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The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never co
by api 4y ago
The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never come back if we are still expecting people to manage servers like it’s 1985.
I think part of the problem is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that is not fun. It’s that boring middle layer between the OS and apps. Compounding the problem is the fact that the people who know that layer well feel no personal need to fix its usability issues.
Programmers want to work on AI and distributed systems and games and other sexy things. Even people who work in the middle layer would rather work on sexy problems there like hyperscaling with Kubernetes and architecture as code.
Making regular old systems easy to use for boring not-hyperscale uses just isn’t sexy so open source devs don’t do it. The economic model for commercial stuff only incentivizes the leveraging of this problem for vendor lock in or to move people into SaaS where data can be mined and rent can be charged forever.
At this point the whole industry is herding everyone into SaaS walled gardens because that’s the only working economic model in software. I don’t see this changing without a movement similar to open source in its heyday in the 90s, but to steal fire from the nerds and bring it to the masses.
I’m not optimistic because nobody seems to care. It might take a whole cycle in which all freedom and privacy is completely lost. Experiences like Twitter just aren’t cutting it. People are stuck on either “woke Twitter was bad” or “pilled Elon bad” instead of realizing that the problem is intrinsic to walled gardens. All cloud spies on you and all social media is manipulating discourse for someone. No exceptions.
- rakoo 4y ago> The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never come back if we are still expecting people to manage servers like it’s 1985. It exists: https://yunohost.org/#/ https://yunohost.org/#/. Install the distro, and then it's all clickety-clicks for all your apps (which are softwares like nextcloud, cryptpad, bitwarden, bitter, etc..)
- api 4y ago“Install the distro” is full stop for most people. The backup and restore also has to be continuous and seamless.
- synchrone 4y agoCannot upvote this enough
- tweetle_beetle 4y agoThat is definietely the idea, but in practice all the app stores suffer from same problems - mainly that keeping the apps up to date is a lot of thankless work. Yunohost is mainly full of community contributions, quite a few of which have been abandoned. Some are stuck on old versions, some use migration scripts which may or may not do things the correct Yunohost way, some use migration scripts with bugs which can lead to data loss. The front end is slick, but it's the wild west behind the scenes. There's not even a mechanism for regularly reviewing if apps have been abandoned - I've manually reported a couple. Cloudron is probably better than most as they have a financial incentive, but then that targets their apps towards "professional" users.
- phoehne 4y agoFreeNAS kinds of sits in that area, but it suffers from some of the same community contribution problem. It’s definitely hit or miss. I’m thinking the solution has to be like 10 core things that are rock solid rather than dozens of things that range from excellent to hasn’t-worked-in-2-years.
- jtode 4y ago[flagged]
- noAnswer 4y ago> The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. I would say NASs from Synology or QNAP provide that. Small but good managed Appstore with autoupdate and file/config backup.