comment!

hammyhavoc• 12 months ago

"The future" is relative and contextual. Different tools for different tasks, different solutions for different problems.

ggirelli• 12 months ago

To me, the major issue of self-hosting (once overcome the tech barrier etc...) has always been protection. Not from external actors or attacks, but from incidents. By which I mean backups. Safest option is online backup, which is expensive and takes your data sovereignty away once again. Or I can once a year make a hard copy and take it to my parents (who live in a different country) for storage, and swap the backups out. Either way, very suboptimal. If anyone has a good way to achieve this, please lmk

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Agree backups are hard and can be expensive! A lot of people recommend Backblaze https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage and it cost ~$6/month per TB

domenicd• 12 months ago

I honestly would be totally fine with large providers being the ones to host and "own" all my media---_if_ they were obsessive stewards of data quality.

To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors.

But in practice, this isn't how it turns out:

* Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes.

* Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether.

* The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence.

* Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.)

* I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere.

If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work.

I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

This is such an interesting point and a great comment. Thank you!

mosquitobiten• 12 months ago

Is it such crazy of an ask to have some it guys sell me the box already set up to be used as a self-host solution aio ? Why can't I find any company that sells this?

_V_• 12 months ago

Future is, unfortunately, probably getting back to piracy in some shape or form. Especially with the general idea of the industry that buying something does not mean you own it. In that case all I can say is: F'em.

It is definitely true that piracy is primarily a service problem, not an ethical one.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

"If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing". Thanks for your comment!

wobfan2• 12 months ago

What. The article reads just as an ad for clouds. It tips into the benefits, ownership problems, setup. Then it says "but how do I share photos???" and this apparently is enough to counter all benefits.

Even if I had to (and this is what I actually do actively) push the photos I want to share to Google Photos, ALL the benefits remain. I see it, it's a slight inconvenience of having to do like 2 more taps and wait for the upload, but that's it. You get so much for this small inconvenience. You own your data, your infrastructure, you're not locked in, and your data is private. But having to share the photos via another app is the dealbreaker?

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

You may want to keep reading. Thanks for your comment!

nektro• 12 months ago

excellent read, thanks for sharing

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Thanks for reading and commenting!

nobodywillobsrv• 12 months ago

Is it just me or is the entire concept of "ownership" kind of wrong in the realm of digital (things that can be copy pasted infinitely and distributed mostly for free)?

Instead we should have ideas of AUTH, AUTH fraud (distributing content with wrong authorship), the right to generate revenue by distribution.

Restricting distribution of something that is essentially free to distribute feels wrong. If you tried to explain to aliens that you had solved "food" with a replicator but The Gov actually banned this and people had to starve ... you would likely be met with some questions.

isaacremuant8• 12 months ago

Translation: this particular user wants to make different privacy choices than the rest and pretends that we should philosophically follow.

All because Big Corp does anti open software/anti privacy thing.

Give me a break.

These platitudes ring like propaganda. I do what I want with my computer and data. You don't get to choose to "connect with me".

Beyond individualism

To authoritarianism.

It's fine if the author wants to do all this but the kind of "we should all do X, which goes against your privacy/data/control beliefs because it's for our greater good" sounds so Rich CEO that knows better, kind of talk.

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

I think collective, democratic ownership is kind of the opposite of authoritarianism, right haha? But I agree choice is important! Thanks for your comment!

isaacremuant8• 12 months ago

Define collective democratic ownership and how it conflicts with the rights of individuals. Why does the collective good need to be the future instead "get your hands of my data". Don't you see there's no one true collective and that politics corrupt?

Every time a party in a democracy wins some group claims they're evil and wrong and suddenly it is not 'democratic'. They will label things along partisan lines whereas I'm making the point of protecting the individual no matter what.

We do agree that choice is important so the inflammatory "no future" to one of those choices is a contradiction if you actually want to preserve it.

yberam123• 12 months ago

I hope for a future where confidential computing or FHE tech is widely deployed (and cheap). Any computation can be done on any device without loosing confidentiality.

yberam1234567• 12 months ago

I hope for a future where confidential computing or FHE tech is widely deployed (and cheap). Any computation can be done on any device without loosing confidentiality.

sameermanek• 12 months ago

I really hate to pirate, but when publishers are in bed with scums like amazon and ignore these acts of greed, they might as well deal with piracy because we really need a tool to humble them

subhobroto4• 12 months ago

This article took a weird turn midway. I really enjoyed the beginning and the start.

My takeaway of the middle part is that the author had certain expectations about self hosting that weren't realistic and they jump to certain conclusions I would not have jumped to.

Yes it's true that we here are an extremely privileged bunch but over the decades I've seen tech become widely more accessible even before. People were paid a bunch of money just to write HTML in 1997 and in 2025 anyone can write a production ready website using the SOTA LLMs.

I am convinced the future is self-hosted (which is why I clicked on this link!) and as the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. From that lens, majority of the public not self-hosting is a cost-benefit, not a knowledge issue. Ergo, if tomorrow TikTok charged every person $500/mo, most people would figure out a way to run their own federated TikTok (but most likely just start using a similar but cheaper service).

Consider, there will be a future when Google will struggle to make money (gasp! how can that be?!) and many years before that day comes, all the "free" gmail accounts will be gone - because by then, email will cease to serve as a method for a company to mine novel information, I imagine there will be no "free" GMail although "free" email might still exist then just because the cost to provide 10GB email would be insignificant and worth good PR to someone (but at that point, not Google).

tomjuggler2• 12 months ago

It sounds like the author never heard of a VPS? Yes it's someone else's computer but you own the contents, can switch providers any time.

Personally no I would never host cloud connected stuff at home, but neither would I trust Dropbox or Kindle with my stuff. Although actually why ebooks need to be in the cloud at all I don't know - just buy somewhere that lets you download and keep them on your device/backup storage? If my eBook reader ever said I couldn't side load books I would hack it so fast..

drew_lytle58• 12 months ago

Yeah, I chose to ignore the VPS angle because I feel like it presents essentially the same problems as self-hosting – just on rented hardware. It didn't really serve the story. But I get that omitting this makes it confusing for more tech-savvy readers. I use a VPS with Dokploy for hosting apps, but I don't know if I'd use it to host my photo library haha

Also, I'm actually working on jailbreaking my Kindle and will probably write a future article about that! Thanks for reading and commenting!

tomjuggler2• 12 months ago

Cool, enjoy jail breaking Kindle. I live for liberating my devices, mostly old android phones and laptops that somehow have the latest updates despite being long forgotten my the companies who made them.

I still remember the iPod my wife and I bought to take our music with us while travelling, only to be told we couldn't transfer the mp3's to our laptop. Hacked that thing and never looked back!

torginus• 12 months ago

I'd say self-hosting on the verge of becoming ubiquitous and accepted.

The whole sales pitch of cloud providers is that instaling and maintaining a server is just too hard for the average Joe.

Thing is the average Joe already has at least 2 dedicated servers in their home - their router and their IoT hub. Both are designed to be servers, and talk to third party endpoints over the internet.

While I'm not crazy about IoT, I think we are reaching the point where most people have something digital in their house that makes sense to be networked.

And thanks to IoT stuff, running and managing servers has become a certified Dad activity, like woodworking and home improvement.

I know multiple dads, who had no prior exposure to IT, who have set up rather complex Raspberry Pi based home automation systems, managing all the complexity of setting up and running a server at home.

I think the skills and interest are proliferating, and it's no longer going to be accepted wisdom to just rely on some nebuluous remote cloud provider, esp for simple stuff.

atoav2• 12 months ago

Well, my whole ebook collection sits on my computer and is managed via Calibre. I only buy books where I get a file without DRM. If there is DRM I don't buy.

My whole music collection sits on my computer in the form of well sorted mp3/flac/wav files. I buy only music where I get files or a physical carrier medium (Vinyl, Tapes, ...)

My whole movie/series collection sits on a jellfin server I can reach via wireguard from literally everywhere.

You get the idea. For me having the file and being able to scroll through my collection and decide what to pick from my collection is part of the fun. I am a musician myself and I earn more in a week in bandcamp (a few hundred bucks a year) than I would earn in 100 years on Spotify (60 cents a year), so if you wanna support the artists, doing it this way benefits them greatly.

kehiy• 12 months ago

Take a look at the Nostr protocol. It can help us to shape both encryption and global identity to achieve your idea.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips

d4rkn0d3z• 12 months ago

Not sure if others mentioned this but one can abstract away the configuration and sys-admin type tasks using a declarative language. Then the setup can be recreated effortlessly by others, reviewed and verified on an ongoing basis.

If the author found a self-hosting setup that works, it should be packaged and automatically reproduced elsewhere. It is always 10% of the work to make something work, 90% of the work is arranging it to be self-reproducing, self-maintaining, and self-documenting without excessive toil. I call this "self-*" computing.

eulenteufel• 12 months ago

NixOS does enables this to a degree, for example with nixos-mailserver[0)].

It would be nice if it could enable people with little sysadmin experience to self-host easily, but right now the bar for using NixOS and configuring these projects is still pretty high. Still, with enough work I imagine it could be possible.

[0] https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

chadcmulligan• 12 months ago

There was a time (around y2k iirc) where you could buy a box preconfigured with databases and so on, there was a movement to make these things 'appliances' like toasters but the winds changed, sun and oracle were selling them and maybe netscape? I have a time capsule (which is still working) sitting in the corner quietly keeping backups for me - I don't do anything to it and it just keeps working. Maybe the issue isn't that the future is not self hosted but the future is appliances, it would be nice to have a server thing with some icons on it to make it a photo server/database server etc.

One of the reasons people use the cloud is because these things have become hard to set up, they really shouldn't be.

dwoldrich2• 12 months ago

Users don't know what they want. There is simply a lack of vision for a human-focused self-service platform with a hook to get ever-expansive services over consumer-grade internet.

Corporate/investor greed is a limiting factor to the design. Network security and hardware/software vulnerabilities are the near impossible barriers to long-term viability. A solution basically needs to be unhackable to compete with cloud.

I have a platform vision that would definitely work, but I have no idea how to solve the greed or security issues. (No, Rust won't solve it! ;)

EDIT: Oh, and nation-state actors and corporate espionage. An independent, successful cloud competitor would be a prime target - they'd be relentless and burn it to the ground. Impossible problems.

erikerikson• 12 months ago

Users don't know what they want.

Users don't know what's possible and without knowing what's possible they can't imagine it well enough to evaluate whether they will want it.

dwoldrich2• 12 months ago

Yep, gotta sneak it into their network under the cloak of some other product and then go, "oh btw, it's like a cloud. Here's our new 2026 features you can buy into." Only then will they realize what is possible and decide they want it.

monksy• 12 months ago

I host a immich server that is publicly accessible and is mostly locked down. I've never had an issue with sharing an albium. It makes a configurable public URL that you can share out to people on whatever medium that you'd like.

teiferer2• 12 months ago

Couldn't this be solved by technical means? All those self-hosted boxes in people's homes could federate. That would allow the friends to upload their photos to an album. If you want to have copies of them on your local hard drive, a config flag could duplicate the data, automatically providing redundancy that's even useful for others. Not everyone wants to run a server at home and thoae who don't want to could rely on some third party, be it a public library, a non-profit, or even a for-profit offering some extra perks. The basic tech could be all the same, even the software stack.

I wonder if there are any startups in that space, there likely are. YC anyone? Whatare the obstacles?

teiferer2• 12 months ago

Is Peergos the answer I'm looking for? If so, what's missing is a big push on the business/PR side. They'll need to replicate what Signal did for chat so that even my 80-year old mom can use it.

Any other alternatives?

ianopolous2• 12 months ago

You're absolutely right. We need a big push on marketing and PR (Peergos founder here). We are self, grant and customer funded and a not-for-profit so we necessarily need to grow more slowly than a VC backed company, but that lets us keep our incentives aligned with our users. Our aim is absolutely ease of use, there shouldn't be a usability tradeoff for privacy in our view. We do already have some very non-technical users who love it.

saltysalt• 12 months ago

Physically books for the win.

chris_engel2• 12 months ago

I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees.

To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.

I can also very simply assign a domain to it and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.

Am I missing something?

Maledictus• 12 months ago

you are not, I consider both self hosting. I used hetzner for a long time and they were doing a great job. These days I run a server in my basement, because I had the hardware around. Most months of the year it also contributes to heating the house :D

MisterSandman2• 12 months ago

Why do you claim that Hetzner won’t screw you over with your data?

What you’re doing with Hetzner is just a few less layers of abstraction compared to AWS or Azure. They can still theoretically take down the machine or steal your data, if they wanted to.

I don’t know what the correct definition of self hosted is, but there is a big ideological difference between what you’re doing and self-hosting actual, physical hardware in your home.

chris_engel2• 12 months ago

Sure, in theory Hetzner could pull the plug or access the data on my VPS. But that’s true of any infrastructure... just like someone could break into my house and steal my self-hosted server.

In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring.

It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.

fsflover9• 12 months ago

You probably mean "federated is more important, cheaper, more practical than self-hosted at home", and I agree.

AlgebraFox• 12 months ago

IMO, that is worst of both worlds. You still put your data out there on somebody else's computer but also get to maintain the infrastructure.

Unless you end-to-end encrypt your data, hosting on a VPS is just a marginal improvement over using Google or Apple's regular cloud.

To me self-hosted is having full control over the data. That includes where the data is stored, not just who's maintaining it.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 12 months ago

Funny the author describes his "self-hosting" but chooses Tailscale over Headscale.

It seems like some do not see control over the "coordination server" as being significant.

robmao• 12 months ago

I really appreciated this post. It goes much deeper than most critiques of cloud platforms, and I respect that the author didn’t just complain — he actually tried self-hosting, experienced its ups and downs, and came to an honest conclusion: self-hosting isn't the future.

I agree.

But I also believe that doesn’t mean we stop here. The real issue isn’t about where the server is — it’s about who owns the identity and the data, and whether we have a shared protocol layer to make true user agency possible.

In case it's useful to others thinking along similar lines, I wrote a response piece called “The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign” https://www.robertmao.com/blog/en/the-future-is-not-self-hos...

It builds on the same dilemma but goes further into decentralized identity (DID), protocol-level ownership, and why self-sovereign systems might be the real way forward — beyond both cloud and self-hosting.

Would love to hear what others here think about protocol vs platform thinking.

requilence• 12 months ago

Self‑hosting swaps one risk for another. A cleaner option may be local‑first apps that speak an open sync protocol: your data lives on your phone/laptop/homeserver; an optional, end‑to‑end‑encrypted relay just moves opaque blobs for backup and multi‑device access. Why this matters: the No. 1 failure I see isn’t servers getting hacked. It’s users losing the only copy of their files. * ~70 million phones are lost annually; most are never recovered. https://snohomishcountywa.gov/Archive.asp?ADID=543 * Consumer hard‑drive AFR hovers around 1‑2 %—≈7 % fail within five years. https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/05/02/disk-failure-rates-in-... * 29 % of people have already suffered data loss from deletion, ransomware, or disk death. https://www.worldbackupday.com/en With odds like these, an off‑device, unreadable backup is basic hygiene, not a luxury. Disclaimer: I work on Anytype, which follows this model: local ownership, open‑source sync protocol, source‑available clients.

sam_goody• 12 months ago

Th solution would be services that use encrypted S3 as a backend.

If services like immich, nextcloud, etc. were designed to have the bulk of the files on a 3rd party S3 compatible encrypted server (eg - only thumbnails and pointers to the encrypted database on the local server), then it would be much more practical to be able to use the big companies for private, safe, metered usage.

I envision the following: Some company offers a phone app which with one click will install your own "self-hosted" Immich or whatever. Immich (in this future version) relies on encrypted S3 files for hosting, and in the contract it says the host will not steal your encryption keys. Since this gives MUCH more control to the user, this service become popular and the hosting company grows (like. Whatsapp hockey stick growth). Soon, other hosting companies offering competing apps. (Hopefully, these apps continue to be developed, and agree on some interoperable standards between them.) Since the data storage is all on S3 you can easilly move from service to service or from S3 host to S3 host.

There is nothing conceptually difficult about such a future, and it would be worlds better than what we have now.

michael-hainz• 12 months ago

I agree that selfhosting can digitally isolate someone. Most of the time, I try to share the services I host with my friends so they also benefit from them. Maybe ideas like the fediverse will play a bigger role in the future to connect many of us, but community maintained.

charles_f• 12 months ago

Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet's inception. Purchased digital goods have always been licenses more than owned assets.

There was a time when you actually purchased software. Owning a key gave you perpetual access to that software. And then SaaS came and now the only model ever considered is paying rent, even for stuff that runs on your computer.

That hasn't always been the case, and self-hosting seems to be the only way around that.

The future is not self-hosted

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