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This is awesome. Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves these days in the age of privacy? How can we make more people self host their da

This is awesome. Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves these days in the age of privacy? How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations? A start might be to tell people to use extensions that are adblockers and to disable javascript on websites and even use and setup pi-holes to take back their data and privacy. There must be more that can be done here but it is a start!

toomuchtodo 3y ago
> Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves these days in the age of privacy? Because it's a pain in the ass and people don't care enough to. People don't want the fediverse, they want an app. They don't want to know about cloud and infra primitives, they want their photos in their phone and for them to be safe and shareable. They want their iMessages and WhatsApp to JustWork(TM). > How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations? You cannot. Make non profits to manage this infra. Wikipedia, Lets Encrypt, etc. Hacker News is a benevolent dictatorship funded by a VC fund and run by someone passionate about the work. Incorporate a 501c3, spin up a deposit account, and start sourcing donations and funding to pay for infra and people. This is not a doomer comment. Enable the power admins and passionate folks to deliver a great experience to normies with as little effort as possible. Literally how Wikipedia functions: datacenter, paid admins, passionate volunteers curating bytes. (Would be cool if Cloudflare supported one click deploy of Fediverse tools into their edge cloud; scale when you need, get your data out of R2 and databases on demand so you're not locked in; having to pay for infra is inevitable, that is to be solved for)
- dsr_ 3y ago
  Most people would like the privacy, but not the responsibility and concomitant work.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pstuart 3y ago
    Then a goal should make the responsibility as minimal as possible (buying a box, inserting a thumb drive and answering a few questions and you're off to the races).
    - dsr_ 3y ago
      You misunderstand. Responsibility cannot be avoided. - power's out at your house. You should have bought a UPS. - internet's out at your house. You should have a router with a backup connection. - security exploit in the wild. You should have configured automatic updates. - update repo changed URLs. You need to change the config. - you enabled open signups, and now strangers are distributing MP3s from your images directory. You need to kill those accounts and change the config. - you let your cousin have an account, and now he's in a flamewar with half of Australia (which he thinks is Austria, and also he believes is ruled by the Illuminati). You need to shut that down and talk to other admins about getting off of their blocklists...
      - robolange 3y ago
        Great list. A few more: - Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege, or jump through hoops to evade their intentional breakage. - Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs, posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using your host and now the police are knocking down your door in the middle of the night and dragging you in for questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors eye you suspiciously from then on.
      - sumtechguy 3y ago
        self hosting is how much of that are you willing to put up with. Everything is a possible point of failure. Of those there are those you can control and those you can not. Just adding in a DNS resolver ups the number of possible points of failure by 2. Mix in a proxy server with TLS rewriting. Add in a few more. Add in your docker source of containers is gone more failure. That on top of your usual 'computers are broken in weird ways' most of the time. Outsourcing that to a 3rd party is tempting, very tempting. But you are also sacrificing other things to do so. So you have to balance those two opposing forces. Sometimes picking up the phone and saying to someone on the other end 'fix it' and they fix it is useful. Other times you digging thru hundreds of forums (or chatgpt these days) and figuring out what is wrong is interesting too and has its uses. That most people just sign up for something and just want it to work. I totally get.
- elashri 3y ago
  > Because it's a pain in the ass. People don't want the fediverse, they want an app. It seems that I enjoy the pain with many other people on r/selfhosted. I will call that pleasure I feel, The Pleasure of Pain. I think that was what the web was about since the beginning and lasted for a good couple of years before targeted ads and "data became the new oil". Edit: I replied before the GP edited the comment.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I do not fault the r/selfhosted masochists, no kink shaming here, but recognize outliers vs the mean. Go talk to average folks for 15-60 minutes on the street about what social (video, communities, threads/twitter/x/whatever, etc) means to them, this will help calibrate perspective. This is just product and user research. Find out what people want and build it, don't build what you think they want. Product market fit is not just for startups.
  - self_awareness 3y ago
    Generally I'm for self hosting everything that I can, I just can't help myself pointing out that currently the most popular thread on r/selfhosted is "I'd rather kill myself than host SMTP again (self.selfhosted)" :D
  - Zak 3y ago
    > on r/selfhosted If you're not participating in https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted from your selfhosted Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc... instance, I question your commitment.
    - jeena 3y ago
      I second this!
- rglullis 3y ago
  And even when you give them an app and basically spoonfeed them with the alternative, the small group that has come before will act like a bunch of elitist NIMBYs who will cry about their small "community losing character".
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    You write this as if the Eternal September problem doesn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    - rglullis 3y ago
      I know, but I am saying in the context of those that were already on Reddit and just wanted to move to an alternative place.
- hruzgar 3y ago
  maybe not exactely what you're looking for (not open source and not non profit) but there is some solutions out there like this one: https://elest.io/ https://elest.io/
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    More like https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/. You can run it yourself, but you can also just have them ding a credit card every month and not think about it again. Wordpress has Automattic, and I'd like to see the same for Peertube and Mastodon. With Mastodon, one can then go to folks and say, "Heh, here is a turnkey solution to migrate to for your 1:many and social interaction needs, fully managed." As long as these applications support an S3 compatible target for backups and restores, portability is a database and object backfill and DNS switch away. If you want strong durable storage, the Internet Archive has Vault, a product that can act as long term storage of last resort for digital preservation. Lets Encrypt serves nearly 192M websites with 13 full time staff and an annual budget of approximately $3.35M, for example.
    - masto 3y ago
      I am using https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ for Mastodon and https://elest.io/ https://elest.io/ for Lemmy. They are fully managed. I'm not worried about who owns my data, but I do want to have a stable identity. The first Mastodon server I signed up with mysteriously disappeared after a couple of weeks, so I decided I was better off paying a small monthly fee to put it on my own domain.
malikNF 3y ago
Convenience. Setting it up, maintaining it, cost, audience reach. Lots of reasons.
ISL 3y ago
I would self-host on a cloud instance for a monthly fee if it required no maintenance overhead from me. I might also self-host if residential ISPs didn't treat home servers as an aberration.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Because self hosting is a big commitment, costly in time and resources, and just generally a skill that the vast majority of users simply don't have (and they'd be well advised not to bother). There are a few managed mastodon services for this that I've been eyeing for corporate usage as I can see the moment coming that we'd might to be on mastodon at least as Twitter/X has been imploding a bit lately. I could probably figure out self hosting but I have more urgent things to do.
BeetleB 3y ago
Compared to the good old days of LAMP, self hosting services like Mastodon is fairly costly (in RAM, DB space, etc).
catapart 3y ago
>How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations? Here's my pitch... Sell a productized version of a server that has everything you need to run all of your data-sharing needs already set up with a nice front end that can be operated by a remote control from an HDMI-connected TV. Using that front end, the user connects to the local network, establishes mobile app companions, enters in any global details for accounts they want to maintain, and manages all the configuration options for the server. The server would host all of the things a household would want to maintain, using open source projects for transparency and maintainability. That would include things like peertube and mastadon for publishing content and media, but it would also include home automation software, as well as personal media software like owncloud as a way to replace google drive content and plex to manage personal media playback. Basically, a little server that uses open-source software to emulate every modern cloud-based service, on a household scale so that you can run it cheaply enough to be affordable ($60-$70 bucks?), layered in encryption and firewalls for privacy and federated to other home servers (and everywhere else) using the fediverse, while also adding in anything you would want a home-management or home media server to do. I call it an "accent server". Like an "accent table". I would make it stylish enough to display, but discreet enough to tuck out of sight. And, personally, I see this kind of thing coming around either way. It's just a matter of whether or not one company puts together all of this software and starts offering it as a walled garden, or if it bumbles itself together out of CLI utility chaining, and enough reddit posts circling around the same setup questions. That assumption is based on the idea that most people seem to want what this would provide; it's just that not even particularly tech-minded people want to go through the steps of setting each of all of these things up. And it's only when you have 3 or 4 of the services or features working in tandem that they add up enough to make a change in lifestyle (which is what we're attempting) tempting enough. So if you could put together a "buy it once, plug it in, set it up, forget about it" kind of offering, I think you would get a ton of people that would buy it, and then once it was just a thing in your house that you could start adding custom plugins to (as easy as installing an app), then you would get a ton of adoption. The hard part is marketing; you have to really explain it fully to make anyone understand what it is you're trying to offer.
- robolange 3y ago
mal-2 3y ago
I think fediverse offers a decent compromise here which is that people can self-host an instance for other people to use. Some of the longest running instances have a few hundred users or maybe a thousand. So if one in 300 people is interested in self-hosting then they can support the other people who either don't have the skills or don't have the interest. It's not perfect but it's working pretty well for those servers.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]

toomuchtodo 3y ago

> Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves these days in the age of privacy? Because it's a pain in the ass and people don't care enough to. People don't want the fediverse, they want an app. They don't want to know about cloud and infra primitives, they want their photos in their phone and for them to be safe and shareable. They want their iMessages and WhatsApp to JustWork(TM). > How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations? You cannot. Make non profits to manage this infra. Wikipedia, Lets Encrypt, etc. Hacker News is a benevolent dictatorship funded by a VC fund and run by someone passionate about the work. Incorporate a 501c3, spin up a deposit account, and start sourcing donations and funding to pay for infra and people. This is not a doomer comment. Enable the power admins and passionate folks to deliver a great experience to normies with as little effort as possible. Literally how Wikipedia functions: datacenter, paid admins, passionate volunteers curating bytes. (Would be cool if Cloudflare supported one click deploy of Fediverse tools into their edge cloud; scale when you need, get your data out of R2 and databases on demand so you're not locked in; having to pay for infra is inevitable, that is to be solved for)

dsr_ 3y ago
Most people would like the privacy, but not the responsibility and concomitant work.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pstuart 3y ago
  Then a goal should make the responsibility as minimal as possible (buying a box, inserting a thumb drive and answering a few questions and you're off to the races).
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    You misunderstand. Responsibility cannot be avoided. - power's out at your house. You should have bought a UPS. - internet's out at your house. You should have a router with a backup connection. - security exploit in the wild. You should have configured automatic updates. - update repo changed URLs. You need to change the config. - you enabled open signups, and now strangers are distributing MP3s from your images directory. You need to kill those accounts and change the config. - you let your cousin have an account, and now he's in a flamewar with half of Australia (which he thinks is Austria, and also he believes is ruled by the Illuminati). You need to shut that down and talk to other admins about getting off of their blocklists...
    - robolange 3y ago
      Great list. A few more: - Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege, or jump through hoops to evade their intentional breakage. - Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs, posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using your host and now the police are knocking down your door in the middle of the night and dragging you in for questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors eye you suspiciously from then on.
    - sumtechguy 3y ago
      self hosting is how much of that are you willing to put up with. Everything is a possible point of failure. Of those there are those you can control and those you can not. Just adding in a DNS resolver ups the number of possible points of failure by 2. Mix in a proxy server with TLS rewriting. Add in a few more. Add in your docker source of containers is gone more failure. That on top of your usual 'computers are broken in weird ways' most of the time. Outsourcing that to a 3rd party is tempting, very tempting. But you are also sacrificing other things to do so. So you have to balance those two opposing forces. Sometimes picking up the phone and saying to someone on the other end 'fix it' and they fix it is useful. Other times you digging thru hundreds of forums (or chatgpt these days) and figuring out what is wrong is interesting too and has its uses. That most people just sign up for something and just want it to work. I totally get.
elashri 3y ago
> Because it's a pain in the ass. People don't want the fediverse, they want an app. It seems that I enjoy the pain with many other people on r/selfhosted. I will call that pleasure I feel, The Pleasure of Pain. I think that was what the web was about since the beginning and lasted for a good couple of years before targeted ads and "data became the new oil". Edit: I replied before the GP edited the comment.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I do not fault the r/selfhosted masochists, no kink shaming here, but recognize outliers vs the mean. Go talk to average folks for 15-60 minutes on the street about what social (video, communities, threads/twitter/x/whatever, etc) means to them, this will help calibrate perspective. This is just product and user research. Find out what people want and build it, don't build what you think they want. Product market fit is not just for startups.
- self_awareness 3y ago
  Generally I'm for self hosting everything that I can, I just can't help myself pointing out that currently the most popular thread on r/selfhosted is "I'd rather kill myself than host SMTP again (self.selfhosted)" :D
- Zak 3y ago
  > on r/selfhosted If you're not participating in https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted from your selfhosted Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc... instance, I question your commitment.
  - jeena 3y ago
    I second this!
rglullis 3y ago
And even when you give them an app and basically spoonfeed them with the alternative, the small group that has come before will act like a bunch of elitist NIMBYs who will cry about their small "community losing character".
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  You write this as if the Eternal September problem doesn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - rglullis 3y ago
    I know, but I am saying in the context of those that were already on Reddit and just wanted to move to an alternative place.
hruzgar 3y ago
maybe not exactely what you're looking for (not open source and not non profit) but there is some solutions out there like this one: https://elest.io/ https://elest.io/
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  More like https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/. You can run it yourself, but you can also just have them ding a credit card every month and not think about it again. Wordpress has Automattic, and I'd like to see the same for Peertube and Mastodon. With Mastodon, one can then go to folks and say, "Heh, here is a turnkey solution to migrate to for your 1:many and social interaction needs, fully managed." As long as these applications support an S3 compatible target for backups and restores, portability is a database and object backfill and DNS switch away. If you want strong durable storage, the Internet Archive has Vault, a product that can act as long term storage of last resort for digital preservation. Lets Encrypt serves nearly 192M websites with 13 full time staff and an annual budget of approximately $3.35M, for example.
  - masto 3y ago
    I am using https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ for Mastodon and https://elest.io/ https://elest.io/ for Lemmy. They are fully managed. I'm not worried about who owns my data, but I do want to have a stable identity. The first Mastodon server I signed up with mysteriously disappeared after a couple of weeks, so I decided I was better off paying a small monthly fee to put it on my own domain.

malikNF 3y ago

Convenience. Setting it up, maintaining it, cost, audience reach. Lots of reasons.

ISL 3y ago

I would self-host on a cloud instance for a monthly fee if it required no maintenance overhead from me. I might also self-host if residential ISPs didn't treat home servers as an aberration.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Because self hosting is a big commitment, costly in time and resources, and just generally a skill that the vast majority of users simply don't have (and they'd be well advised not to bother). There are a few managed mastodon services for this that I've been eyeing for corporate usage as I can see the moment coming that we'd might to be on mastodon at least as Twitter/X has been imploding a bit lately. I could probably figure out self hosting but I have more urgent things to do.

BeetleB 3y ago

Compared to the good old days of LAMP, self hosting services like Mastodon is fairly costly (in RAM, DB space, etc).

catapart 3y ago

>How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations? Here's my pitch... Sell a productized version of a server that has everything you need to run all of your data-sharing needs already set up with a nice front end that can be operated by a remote control from an HDMI-connected TV. Using that front end, the user connects to the local network, establishes mobile app companions, enters in any global details for accounts they want to maintain, and manages all the configuration options for the server. The server would host all of the things a household would want to maintain, using open source projects for transparency and maintainability. That would include things like peertube and mastadon for publishing content and media, but it would also include home automation software, as well as personal media software like owncloud as a way to replace google drive content and plex to manage personal media playback. Basically, a little server that uses open-source software to emulate every modern cloud-based service, on a household scale so that you can run it cheaply enough to be affordable ($60-$70 bucks?), layered in encryption and firewalls for privacy and federated to other home servers (and everywhere else) using the fediverse, while also adding in anything you would want a home-management or home media server to do. I call it an "accent server". Like an "accent table". I would make it stylish enough to display, but discreet enough to tuck out of sight. And, personally, I see this kind of thing coming around either way. It's just a matter of whether or not one company puts together all of this software and starts offering it as a walled garden, or if it bumbles itself together out of CLI utility chaining, and enough reddit posts circling around the same setup questions. That assumption is based on the idea that most people seem to want what this would provide; it's just that not even particularly tech-minded people want to go through the steps of setting each of all of these things up. And it's only when you have 3 or 4 of the services or features working in tandem that they add up enough to make a change in lifestyle (which is what we're attempting) tempting enough. So if you could put together a "buy it once, plug it in, set it up, forget about it" kind of offering, I think you would get a ton of people that would buy it, and then once it was just a thing in your house that you could start adding custom plugins to (as easy as installing an app), then you would get a ton of adoption. The hard part is marketing; you have to really explain it fully to make anyone understand what it is you're trying to offer.

robolange 3y ago

mal-2 3y ago

I think fediverse offers a decent compromise here which is that people can self-host an instance for other people to use. Some of the longest running instances have a few hundred users or maybe a thousand. So if one in 300 people is interested in self-hosting then they can support the other people who either don't have the skills or don't have the interest. It's not perfect but it's working pretty well for those servers.

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]