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TL;DR: Yes, it’s alive and well, and it feels like this space has never been better than now. A lot of things have changed since then. Now it’s called “self-hos

TL;DR: Yes, it’s alive and well, and it feels like this space has never been better than now. A lot of things have changed since then. Now it’s called “self-hosting”/“home lab”. Due to the advent of low power small form factor PCs/SBCs like the Pi, and all the additional management options you get these days: conventional bare-metal, but also containers, VMs, and everything in between, coupled with IaC like Ansible or Salt. A single machine can now be far more useful than just classical Unix services like LAMP or SSH - but you can still have those if you wish in addition to the new stuff! I recommend checking the subreddits /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab to get an idea what people do these days. These are by no means the only places where all the cool discussion takes place, but they are a very good jumping off point. If you’re interested in managing file storage that goes beyond a few TB, /r/datahoarder is a good place to look too. (And yes, running an email server still sucks. This time, the complexity is no longer about setting up or maintaining the thing (Mail in a Box/Mailcow basically put this whole thing on auto-pilot for you, including initial setup), but about fighting the major email providers to force them to not silently drop incoming messages sent from your server).

asim 4y ago
Really interesting comment. I've amended the title to include self-hosting for relevancy here. You are right, power in small form factor has increased to the extent that Pis with some additional storage can suffice. The setup can be arduous though, I've spent countless hours just trying to get something up and running and no better than hosted experiences. Sometimes I don't really know what I'm accomplishing by doing it. I think a lot of us who used to tinker with building PCs, etc, eventually moving to just paying for prebuilt things that served the purpose. It was the same with bikes and cars before that. I really enjoyed building myself but eventually the cost/time of maintenance was too much. What you said about email is also really true. I think it means your sending really has to go through reputable origins rather than through your own IPs. So the relaying/sending part needs to be decoupled from the actual storage. All of this points to, where's the drop-in solution.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  As for a drop-in solution? - For email, that's (IMO) Mail-in-a-Box/Mailcow on a VPS + an SMTP relay. - For everything else, either a VPS or an x86 server/PC running Docker, paired with an easy reverse proxy like Caddy. I was able to quickly try out multitudes of applications with Docker, without commiting more than a few minutes to any application unless I liked what I was seeing. My self-hosted environment is very much function over form. I don't have time to have fun with self-hosting. I run it due to two simple realities of SaaS platforms: the prying eyes, and the limited storage. No prying eyes: pretty obvious. No matter how much each provider swears up and down that they do no, cannot, or will not read your stuff (if they do promise such a thing at all), I think it's wise to assume that they can, unless it's all E2E encrypted and you use an open-source client to access whatever service this is (not commonly available). I prefer to use self-hosted storage because I don't have to think about my data potentially being made public to someone who hacks into their systems, or sends a "give us all their data" letter on fancy letterheaded paper/email. Securing a system against external attacks is not such a huge amount of work, unless applying security updates is a problem. Once I feel I have true privacy on my own equipment, then I feel that I can freely express myself without self-censorship. Limited storage: I prefer to archive as much as I can, because it goes away. As an example: - several widely-acclaimed HBO shows have recently been wiped from the face of the Earth, because... reasons? As best as I can tell, it's some tax-reduction maneouvre that was mean to save them money, but at the cost of destroying a huge chunk of our shared cultural commons (because TV is a part of that, whether we like it or not). - Youtube channels are dropping like flies thanks to drama, Youtube's copyright policies and other weird factors that mean the channel is there one day with 500+ videos, and the next day it's gone forever like the victims of the Ministry of Truth from "1984". - There are benefits to having a full download of my entire GOG games collection available locally. Easier to navigate a few directories on my NAS and double-click on an installer than do the same with extra steps via a web browser or GOG Galaxy (which is still slow on old machines) Self-reliance takes a lot of disk space, and that disk space gets pretty expensive in the cloud at TB+ scales (not even some crazy collections that people with 100TB+ of storage build - even just single-digit TB sizes are hard to afford). So the only solution is to keep most of it local, even if I make use of cloud storage for email backups and such.

asim 4y ago

Really interesting comment. I've amended the title to include self-hosting for relevancy here. You are right, power in small form factor has increased to the extent that Pis with some additional storage can suffice. The setup can be arduous though, I've spent countless hours just trying to get something up and running and no better than hosted experiences. Sometimes I don't really know what I'm accomplishing by doing it. I think a lot of us who used to tinker with building PCs, etc, eventually moving to just paying for prebuilt things that served the purpose. It was the same with bikes and cars before that. I really enjoyed building myself but eventually the cost/time of maintenance was too much. What you said about email is also really true. I think it means your sending really has to go through reputable origins rather than through your own IPs. So the relaying/sending part needs to be decoupled from the actual storage. All of this points to, where's the drop-in solution.

selfhoster11 4y ago
As for a drop-in solution? - For email, that's (IMO) Mail-in-a-Box/Mailcow on a VPS + an SMTP relay. - For everything else, either a VPS or an x86 server/PC running Docker, paired with an easy reverse proxy like Caddy. I was able to quickly try out multitudes of applications with Docker, without commiting more than a few minutes to any application unless I liked what I was seeing. My self-hosted environment is very much function over form. I don't have time to have fun with self-hosting. I run it due to two simple realities of SaaS platforms: the prying eyes, and the limited storage. No prying eyes: pretty obvious. No matter how much each provider swears up and down that they do no, cannot, or will not read your stuff (if they do promise such a thing at all), I think it's wise to assume that they can, unless it's all E2E encrypted and you use an open-source client to access whatever service this is (not commonly available). I prefer to use self-hosted storage because I don't have to think about my data potentially being made public to someone who hacks into their systems, or sends a "give us all their data" letter on fancy letterheaded paper/email. Securing a system against external attacks is not such a huge amount of work, unless applying security updates is a problem. Once I feel I have true privacy on my own equipment, then I feel that I can freely express myself without self-censorship. Limited storage: I prefer to archive as much as I can, because it goes away. As an example: - several widely-acclaimed HBO shows have recently been wiped from the face of the Earth, because... reasons? As best as I can tell, it's some tax-reduction maneouvre that was mean to save them money, but at the cost of destroying a huge chunk of our shared cultural commons (because TV is a part of that, whether we like it or not). - Youtube channels are dropping like flies thanks to drama, Youtube's copyright policies and other weird factors that mean the channel is there one day with 500+ videos, and the next day it's gone forever like the victims of the Ministry of Truth from "1984". - There are benefits to having a full download of my entire GOG games collection available locally. Easier to navigate a few directories on my NAS and double-click on an installer than do the same with extra steps via a web browser or GOG Galaxy (which is still slow on old machines) Self-reliance takes a lot of disk space, and that disk space gets pretty expensive in the cloud at TB+ scales (not even some crazy collections that people with 100TB+ of storage build - even just single-digit TB sizes are hard to afford). So the only solution is to keep most of it local, even if I make use of cloud storage for email backups and such.