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Looks good! Unfortunately the problem with the self-hosted apps is lack of maintenance, so after a couple of years, when the author doesn't push any updates to

Looks good! Unfortunately the problem with the self-hosted apps is lack of maintenance, so after a couple of years, when the author doesn't push any updates to it you will be forced to move on to an alternative. And at that point you will lose all your data (in this case, gists) and links, let alone time.

JD557 8y ago
I would argue that the opposite is true: > Unfortunately the problem with the SaaS is lack of control, so after a couple of years, when the company shuts down you will be forced to move on to an alternative. And at that point you will lose all your data (in this case, gists) and links, let alone time. Even if the author stops posting updates, you can keep using the application for as long as you like. Since it's open source, you can even update it yourself if you really need it. Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll never lose them (unless you delete the database). In this case, gists might even be stored as a git repository, so it might not be that hard to import them to another self-hosted snippets app.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  > Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll never lose them (unless you delete the database). The opposite is true as well: > Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll eventually lose them (unless you apply the same rigor in system administration, backups and security that large companies would). I used to always host everything myself. I knew the risks, and I knew they would bite me some day, but I wanted to learn. I don't regret this choice. But the day I lost my 10 years of IRC chat history was the day I subscribed to IRCCloud instead. The day I lost all the photos I took with my mom on some trip was the day I started heavily using Google Photos. Even long before that, the day I lost my only physical copy of my favourite game was the day I bought it back on GOG. Life's too short to care about this stuff for more than the learning experience. Using cloud services is a fucking immense productivity gain. Of course I still encourage people to run their own stuff, and I 100% back self-hosted alternatives (they're important). The best services in my experience provide self-hosted + paid hosted service. Those are the ones you can really trust. You choose your trade-off based on your use case, and you are very likely to get the advantage of data portability. Paying money for it also ensures you're less likely to get screwed by their whims.
  - QasimK 8y ago
    It just sounds like all of the self-hosted services you were using were crap to be honest. They still are more or less. IRC and photos should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a location of your choosing, local, remote, cloud. Ideally, of course, you’d configure this location once and then all apps would automatically use it. As for physical games, this is not a comparable example (physical self-managed vs virtual self-managed). In this case, you’d virtually back up the disk, and if you can’t because of DRM or something, then you don’t really own it. Your comment on self-hosted + paid-hosted I especially agree with and is one that I’ve quite recently also came to the conclusion of.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      > It just sounds like all of the self-hosted services you were using were crap to be honest. No... they just match up with expectations of what I said: You need backup solutions. Those backup solutions need to work, need to be recoverable. And when a disaster happens, let's say there's a fire at my house, the last thing I want to be doing is spending hours recovering backup. That's a sysadmin's job, not mine. I don't know why you say IRC "should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a location of your choosing" -- that's not the case of any existing service to my knowledge, possibly not even for photos. And I also wouldn't expect every single self-hosted service developer out there to have to set up something like that, especially given that the development of such a thing requires pretty extensive sysadmin knowledge and self-hosted projects tend to be open-source-volunteer ones. I'd love to have more things work like git though. Easy mirroring. Decentralized truth. In some way, IPFS, but not for like the entire internet; just for select projects.
themodelplumber 8y ago
I always seem to run into the "will I maintain it by installing upgrades" question before that one. :-) One exception was the case of a certain static website generator which the author migrated from PHP to Python as a natural progression from v.1 to v.2. That was a bit of a shock. I have since moved my personal snippets collection to plain old HTML. You can do a lot of processing with a capable text editor these days, and in doing this I can save my maintenance energy for projects where a dynamic approach is really needed.
- danielecook 8y ago
  What do you mean you moved them to html?
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    Hi, I just now saw your comment--I maintain lists of my most used snippets in HTML format, rather than using a dynamic "snippets manager" or other content management system to generate HTML when requested or as a static website. I hope that clears it up.
pwnna 8y ago
It's not actually as bad as it looks as long as you're disciplined in not trying to run every new shiny services that you discover. Instead, what I do personally is to try to host the minimum number of services where each can do many things. This reduces the maintenance overhead of running a lot of "microservices". The remaining services you host should be either well maintained, easily exportable/standard, or be understandable such that you can maintain it yourself in 5/10 years time when no one pushes updates for it anymore. The snippets thing is a perfect example of this: I self-host a gitea instance for some private repos that I don't want to share with Microsoft. The same instances also host a snippets repository, where I can create snippets directly via the web ui (even have features like revisions/categorization via directories). The instance is already backed up using an existing system, which also lowers the burden of having to setup backup for yet another app.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Sandstorm.io or Cloudron.io like platforms can effectively fix this. It's possible to have a one-off niche app, but operate it in an isolated container and run it from a package format that doesn't go significantly out of date. Sandstorm app packages circa 2014 still work fine, so as long as the overarching platform gets updates, it's safe to run pretty much anything inside it.
  - pwnna 8y ago
    I'm not sure if it makes things better. One of the problems is the maintenance load for 10-20 year horizon. One of niche app that you dont write yourself usually don't have that kind of support timeline, especially if the data storage mechanism based on something other than plain text (and possibly sqlite). This means that you'll more likely have to service it during that time frame. Best to keep it simple and reuse something more basic/universal rather than deploy an app that gives you a fancier UI imo. Something like sandstorm adds even more complexity and dependencies for other applications, which brings up the maintenance burden for the long term. I don't know if I can trust it to exist in 10 years, so it's probably best not to use it for now unless I can patch it myself, which I'm not committed to do given that I can accomplish most of what it does with standard linux utilities that I'm already familiar with.

JD557 8y ago

I would argue that the opposite is true: > Unfortunately the problem with the SaaS is lack of control, so after a couple of years, when the company shuts down you will be forced to move on to an alternative. And at that point you will lose all your data (in this case, gists) and links, let alone time. Even if the author stops posting updates, you can keep using the application for as long as you like. Since it's open source, you can even update it yourself if you really need it. Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll never lose them (unless you delete the database). In this case, gists might even be stored as a git repository, so it might not be that hard to import them to another self-hosted snippets app.

scrollaway 8y ago
> Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll never lose them (unless you delete the database). The opposite is true as well: > Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll eventually lose them (unless you apply the same rigor in system administration, backups and security that large companies would). I used to always host everything myself. I knew the risks, and I knew they would bite me some day, but I wanted to learn. I don't regret this choice. But the day I lost my 10 years of IRC chat history was the day I subscribed to IRCCloud instead. The day I lost all the photos I took with my mom on some trip was the day I started heavily using Google Photos. Even long before that, the day I lost my only physical copy of my favourite game was the day I bought it back on GOG. Life's too short to care about this stuff for more than the learning experience. Using cloud services is a fucking immense productivity gain. Of course I still encourage people to run their own stuff, and I 100% back self-hosted alternatives (they're important). The best services in my experience provide self-hosted + paid hosted service. Those are the ones you can really trust. You choose your trade-off based on your use case, and you are very likely to get the advantage of data portability. Paying money for it also ensures you're less likely to get screwed by their whims.
- QasimK 8y ago
  It just sounds like all of the self-hosted services you were using were crap to be honest. They still are more or less. IRC and photos should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a location of your choosing, local, remote, cloud. Ideally, of course, you’d configure this location once and then all apps would automatically use it. As for physical games, this is not a comparable example (physical self-managed vs virtual self-managed). In this case, you’d virtually back up the disk, and if you can’t because of DRM or something, then you don’t really own it. Your comment on self-hosted + paid-hosted I especially agree with and is one that I’ve quite recently also came to the conclusion of.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    > It just sounds like all of the self-hosted services you were using were crap to be honest. No... they just match up with expectations of what I said: You need backup solutions. Those backup solutions need to work, need to be recoverable. And when a disaster happens, let's say there's a fire at my house, the last thing I want to be doing is spending hours recovering backup. That's a sysadmin's job, not mine. I don't know why you say IRC "should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a location of your choosing" -- that's not the case of any existing service to my knowledge, possibly not even for photos. And I also wouldn't expect every single self-hosted service developer out there to have to set up something like that, especially given that the development of such a thing requires pretty extensive sysadmin knowledge and self-hosted projects tend to be open-source-volunteer ones. I'd love to have more things work like git though. Easy mirroring. Decentralized truth. In some way, IPFS, but not for like the entire internet; just for select projects.

themodelplumber 8y ago

I always seem to run into the "will I maintain it by installing upgrades" question before that one. :-) One exception was the case of a certain static website generator which the author migrated from PHP to Python as a natural progression from v.1 to v.2. That was a bit of a shock. I have since moved my personal snippets collection to plain old HTML. You can do a lot of processing with a capable text editor these days, and in doing this I can save my maintenance energy for projects where a dynamic approach is really needed.

danielecook 8y ago
What do you mean you moved them to html?
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Hi, I just now saw your comment--I maintain lists of my most used snippets in HTML format, rather than using a dynamic "snippets manager" or other content management system to generate HTML when requested or as a static website. I hope that clears it up.

pwnna 8y ago

It's not actually as bad as it looks as long as you're disciplined in not trying to run every new shiny services that you discover. Instead, what I do personally is to try to host the minimum number of services where each can do many things. This reduces the maintenance overhead of running a lot of "microservices". The remaining services you host should be either well maintained, easily exportable/standard, or be understandable such that you can maintain it yourself in 5/10 years time when no one pushes updates for it anymore. The snippets thing is a perfect example of this: I self-host a gitea instance for some private repos that I don't want to share with Microsoft. The same instances also host a snippets repository, where I can create snippets directly via the web ui (even have features like revisions/categorization via directories). The instance is already backed up using an existing system, which also lowers the burden of having to setup backup for yet another app.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Sandstorm.io or Cloudron.io like platforms can effectively fix this. It's possible to have a one-off niche app, but operate it in an isolated container and run it from a package format that doesn't go significantly out of date. Sandstorm app packages circa 2014 still work fine, so as long as the overarching platform gets updates, it's safe to run pretty much anything inside it.
- pwnna 8y ago
  I'm not sure if it makes things better. One of the problems is the maintenance load for 10-20 year horizon. One of niche app that you dont write yourself usually don't have that kind of support timeline, especially if the data storage mechanism based on something other than plain text (and possibly sqlite). This means that you'll more likely have to service it during that time frame. Best to keep it simple and reuse something more basic/universal rather than deploy an app that gives you a fancier UI imo. Something like sandstorm adds even more complexity and dependencies for other applications, which brings up the maintenance burden for the long term. I don't know if I can trust it to exist in 10 years, so it's probably best not to use it for now unless I can patch it myself, which I'm not committed to do given that I can accomplish most of what it does with standard linux utilities that I'm already familiar with.