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When self hosting is as easy (for your grandma who likes cats) as downloading a container from the Windows Store and double clicking it to open, install and sta

When self hosting is as easy (for your grandma who likes cats) as downloading a container from the Windows Store and double clicking it to open, install and start the server. Then we've truly made leaps and strides in fixing centralization. Self hosting is hard because ops is hard [1]. People aren't yet in the mentality that you should provide an official modular deployment every time you provide a server binary. Everything-as-a-container wouldn't be the worst way to take the desktop [2]. Isn't that kind of how Apps work on OS X? [1]: The ironic part is that most people don't keep anything long enough for a hard drive or any other component to fail anymore. So the argument about the cloud abstracting away the physical hardware maintenance for every day consumers like yourself or I is ... dubious. [2]: Yes.. I just spent the weekend learning nix-build. Goodness, it's super easy to container all the things! :) I'm feeling like a zealot when I start using nix to do what I could have done with a zip file. But there's something magic to having a zip file of assets with its own shell.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
True, I was mainly thinking about the HN community (and the more technical people around me) instead. This is not for my grandma who likes cats (PS: So do I!) Yes this is kinda how apps work on macOS, but not all apps yet. The new sandboxed container model isn't mandatory yet. Some apps are just a folder of files with no kind of containerisation at all (other than the .app itself being a folder rather than a file). More modern apps store all their data in a containerised filesystem though. It leads to some cool things you can do like easily capturing the icon of an app or even changing it without having to change the app itself. But on the self-hosting side, docker is making big strides there. Almost everyone deploying something like Home Assistant for example will do it through a tree of managed docker containers, in many cases without even knowing it :) It comes with a supervisor (which is also dockerised) which manages that part very well. I think most consumers I know keep their computers for long enough by the way.. Phones come and go, but desktops and even laptops tend to stick around until they do break and I can't fix them anymore or just heave a sigh and go like "NO this time you really have to get a new one, Windows Vista hasn't been supported for years"
- hobofan 5y ago
  > But on the self-hosting side, docker is making big strides there. Docker is only part of the puzzle. Even being proficient with Docker (and running services in a traditional way), there was always a big barrier to self-hosting for me in networking. If you lose all of your cloud-equivalent functionality once you leave your home network, it isn't a realistic alternative. I'm not a network whiz and the builtin VPN functionality of my NAS is sadly not up to par either. In comes Tailscale[0], which made it dirt easy to self-host my stuff and have it available anywhere (given there is a Tailscale client for it which has been the case for all my devices). Since I started using it, I've completely migrated my contacts, calendar, zettelkasten (Trilium) to self-hosting and started some home automation projects. For someone who tried and was stuck at the networking part in the past, it truly is a game changer (and I'd like to think I'm not the only one that is held back by that). [0] https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Indeed, I use tinc instead of tailscale but it's the same concept. It's how I access all my self-hosted stuff. There's also ZeroTier and Nebula. Mesh VPN is definitely here to stay!
    - Datagenerator 5y ago
      And Wireguard in the mainstream Linux kernel will enable more S2S connections.
ozfive 5y ago
Self hosting is hard because we are limited by our ISPs and what they allow us to do with our connections. Why don't they allow people to self host and when traffic starts to get big have an option to migrate that data to the cloud instead of clogging the municipal pipes if that's really the problem. The way companies like Comcast and DSL providers can succeed in this arena is to make self hosting easier. Why do I as an end user need to understand the infrastructure when all I am trying to do is share data or information?!?! I am playing the role of an uneducated user here and not as a Software Engineer as a career. It's disheartening that basic things like this aren't solved for people on the ISP level. I should have to find a service like Weebly or, DO or AWS, etc. I just want to be able to share my info and my ISP at the very least should be able to provide the basic framework for me to do it. When my content becomes populate then adjust accordingly.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  I don't think that anyone self-hosting is able to make a single dent in the consumer internet infrastructure. Usually when you're self-hosting I guess you're handling either just your friends and family or perhaps at most up to 1000 strangers that follow your hobby. Hypothetically in a future where self hosting is non hostile, will you see people self-hosting startups and the like? Yeah, maybe feasible. I think at that scale you start to care about things like uptime and maintenance. But I think the biggest winner to self hosting is the photographer who saves $5/mo on the blog that people rarely read or the kid who doesn't have to pay $10 to play Minecraft with their friends, or the family friend with 2TB of family data that doesn't want to pay $20/mo for Dropbox or the like when they already have the hard drive to store it. Yes it needs to be simpler for these people! There's a whole economy in making it difficult for these!
  - vincnetas 5y ago
    " I think at that scale you start to care about things like uptime and maintenance." I guess none of members of your mentioned groups will ever grow to care about a scale. And thats a good thing because they are distributed. And i think it creates a better internet, which is kind of wide network instead of shallow graph of couple mega nodes.
viraptor 5y ago
While self-hosting as commonly understood is not for everyone, I really hope and think that small-community hosting as a service will become a thing. Basically there's a number of places like https://syntaxserver.io/ https://syntaxserver.io/ which will host (for example) nextcloud for you. You should be able to get that as a supported service from a local company/organisation/group for a price comparable to what huge SaaS businesses would charge. With the difference that you can move the backup anywhere you want, and your data does not touch other people's data.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Selfhosting these days is actually a breeze with docker. I don't like using docker for delivery or for deployment of saas, but as a delivery mechanism, it's really great
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  I meant: ... using docker for development or for deployment of saas....

GekkePrutser 5y ago

True, I was mainly thinking about the HN community (and the more technical people around me) instead. This is not for my grandma who likes cats (PS: So do I!) Yes this is kinda how apps work on macOS, but not all apps yet. The new sandboxed container model isn't mandatory yet. Some apps are just a folder of files with no kind of containerisation at all (other than the .app itself being a folder rather than a file). More modern apps store all their data in a containerised filesystem though. It leads to some cool things you can do like easily capturing the icon of an app or even changing it without having to change the app itself. But on the self-hosting side, docker is making big strides there. Almost everyone deploying something like Home Assistant for example will do it through a tree of managed docker containers, in many cases without even knowing it :) It comes with a supervisor (which is also dockerised) which manages that part very well. I think most consumers I know keep their computers for long enough by the way.. Phones come and go, but desktops and even laptops tend to stick around until they do break and I can't fix them anymore or just heave a sigh and go like "NO this time you really have to get a new one, Windows Vista hasn't been supported for years"

hobofan 5y ago
> But on the self-hosting side, docker is making big strides there. Docker is only part of the puzzle. Even being proficient with Docker (and running services in a traditional way), there was always a big barrier to self-hosting for me in networking. If you lose all of your cloud-equivalent functionality once you leave your home network, it isn't a realistic alternative. I'm not a network whiz and the builtin VPN functionality of my NAS is sadly not up to par either. In comes Tailscale[0], which made it dirt easy to self-host my stuff and have it available anywhere (given there is a Tailscale client for it which has been the case for all my devices). Since I started using it, I've completely migrated my contacts, calendar, zettelkasten (Trilium) to self-hosting and started some home automation projects. For someone who tried and was stuck at the networking part in the past, it truly is a game changer (and I'd like to think I'm not the only one that is held back by that). [0] https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Indeed, I use tinc instead of tailscale but it's the same concept. It's how I access all my self-hosted stuff. There's also ZeroTier and Nebula. Mesh VPN is definitely here to stay!
  - Datagenerator 5y ago
    And Wireguard in the mainstream Linux kernel will enable more S2S connections.

ozfive 5y ago

Self hosting is hard because we are limited by our ISPs and what they allow us to do with our connections. Why don't they allow people to self host and when traffic starts to get big have an option to migrate that data to the cloud instead of clogging the municipal pipes if that's really the problem. The way companies like Comcast and DSL providers can succeed in this arena is to make self hosting easier. Why do I as an end user need to understand the infrastructure when all I am trying to do is share data or information?!?! I am playing the role of an uneducated user here and not as a Software Engineer as a career. It's disheartening that basic things like this aren't solved for people on the ISP level. I should have to find a service like Weebly or, DO or AWS, etc. I just want to be able to share my info and my ISP at the very least should be able to provide the basic framework for me to do it. When my content becomes populate then adjust accordingly.

aetherspawn 5y ago
I don't think that anyone self-hosting is able to make a single dent in the consumer internet infrastructure. Usually when you're self-hosting I guess you're handling either just your friends and family or perhaps at most up to 1000 strangers that follow your hobby. Hypothetically in a future where self hosting is non hostile, will you see people self-hosting startups and the like? Yeah, maybe feasible. I think at that scale you start to care about things like uptime and maintenance. But I think the biggest winner to self hosting is the photographer who saves $5/mo on the blog that people rarely read or the kid who doesn't have to pay $10 to play Minecraft with their friends, or the family friend with 2TB of family data that doesn't want to pay $20/mo for Dropbox or the like when they already have the hard drive to store it. Yes it needs to be simpler for these people! There's a whole economy in making it difficult for these!
- vincnetas 5y ago
  " I think at that scale you start to care about things like uptime and maintenance." I guess none of members of your mentioned groups will ever grow to care about a scale. And thats a good thing because they are distributed. And i think it creates a better internet, which is kind of wide network instead of shallow graph of couple mega nodes.

viraptor 5y ago

While self-hosting as commonly understood is not for everyone, I really hope and think that small-community hosting as a service will become a thing. Basically there's a number of places like https://syntaxserver.io/ https://syntaxserver.io/ which will host (for example) nextcloud for you. You should be able to get that as a supported service from a local company/organisation/group for a price comparable to what huge SaaS businesses would charge. With the difference that you can move the backup anywhere you want, and your data does not touch other people's data.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Selfhosting these days is actually a breeze with docker. I don't like using docker for delivery or for deployment of saas, but as a delivery mechanism, it's really great

jbverschoor 5y ago
I meant: ... using docker for development or for deployment of saas....