4 ms·

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) ea

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on, which is why I'm surprised it isn't being worked on by Amazon or similar. The only company I know of working on this is Urbit, which seems at this point unlikely to take off for a variety of reasons.

glandium 6y ago
There is the Freedombox project.
- swsieber 6y ago
  And sandstorm.io ... sort of. A similar problem space.
m463 6y ago
There is unraid (which I haven't tried) I'm pretty happy with proxmox - apparently lots of people use the LXC appliances.
- geoah 6y ago
  I’m honestly amazed at how bad the ux of unraid is. It does a ton of things I’ll give them that. But coming from synology’s dsm (xpenology) the experience has not been good. The lack of a web file manager is mind boggling.
decasteve 6y ago
I wondered if this would move along more quickly if hosting from home were easier. Give everyone their own IP addresses and people tinkering their way to personal servers becomes more likely.
- anchpop 6y ago
  With things like Hyperswarm [0], building things like that is easier than it used to be [0]: https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm
TristanBall 6y ago
Many of the nas's get pretty close too this... but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. "Whats a domain? Can just put whatever like?" Etc etc.. even if you baby people through all of that, you still end up with a device that needs to be backed up, isn't available when the powers out at home etc.. Not knocking the nas's btw, I really like them because they do make it relatively simple to do a whole swathe of the common services, but it's only simple to me because I know how to do it by hand. A non technical person won't even understand the terminology. That said.. I did wonder whether the deployment of solar and batteries to many homes might eventually also enable the deployment of edge services to per home servers. Right now the power draw prob makes in unworkable, as do maintenance costs.. but won't someone think of the reduced latency?
- ineptech 6y ago
  > but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous. I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes. edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago
t0astbread 6y ago
Maybe not for non-technical people but what I'd like to have is something like Docker Compose for virtual machines. I.e. just give it a description of what you'd like and the hypervisor takes care of building immutable machine images and setting them up including networking and potentially also backups of data volumes. There are a lot of tools that do parts of this but connecting it all is a lot of work and in the end you probably end up with something hacky.
pcr0 6y ago
https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ This is the closest project I can think of.
- ineptech 6y ago
  Yes, sort of, as is Freedombox and Urbit and probably a few others. So another way of phrasing my post is that I'm surprised Jeff Bezos (or one of his ilk) hasn't gotten tired of waiting for Sandstorm/Urbit/etc to get good enough for my grandma to use, and just assigned 5k dev-years to the project.
iandanforth 6y ago
I want Mozilla to build this.
golergka 6y ago
Why would a non-technical person choose this over SAAS that already provides the same service?
dmitriid 6y ago
Not just non-technical people. As a programmer, I don't want to send a significant chunk of my free time figuring out, configuring and then maintaining something.
Ir0nMan 6y ago
Many cloud/VM providers like Digital Ocean offer one-click deployments of popular applications now.
staz 6y ago
There is Yunohost https://yunohost.org/#/ https://yunohost.org/#/ which is a open source project, whose goal is exactly that, personal server for everyone, with popular services that you can install from a web interface and that you can run on a dedicated server or a Raspberry pi like computer. There is also nextcloud which is more a all in one product.

glandium 6y ago

There is the Freedombox project.

swsieber 6y ago
And sandstorm.io ... sort of. A similar problem space.

m463 6y ago

There is unraid (which I haven't tried) I'm pretty happy with proxmox - apparently lots of people use the LXC appliances.

geoah 6y ago
I’m honestly amazed at how bad the ux of unraid is. It does a ton of things I’ll give them that. But coming from synology’s dsm (xpenology) the experience has not been good. The lack of a web file manager is mind boggling.

decasteve 6y ago

I wondered if this would move along more quickly if hosting from home were easier. Give everyone their own IP addresses and people tinkering their way to personal servers becomes more likely.

anchpop 6y ago
With things like Hyperswarm [0], building things like that is easier than it used to be [0]: https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm

TristanBall 6y ago

Many of the nas's get pretty close too this... but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. "Whats a domain? Can just put whatever like?" Etc etc.. even if you baby people through all of that, you still end up with a device that needs to be backed up, isn't available when the powers out at home etc.. Not knocking the nas's btw, I really like them because they do make it relatively simple to do a whole swathe of the common services, but it's only simple to me because I know how to do it by hand. A non technical person won't even understand the terminology. That said.. I did wonder whether the deployment of solar and batteries to many homes might eventually also enable the deployment of edge services to per home servers. Right now the power draw prob makes in unworkable, as do maintenance costs.. but won't someone think of the reduced latency?

ineptech 6y ago
> but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous. I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes. edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago

t0astbread 6y ago

Maybe not for non-technical people but what I'd like to have is something like Docker Compose for virtual machines. I.e. just give it a description of what you'd like and the hypervisor takes care of building immutable machine images and setting them up including networking and potentially also backups of data volumes. There are a lot of tools that do parts of this but connecting it all is a lot of work and in the end you probably end up with something hacky.

pcr0 6y ago

https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ This is the closest project I can think of.

ineptech 6y ago
Yes, sort of, as is Freedombox and Urbit and probably a few others. So another way of phrasing my post is that I'm surprised Jeff Bezos (or one of his ilk) hasn't gotten tired of waiting for Sandstorm/Urbit/etc to get good enough for my grandma to use, and just assigned 5k dev-years to the project.

iandanforth 6y ago

I want Mozilla to build this.

golergka 6y ago

Why would a non-technical person choose this over SAAS that already provides the same service?

dmitriid 6y ago

Not just non-technical people. As a programmer, I don't want to send a significant chunk of my free time figuring out, configuring and then maintaining something.

Ir0nMan 6y ago

Many cloud/VM providers like Digital Ocean offer one-click deployments of popular applications now.

staz 6y ago

There is Yunohost https://yunohost.org/#/ https://yunohost.org/#/ which is a open source project, whose goal is exactly that, personal server for everyone, with popular services that you can install from a web interface and that you can run on a dedicated server or a Raspberry pi like computer. There is also nextcloud which is more a all in one product.