drew_lytle

The AI companies want you to believe you need to pay up to keep up. Don't buy it. Here's how you can get great output out of "stupid" models.

Looks cool! Thanks for commenting!

Hahaha thanks for reading!

Sounds interesting! Good luck and thanks for reading!

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

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!

Thanks for reading and commenting!

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

Thanks for commenting!

Thank you for this!

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!

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!

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!

Thank you for your comment this is really enlightening! I'd love to learn more about services you're hosting for friends and neighbors and how that works technically and socially. If you're interested in connecting – please email me hn@drewlyton.com

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!

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

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

Sounds complicated, but cool! Thanks for your comment!

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

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!

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

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

Hell yeah! Thank you for your work!

Couldn't agree more – thank you!

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

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!

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!

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

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

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