25 ms·

The future is not self-hosted

• jqpabc123 1y ago
  What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think... beyond individualism What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting. Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever. In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location". When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords. But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Totally agree that without economic infrastructure supporting the model, it's completely unsustainable. Good-will is not a business model. Thanks for reading!
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    It's just like any other expense. You can get lunch delivered, or have a cafeteria onsite.
  • __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I think that cycle will break one day. It's easy to trust a corporate overlord with your pictures or your email, because the immediate damage doable by somebody who has compromised those things is relatively low. Privacy is important I guess, but not when compared to things like whether your car or your insulin pump does what it needs to to keep you alive. Eventually, the bad guys will be sophisticated enough, and the tech will be integrated enough, that it's no longer safe to trust economic incentives alone. You're going to want your sysadmin to share your interests (in a more specific way than you get from they-also-like-money).
  • dylnuge 1y ago
    I'm part of several small/mid-sized communities where people voluntarily do sysadmin work so that the group can have some nice shared services, and that's to say nothing of the number of people I know running personal homelabs/self-hosting setups at decent cost just for fun. You could of course say that fun, maintaining something for friends you care about, or having a dream of less corporately locked-in software are all incentives, but they're not monetary ones. Really, it's easy to get sysadmin types interested in this; the problem is that most people aren't sysadmins and don't know any. If you really wanted a business model out of this, it'd probably be a managed service that lets non-tech-savvy users spin up their own versions of this without learning the details. > Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever. There are plenty of successful economic models around open source, and plenty of open source software is used in high-reliability contexts. What comparison are you trying to make?
  • cmilton 1y ago
    I agree better incentives are needed for community hosting. Co-location is still readily available. Which service and reliability improvements are you looking for that competent sys admins couldn't provide with multiple co-lo's? Not everyone made the cloud jump.
    • jqpabc123 1y ago
      In the days of old, I had 2 different co-lo's shut down on me with minimal notice. I moved to AWS and haven't had that problem since.
  • sgarland 1y ago
    > What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting. I’d do it for free. I’ve long been frustrated that I have more reliable infrastructure in my homelab than most companies I’ve worked for, and that none of them have any interest in shifting out of the cloud. I don’t see a market for it, though. Most people are generally happy with Google, Apple, etc. to host their stuff, and I get it - it’s quite reliable, integrates with the rest of their respective products nicely, and Just Works. Add to that the economies of scale, and it’s a non-starter unless you find a niche group of people. Google One is $99/year for 2 TB of storage. For me to have confidence in uptime to offer public storage, I’d need at least 4U of colo rack space, and ideally 6U (2x 2U for HDD servers, 2x 1U for hosting applications in HA-ish). That would cost a few hundred USD/month, not to mention an initial outlay of tens of thousands of dollars for servers and drives (mostly the drives… high capacity enterprise-rated HDDs aren’t cheap). And that’s only for one site - ideally, of course, there are at least two, or at the very least, off-site backup like rsync.net.
    • jqpabc123 1y ago
      I’d do it for free. And if you get hit by a car? Or worse --- maybe you get married and have kids<g>? One big reason people *buy* service is sustainability/longevity/redundancy. There are no absolute guarantees but I think most commercial endeavors nowadays would bet on AWS/Google/MS/Apple over "Hosting by Joe and Friends".
      • esseph 1y ago
        There is no guarantee that the service you buy will exist tomorrow, and if they go out of business, there is no guarantee you can get your data out before they close the platform.
        • jqpabc123 1y ago
          Yes, exactly as I stated --- there are few guarantees in life. So use your best judgment and place your bets accordingly. Personally, I'm betting on those who are highly incentivized and have the resources and structure needed to sustain reliable service.
  • esseph 1y ago
    Woah woah woah I thought as an industry we clearly didn't need sysadmins anymore /s
  • fragmede 1y ago
    > When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords. Not all corporate overloads are equal. Or rather, if you and your buddies get together and pay the $350+fees to legalzoom to start a corporation, you too, can be a corporate overload. There's still miles to go before you're Facebook, but congratulations, you're now... still the same person you were before you clicked that button on legalzoom's webpage and spent $500 or whatever. Where is the problem of people turning into corporate overloads for you? Is it at 10 employees? 100? 1,000? 10,000? If we're too stupid to differentiate specific corporations because their legal structure means they're all exactly the same, then yeah, I guess there's no hope and we're all doomed.
• bix6 1y ago
  I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows. I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
  • slightwinder 1y ago
    > I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular. > Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows. This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason why people prefer letting other people doing this work. > I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking here about separate modem & router?
    • garciasn 1y ago
      > People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular. I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP, httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing many of the same things I did at home. I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with work, I just want to go outside or read a book. I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications; but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more to me at this point in my life.
      • ryandrake 1y ago
        I do the same things (self-hosted server, NAS storage, DNS, email, http for a handful of domains, some development VMs) and it's really set-and-forget. It doesn't require maintenance. Every once in a while LetsEncrypt's certbot falls over and I have to log in to manually refresh ssh certificates, but HN commenters tell me it's user error, so it's something I can also fix to be set-and-forget if I really cared. My self-hosting infrastructure will probably outlive me.
• jmclnx 1y ago
  It is nice that he created a cloud environment for a pointy/clicky people :) But if I where to do such a thing: 1. Cloud only used to send and store locally encrypted compressed backup data 2. Open an ssh port to the public, but deny logins. Only allow logins using ssh keys. 3. Download data from my system using sftp/scp This protects you from being chased by DRM lawyers because the system is not public. Plus it is very simple to setup. Setting up a Cloud System like described here is very great for end users, but it could get you into court, or at the very least lots of take-down notices.
  • JimmyBiscuit 1y ago
    The dude set it up to use Tailscale, so not really public. But it was only mentioned in passing.
• EGreg 1y ago
  This is exactly what I’ve been building for a decade, but it’s not just a “community hosted cloud platform”, it is an entire reimagining of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram and all the other community platforms, for an open source world. Here is an overview of how the payments work: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem And here is the software you can try for yourself over a weekend: https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix If any of you do, let me know what you think! I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179795 If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
  • radlad 1y ago
    > And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you? Is this meant to be tongue in cheek?
    • EGreg 1y ago
      No, I am serious. Do you have links to stories of AWS breaking into EC2 instances to eg read RAM for data that is encrypted at rest? And even if they do, this would present an issue for privacy, but the protocols would still enforce their own permissions (eg no custom amazon DRM for books).
      • radlad 1y ago
        Most of how the NSA operates is classified but this does not sound far-fetched to me in the slightest. Cloud providers frequently provide law enforcement information via subpoena. It's not really "breaking in." From 2015, AWS asserted they were not involved in the PRISM program, but they would be under a gag order if they were, so you've gotta take it with a grain of salt: https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300077146/aws-finally-releases-data-documenting-government-surveillance-efforts https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300077146/aws-finally-release... Meanwhile: > From the start of this calendar year through May, AWS received 813 subpoenas from the U.S. government seeking access to customer accounts. In those five months, the Seattle-based cloud provider fully complied with 542 of those court orders, submitted partial information in response to 126 and didn't respond at all to 145. > Through the same period, Amazon received 25 search warrants from federal authorities and turned over all the data sought by about half of them, partially fulfilled eight others and withheld information requested by four of the warrants. > AWS fully responded to only four out of 13 court orders that weren't subpoenas or warrants, while refusing to turn over any data related to four of those. > Foreign governments were more successful with their solicitations to Amazon. Of the 132 non-U.S. requests fielded by the cloud provider, more than 80 percent yielded complete data disclosures, while just 13 percent hit a dead end. Amazon also complied with the only request it received during the five months under review to actually remove a user's data from its servers.
• webdevver 1y ago
  sad but true.
  • throwzasdf 1y ago
    It is the future for those who want to selfhost and isn't for those who don't want to selfhost. Decades ago no one pumped their own gas.
• MoreQARespect 1y ago
  Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone. Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call". SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket. This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced. I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
  • theamk 1y ago
    This still exists... OsmAnd, offline map app for Android, has 10M+ downloads. Maps.me has 50M+ downloads. Sure, that's not 10B+ of Google Maps users, but still a lot of users. I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.
    • palata 1y ago
      Isn't Organic Maps the open source successor of Maps.me?
      • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
        And CoMaps the successor of Organic
        • fivestones 1y ago
          TIL about CoMaps
  • NoboruWataya 1y ago
• mystraline 1y ago
  That all depends if you're willing to run stuff yourself, or be subservient on the good will of companies not to enshittify (pro-tip, they always will). I self-host the following: Video: Jellyfin Audio: Navidrome Audiobooks: Audiobookshelf Phone image sharing: Immich Home automation: Homeassistant Office suite: NextCloud Monitoring: LibreNMS Compute: Proxmox AI/LLM local: open-webui
  • crashabr 1y ago
    What kind of machine do you need to run all of this concurrently?
    • jerf 1y ago
      I'm running Immich, syncthing (watching about 2TB in 150,000 files), jellyfin, and pihole, as well as remoting in to a browser session, on this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH81C4K3 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH81C4K3 which is a $125 NUC with 8GB of RAM and an Intel N150. I know from experience that adding NextCloud to it would work out OK for a family, and I imagine you could shove most of the rest of that list on to this system as well, though in the case of ProxMox I'm just talking about the management. Obviously I'm not running very many full VMs on that before it runs out of RAM. (I don't even know if it can run VMs. Everything's docker in this setup.) The bottleneck appears to be RAM as that is eating about half of it right now. The CPU only works when someone is doing something, and there is some contention at startup as all of the services start scanning their storage for changes, but it gets through it. jellyfin is configured to not transcode anything. The vast bulk of my library is DVD/BluRay rips of my own creation and I just ripped them in the desired format in the first place. This could probably keep up with a single DVD-quality re-encode, I dunno about Blu-Ray (depending on config, perhaps), but I just have it serve the correct files in the first place. There's a ~$125 5TB USB drive hanging off of it for the media storage, which syncthing syncs to another 5TB drive in the house. (I don't actually "back up" my media storage in the full sense; everything else is actually backed up in the full sense to S3 via restic.) The "contention" I mentioned above is because all the big data sets are mostly on that spinning-rust drive. The Immich AI features worked fine on this, though it did take overnight to process my initial load of ~20 years of photos. However once it chewed through that, the responsiveness is fantastic. If you want responsive AI that uses GPUs this isn't anywhere near enough, but for any "conventional" app, $125 or $250 buys you a lot nowadays.
• dathinab 1y ago
  > Which raises the question: do they even own those books? nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no matter if you bought a license or not in additions license with clear deadline should always be required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly. It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices or violence .)
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Couldn't agree more – thanks for reading and commenting!
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  There has been a big move to web based apps (SAAS) as web-based software has improved. The biggest plus to web based software for the user is that there is no need to install anything. BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man. So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more. I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Yes! And I think this way of building software is having a come-back with the local-first movement! https://lofi.so/ https://lofi.so/
    • mostlysimilar 1y ago
      It's a shame they're using Discord, a centralized silo of proprietary ownership, for community.
      • yonz 1y ago
        I hear you. What platform would you recommend? Is discord a blocker for you?
        • DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
          Self-hosted phpBB.
• rs186 1y ago
  > My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open-source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us. Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full of negative impact.
  • arscan 1y ago
    A danger with the arrangement of this article is that it takes awhile to get to the point, which actually in line with your view. He hints at it in the title and the very next paragraph, but maybe you didn’t get that far? > And this week, I want to share with you how I did it, what I learned, and why I think self-hosting is NOT the future we should be fighting for.
    • drew_lytle 1y ago
      Haha yes I have a tendency to bury the lede a little – thanks for reading!
  • kwanbix 1y ago
    While I know what you mean, money is one positive thing. The rest, you only realize the day google blocks your account because some stupid AI flagged a picture and they think you are a risk and kick you out.
  • chneu 1y ago
    Zero gain? Say that when your Google account is flagged because of any number of nonsense reasons. Or there's an issue that simply wipes your data from any number of services. Or a court requests access to your data and you have no idea. You're leaving your entire digital existence up to companies who will and have ruined people's lives. I think it says a lot about how much we've given up that control over your data and access to your data is seen as "zero gain" or "full of negative impact." It's wild how little people care about their own rights. Capitalism and hustle culture make it so easy to give up so much while receiving so little in return. The pressure to give up more is constant and people willfully lean into it.
• QuiCasseRien 1y ago
  > The future is community-hosted That's old school P2P since 25 year. this is not new and not future...
• PaulKeeble 1y ago
  The reason why giving this storage and control over to any company doesn't work is because their incentives are always towards enshitiffication. The issue of community access can always be solved by self hosting on a rented cloud server, its still your data under your control its just someone elses box with a high speed internet connection and global accessibility, self hosting gives you the choice who sees and uses it and how. The hardware isn't actually the important bit, its the software. I think its not the future in its current form either, because it requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays. But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Couldn't agree more! Thanks for reading and leaving a comment Paul!
• redog 1y ago
  Hybrid runners are self hosted... it's like paying to cook things on your own stove.
• skeezyboy 1y ago
  it effing well is
  • skeezyboy 1y ago
    plus it appears to be cyclical as we began with mainframes, then to pcs now back to the cloud, and given how arm is beginning to dominate i bet well see miniaturization push us back to local again
    • riffic 1y ago
      pendulum swing
• meonkeys 1y ago
  Well-said, Drew! This is inspiring. The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah, that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the hard thing because it's the right thing. Heck, maybe the right thing will also be the easy thing if we come up with better ideas like yours.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Thanks so much for reading a commenting friend! Here's hoping together!
• VikingCoder 1y ago
  So, the thing we have right now is Tailscale - and it's freaking awesome. But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines. I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together. It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this. I get that you can basically do this with Tailscale. Basically. But I want the next thing to be designed from the ground-up around this kind of design. People, sharing apps with each other.
  • nicman23 1y ago
    that is just usenet with extra steps
    • VikingCoder 1y ago
      No, thanks. I want to limit the number of people I share content with. Not broadcast to the world.
      • nicman23 1y ago
        that is just private trackers with extra steps :P
  • fragmede 1y ago
    You can invite other users into your tailnet.
    • VikingCoder 1y ago
      Right, but that doesn't work when I have a hundred friends, and they each have a hundred friends, and etc. If I "Share" nodes on my tailnet with a hundred people, it's way closer to what I want.
      • fragmede 1y ago
• kreco 1y ago
  I strongly agree with the global sentiment. If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it. You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone. You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back. Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup. There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks. I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
  • otter-in-a-suit 1y ago
    Exactly. It's a great article, but the depressing part is that there's a very limited catalog of legal media available to use these services with (except for immich, I suppose). For games, there's GOG. Good luck finding bigger releases. For music, there's Bandcamp and CDs and vinyl. Fortunately, most albums still release on either one of these. Audiobookshelf can be used for most podcasts (some do not have a traditional RSS feed and are in some walled garden) and some audio books are available DRM free, but tons of books are Audible exclusives. I'm relatively sure that they also stop authors from publishing e.g. on Royal Road once they're on there. The same is true for e-books - HumbleBundle and co are great, but good luck finding certain titles. I regret buying a new Kindle, but at least had the foresight to download all my books before they stopped allowing that. Physical books are an option, but that's not an equivalent to en e-book. I stopped caring about TV shows and movies a long time ago (largely due to the atrocious streaming fragmentation, pricing, and the sheer audacity to include ads in paid plans), but I assume 95% of all shows are exclusive to some streaming giant, too.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• mmstgshj 1y ago
  I don't know if this idea was inspired by the Library Socialism movement or if it is an instance of "great minds think alike", but people who like this idea, may find Library Socialism appealing as well https://librarysocialism.org/ https://librarysocialism.org/
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Seems very inline! Thanks for sharing!
• kbody 1y ago
  There have been solid efforts with niche adoption that have quite nice UX like Umbrel [1] that allows installing all the mentioned and a ton more open-source apps [2] just by using a UI. It was spawned as bitcoin node hardware+software combo but expanded and is now primarily about self-hosting. The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration. [1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos https://umbrel.com/umbrelos [2] https://apps.umbrel.com/ https://apps.umbrel.com/
  • slightwinder 1y ago
    There are many solutions like Umbrel, but they all suffer from limited amount of apps, and depending on someone maintaining them. You basically have to choose them by which apps you want to use, and how that it will get maintained long enough. What we need is something more universal, like a more userfriendly docker, or something like flatpak+hub for server-apps.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    So interesting! I'll have to check those out! Thanks for reading and commenting!
• torium 1y ago
  > Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day. Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats. [1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for sharing! Stallman was, indeed, right lol
• singpolyma3 1y ago
  It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating self hosting with having a physical server in your house. Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.
  • torium 1y ago
    > It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating self hosting with having a physical server in your house. LOL right. I bought an ereader that works for me instead of working for Amazon. No need to run a server.
    • drew_lytle 1y ago
      Currently working on jailbreaking my Kindle – thanks for your comment!
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    > Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible. Totally agree, but there's a lot more nuance here. Giving each friend an account on my server would require it be exposed to the public internet which is difficult to manage securely. And SSO doesn't really make this very convenient because that means everyone would have to sign in and sync to everyone's servers which is a lot of work for the user. It's a UX problem. The solution as I see it here is services that can interoperate and sync files across hosts. So, my friend's Alice and Bob can both have their photos synced to a separate server and can choose which photos to share to my server. Separate but connected. Thanks for reading and for your comment!
    • ndriscoll 1y ago
      Right, the services should allow federation, but that doesn't mean you need to federate with the entire world. You and your friend should be able to just click "invite" in your "My Home" app to get a link to text to each other like `myhome://invite?domain=<random>.services.frienddomain.com` (or a QR code flow). Under that TLD you have well-known subdomains and TXT records for e.g. wireguard config, oauth server location, etc. When you open the link in your "My Home" app, it adds the wireguard peer and starts trying to perform oauth client autoregistration and federate any services you run. When your friend clicks your link, it'll set up the other half of those connections. Once you've both clicked, things start talking to each other. This all stays invisible to the normal Internet for anyone that doesn't know the root domain to search for records under. This could all run on one of those $130 N150 minipcs that uses like 8W and could run 24/7. It's a lot of integration work, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a fairly off-the-shelf product. You could also explore other service discovery patterns since buying a domain name is a pain. Like have the URL provide the initial wireguard config (including outside IP) and DNS search domain, and then the servers on each end can query (private) DNS on the other end via the tunnel for services.
• mrbluecoat 1y ago
  > our friends can't access our server You're almost there with your excellent lineup of self-hosted tech. Just throw in Headscale and some Tailscale clients and you'll be there. (Or any number of mesh VPN alternatives, like NetBird)
• stego-tech 1y ago
  The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm). I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens. I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
  • rightbyte 1y ago
    > but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. Complexity, sure. But for most people, the cost of Netflix, Spotify and whatever will quickly add up to a 500usd server. With 1-10 users you don't need much.
  • chneu 1y ago
    Docker has basically solved the deployment issue. For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up in ~5 minutes with a docker compose and env file. There are whole OSes built around it, like casaOS which gives users a neat front end/dashboard for their self hosted stuff. Also for cost eh idk. For $300 you can have enough hardware and storage to self host everything, even a Google photos alternative. Most people spend much more than that on subscriptions for storage, streaming, etc. I guess a UPS is necessary and adds a bit of cost. There are also plenty of pre-built kits for this. I do agree that it isn't for everyone. Its finicky to get just right and security can be very annoying. Security is already a crapshoot though so I'm not sure that's necessarily a ding for self-hosted.
• V__ 1y ago
  I disagree with some of the authors takes here: > Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of the data and software, than the location of the hardware. > Well...since our friends can't access our server, the only good way to do that would probably be using an app like Google Photos or iCloud Get a domain and set up a subdomain for Immich (maybe add a tunnel if it is a home server). I have friends using my Immich instance without problems, it's just another app. > I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services. I can't see how one can convince people to switch to a community cloud if Apple Cloud etc. exists. Most people just won't understand the difference or benefits.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Thanks for your comment! Yes, I ignored the VPS angle simply for ease of narrative, but you're right. I also updated the shared album example to hopefully better explain why this is hard from a technical and UX perspective. As to the "convince people to switch" angle, I think the benefits of data interoperability would be pretty significant and eventually lead people to switch to providers that have that or would likely incentivize providers like Apple to implement that into their products. Ideally, no one would have to switch and everything would just get better.
    • V__ 1y ago
      I like the vision though and would love to see it become reality, if just to have the alternative.
• will5421 1y ago
  Could the friends access the server through the VPN? > It's secured behind our own VPN. > So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Well...since our friends can't access our server
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Definitely! But even if I could convince everyone I know to do that, that feels like a nightmare to manage haha. Thanks for reading and commenting!
• mmstgshj 1y ago
  https://disroot.org/ https://disroot.org/ is already doing this, though not all its services are end to end encrypted. They are explicit about what is e2ee though.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Looks super interesting! Thanks for sharing!
• palata 1y ago
  I sometimes wonder about "managed hosting" (or whatever it is called). For instance, some providers like Hetzner or Infomaniak offer a "Nextcloud managed instance". So you pay a subscription and they maintain your Nextcloud instance for you. Which is presumably simpler and safer than doing it yourself at home. On such an instance, one can share a folder with a friend, for instance. And I think Nextcloud is even working on federation (?). One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is in your country).
  • bayindirh 1y ago
    > One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is in your country). You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at Hetzner. I host my own Nextcloud, and I know it supports encryption, but apparently Hetzner also allows you to do so. On the other hand, if you want a standard cloud provider, pCloud provides good encryption support. Also they have a nice FUSE based client, and they're interoperable with tons of tools, too. Returning to Nextcloud, you can share files/folders directly (with expiration/password) or add more users with limited access to your folders. BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy, let it be container based or bare-metal install. It never let me down over the years.
    • palata 1y ago
      > You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at Hetzner. Doesn't it mean that they can still access your data while the server is running? I mean, they run the server, they must have access to it, right? > pCloud provides good encryption support You mean e2ee? If it's about sending files to an untrusted server, I use restic. Works with pretty much everything (including pCloud) :-). > BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy Sure, but what I was saying is that either you do it at home and it makes it harder (you want your home LAN to be secure :-) ) or you do it on a VPS, and someone else has access to your data.
      • bayindirh 1y ago
• hengheng 1y ago
  I can't see community-hosting taking off. I do not trust anybody telling me about E2E encryption that I can not prove. I barely trust Google. I trust the long bearded neighborhood nerd much less than most companies. Even if I probably am that person in my neighborhood. But nobody should trust me, and I am not going to tell them to trust me. Even if everything is encrypted, I can almost guarantee that the community shared server will be confiscated by the police once in the next three decades.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Yeah, trusting people and systems is hard. But we live in a society and trust is just part of the game. For me, I am far more likely to trust a community of people that all build, operate, and own a service we all rely on than a company that will sacrifice anything for profit. Thanks for reading and commenting!
• armchairhacker 1y ago
  It seems like the main benefit of self-hosting (and community-hosting) is “what if the bigco SAAS enshittifies”? i.e. it’s a backup plan. What if instead, you just store local copies of your data, possibly organized and synchronized? If necessary it can be done manually, just download anything important enough that you might want it later. If a service decays, then import it into another. A big point the author makes is that many cloud providers don’t let you download the data. But any media that can’t be accessed outside bigco’s cloud can’t be uploaded to your cloud in the first place. If bigco’s cloud prevents you from downloading data that you create or upload, only then the solution is to use a (possibly self-hosted) alternative. However, in practice I rarely see this happening, for example downloading from Google Workspace and OneDrive is very easy (it can even synchronize a folder on your local machine), and if you’re worried about it happening in the future, again, you can backup important files.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    #LocalFirst baby! I agree that that would be ideal, but as someone who spent two days using Google Takeout to transfer 4 TB of photos from Google Photos to my server, even with easily downloadable file formats, they still make it a nightmare haha.
• 9x39 1y ago
  I agree with the title, but not the solution and that’s okay. Is the future endlessly tinkering with and running stuff out of your house? I think nope, that’s just your hobby. I think of the centralization of content and the licensing as something that works so long as it’s a commodity market, that is, it’s hard to 2x the price of an ebook over a dead tree which I can own. Investors may wish otherwise, but they have to add tons of value to get consumers to play along. I’m fine with commodities in my life. Power and water and gas come to mind. They cost what they cost and I don’t have problems with it. I could build a nas and run software and admin it, or I could pay $20/mo to Adobe and another $33 to Apple for my family’s shared storage. Done. Of course, if the benefits of commoditization evaporate and it looks like the streaming market, then I’m wrong and would have to change track.
  • meonkeys 1y ago
    Will you clarify "centralization of content and the licensing"? Regarding DRM, specifically. If you own said content then sure, you can E2EE and store it in whatever cloud you prefer while avoiding common attention/control/data hoarding (read: enshittification) of commercial online cloud & online services. If you're saying DRM is OK then you're conflating commercial commodities with public utilities. The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs.
    • 9x39 1y ago
      Centralized delivery of content licenses might be more accurate. Similar to your point about using public utilities as examples, I think it's a distinction without difference for what the OP was talking about. I think the point is in a delivery of commodities (storage, IP licenses, water, power) there is some benefit from the generally fungible nature of the commodity, which makes it harder to put high prices on them, which makes doing it yourself more expensive and inefficient unless you value something very specific. It's true I don't own the water from my city nor own access to it (it's a license, effectively), and I pay a delivery fee and purchase units of water. But like most people around, I don't value the intangible of truly owning access to the water under my land and drill a well, I just use the commodity. So it goes with e-book licensing and video licensing, too, and I don't think that they're regulated utilities affects this decision whatsoever - enough people value cost and convenience sufficiently to think licenses are fine for their use case instead of ownership. >The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs. The former could say they make money by enriching lives in their own way. Is this arguing basic human needs should be charity? If so, even the most humble city will charge for water. Further, companies are often created to make money by providing production and distribution of that human need. Utilities are not altruistic but can be fair enough when held in check by a state.
• enobrev 1y ago
  This is what I imagined when reading Neuromancer and other sci-fi of that time. A public online space that we share. Sure, some corners will get gross and dangerous. But that's what humanity looks like. It's strange to me that we never included public spaces in our growth and innovation of the internet over the past 30 years. Of course I expect companies to do their thing as they've had free reign to do, but it wouldn't have taken much cost or effort to add a couple publicly funded data-centers where everyone gets a little space for themselves. At least in the US, I think it's because we've allowed those who run our government to get far too old. The people running the country have not really understood the public good of the internet outside of commerce. Don't get me wrong, I've benefited from said commerce for my entire career, but I think we, as a society, have lost quite a bit of ground by not collectively owning a piece of this thing as it grew. Once upon a time the airwaves were ours, and music thrived because of it. These days the airwaves are all practically walled off with massive monopolies controlling them. It's an overall detriment to our creative progress. I know I'm an old man barking at clouds, but I miss the radio from when I was young - there was actually new and interesting music there. The internet feels the same way for very similar reasons.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Couldn't agree more – bring back the radio – thanks for reading and commenting!
• TimTheTinker 1y ago
  One company comes to mind that is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the current situation by offering a convenient self-hosting solution: Ubiquiti. Despite their pretty bad missteps 5 years ago, their UniFi product range is still very decent and user-friendly for SOHO/SMB networking, and they seem to have the appetite to continue expanding their product line into adjacent markets. I have deployed simple UniFi setups for all my relatives, and they are very happy (though they couldn't have done it themselves). IMHO, they have the DNA to go further and offer a full self-hosted cloud, if they're willing to put in the effort to make it even easier and more integrated.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Super interesting idea! Thanks for reading!
• drew_lytle 1y ago
  Wow! Thanks so much everyone for reading and creating a real discussion around my article! Means a lot!
• nirui 1y ago
  > Imagine a world where your library card includes 100GB of encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration tools, and media streaming services — all for free. But why should a (public) library be interested in providing such services? For funding? What about costs? On for example censorship/regulations/compliance/maintenance etc? I'm not so sure a publicly funded library would have any interest in doing that. Think about it, if libraries can/welling to do any of that, then Amazon would never have any chance to grow this big. I think that's why only private companies is capable of doing it, at least currently. They found out a way to make a profit while operating a sustainable (all things considered) cloud service. In fact, the at-cost service provided by the libraries will probably collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a cheaper plan. Also, host by a library still creates centralized service, which comes with all problems that a centralized service inherits. It only shifts the problem, not solving it.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Hey! Thanks for the comment! > But why should a (public) library be interested in providing such services? For funding? What about costs? Public institutions like libraries are usually funded through government mandates. We as citizens decided that having free access to books is a good thing and nations, states, and municipalities dedicate tax dollars to fund those programs. So, if we decided providing internet-based services through the library was also important, we'd enact mandates for that, too. Not saying that's likely, but it is possible. > At-cost service[s] provided by the libraries will probably collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a cheaper plan. At-cost actually means it couldn't be cheaper (at least if economies of scale are equal). That gets a little hairy because companies like Google can provide services like Photos and Drive for "free" because they make so much money selling search data, but generally speaking that's the deal. > Also, host by a library still creates centralized service, which comes with all problems that a centralized service inherits. It only shifts the problem, not solving it. Totally agreed – if there was only one library. But, there are tons! And as I mentioned, if the services are based on interoperable standards, you could easily move your data between services and have them talk to each other so there's no vendor lock-in. Think ActivityPub for files. Thanks again for reading and engaging in the discussion!
• willquack 1y ago
  Am I crazy or did my 2006 iMac come with a home media server for serving movies / tv shows / music photos from your filesystem. I think it even came with a slick looking remote! You could stream content from it over your home network (as long as you were connecting from another Apple device) Is this lost technology or just a figment of my imagination? I've long since switched to linux and run the typical Jellyfin setup etc
  • Shopper0552 1y ago
    I’ve never had an iMac but my MacBook Pro circa 2009 came with a media remote. There was an infrared receiver on the body of the laptop in the front corner.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    You're not crazy! I remember getting one of those remotes with my first iBook!
• LaGrange 1y ago
  > Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app... You do exactly that. "Oh but security." Any security you get from hiding behind a firewall is illusory at best. You still need to keep on top of updates and tech news. And I want to be able to access my stuff from wherever too. Most of my friends don't have to, because they have me and at least 3 other friends who also self host. There's a couple of things I won't let others in (like, my email domain. That's like my last name, so nope). But things like _sharing a video_? Yeah, I'll let them log in.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for sharing!
• nsb1 1y ago
  For those interested in self-hosting, here's a site that maintains a collection of self-hostable services. https://selfh.st https://selfh.st
  • warkdarrior 1y ago
    That website lists Hugo, the static site generator. What kind of self-hostable service does Hugo provide??? Confusing info like this makes me doubt the rest of the entries on that page.
    • throw123xz 1y ago
      The comment you replied to said it was a site about "self-hostable services". The site doesn't claim to be just about "self-hostable services".
      • _Algernon_ 1y ago
        How do you host Hugo? I understand that you can host a site generated by hugo, but how do you host Hugo itself?
        • throw123xz 1y ago
          I can tell you that technically Hugo has to be somewhere you control to generate a website, but I don't see the point in that discussion. The list I can see on the site seems to be of tools you can self host or can help you create something that you can self host. That's it. It doesn't make sense to blame a site because a comment on HN didn't correctly describe the content of the website... like, the problem is the comment, not the site.
• nancyminusone 1y ago
  Do you really need to self host all these apps just to "take ownership"? All my pictures are stored as plain files in various folders on a big networked hard drive. So is all my music, audiobooks, movies, documents, projects, etc. This is backed up 5 times over to more hard drives periodically. I give a couple to family that lives out of state when I visit. You might laugh, but I'm not really sure what I'm missing that would have me do something else. And yes, it's work to take care of it, but that's true of any of your possessions. Just give me my files, man.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Totally! Before going the full self-hosted route, I actually had an old computer I used as a simple NAS. For this project, I was just looking to make everything as easy to use as any other app my wife and I were used to. Thanks for reading and commenting!
    • horsawlarway 1y ago
      If this is the goal (and I think it's a perfectly commendable goal), you being afraid of the public web makes it basically impossible. Honestly - just make the service public. Let your wife share links to her photo albums with her friends - have them point to your domain. Make your friends make accounts on your services if they need to - or better yet, provision accounts automatically for them (I do this). I understand the fear here, and I get it, but I also think it's widely misplaced. Pay a small sum for backups, rotate them, and let it rip. The suburban web is actually pretty good these days (at least in real suburbs, I have 2gbs/down 1gbs/up in mine) and it basically only gets better. --- My experience comes from hosting several sites for my family (including extended family in several different cities and countries) and also several sites for my neighborhood. The vast majority of them are public (as in - there is a public domain that resolves to my services with no need for preshared secret [aka: tailscale or other wireguard based vpn]). Yes, you get clearly bogus traffic scanning for the lowest of low hanging fruit (ex - php_myadmin/wp-admin/etc) but auth solutions have come a long way, and I don't even bother blacklisting/fail2banning anymore. It's a waste of time and effort for small peanuts. It's pretty easy to configure SSO pointed at something like Keycloak/Authelia and then have your friends get a centrally managed account with 2fa required. Ex - Jellyfin, Bookstack, Gitea, Immich etc... I host all of these (and lots more) and SSO support is pretty good these days. Personally, if all your public infrastructure is behind a keycloak login form... I don't think you're going to have many problems. --- Side note - this is one perfectly acceptable strategy to reach the point you want (community based self-hosted solutions). I host services for my neighbors & family. Not every household needs to be an expert, and no need to get the gov involved (not that I mind the idea of a new digital services library, either). But fear of the public web means you can't ever reach that spot.
• aborsy 1y ago
  How about an all in one box, like phones or synology boxes that come with packages maintained by the manufacturer? If update goes wrong, it will be on support. They require almost no maintenance. You would put two in different locations for redundancy and it begins to be a personal “cloud”. Another option is an app like nextcloud. You learn it and it does everything 80% as good as possible, which is often more than enough!
• nine_k 1y ago
  The future is not uniform. Certain things will be cloud-based or otherwise provider-hosted. Some things will remain self-hosted, for those who prefer it. It's like owning a car: you take the trouble to maintain it, but it's yours and will take you where you want, without the limitations of a taxi or even a rented car. I live in NYC and don't own a car, for I have too little use for it. OTOH if I were a plumbing contractor, I most definitely would own a car, or maybe a light truck. One size does not exactly fit all.
• ingohelpinger 1y ago
  > So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Who is doing this anyway? Nowadays everyone has his instagram profile on private and if you need to share some pics, you do it via Airdrop. lol
  • v3xro 1y ago
    There's Immich https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/ and https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ which are both E2E encrypted and not locked to any ecosystem (besides, e.g. Apple only has E2E encryption when you have Advanced Data Protection enabled, and even then not on shared albums). So those apps are strictly an improvement (and I use them). I also do not have Facebook/Instagram/whatever else people are using that don't care about their own or related people's privacy.
    • ingohelpinger 1y ago
      I'm neither using apples cloud, I just find the argument for not self-hosting a bit silly, since nobody is actually doing it.
• voxleone 1y ago
  Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*. During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers. In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought. Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Couldn’t have said it better myself! Thanks for reading!
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies. But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online. Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.
    • BizarroLand 1y ago
      Knowledge is not proliferating faster than ever. It's being gobbled up and locked down by companies whose sole interest is making as much money as they can instead of improving the world and profiting from the improvement. Media is being deleted or locked in vaults. Games are being shut down with no way to restore them. The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge. I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
• m463 1y ago
  After reading the article, I think this is a clickbait title. (and many comments here didn't seem to read it)
• v3xro 1y ago
  What I see is that it's trivial to 'self-host' locally - go buy a product from Synology/QNAP etc. - they have an ecosystem, easy setup, apps, everything. Three issues from my perspective: 1) cost and 2) security+privacy 3) not so easy to integrate networking (visibility from internet side) for things like email hosting. I can also see it possible to 'self-host' things once you use a cloud where you can do 'confidential computing' stuff aka. the hosting provider does not have access to whatever it is you're running. That functionality is there on the major clouds now (EC2, Azure, GCP) all have the Intel/AMD/Arm TME/SEV/RME stuff implemented but finding it on a device that you can self-host in your little storage cupboard is impossible right now (EPYC 9004 seems to be the lowest available with that technology). At a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption if you are not in control of the hardware space itself.
  • tryauuum 1y ago
    > at a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption that's an interesting statement. These all feel like patches to mitigate the evil maid problem, but they can never solve it fully
• deathanatos 1y ago
  The author mostly just hand waves away self-hosting. There's an analogy that compares it to suburbia, but unlike the suburbs where you have to drive 40 minutes to get anywhere interesting, … an Internet hosted service is just as accessible, anywhere. It's a vapid analogy. The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature: > Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either. One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.) (¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
  • rel_ic 1y ago
    I totally agree. I see this "people don't want to do hard stuff" argument used all over - completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff. It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.
    • scubbo 1y ago
      > It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values Unfair IMO. The author _did_ the hard work. And recognized that most other people, not similarly motivated, would not.
      • smeej 1y ago
        And, the author is right. Most people do not give a rat's ass about the security of their data. They know their social media apps are tracking where they go and who they meet, and they'll say it's creepy if you ask them, but they don't actually care enough to lift a finger to do anything about it.
• purpleidea 1y ago
  This article misses the point. The future will be self-hosted (or local community hosted) when automation technology actually matures and shows some real innovations. That's one reason we're building https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Sounds interesting! Good luck and thanks for reading!
• sashank_1509 1y ago
  The fundamental problem here is that bad apples don’t respect common sense agreements. If everyone who owned a kindle book, agreed to never share the downloaded version of the book for free on the internet, companies would not have to do this. I don’t see what’s the solution, if buying a kindle ebook is allowing you to share it for free on the internet. In the past people were limited by a physical copy, they could give the copy but only 1 copy could exist at a time, now without that limit, people need to do something to protect against piracy. I don’t like this solution, but I don’t see what’s the alternative?
  • OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
    I see this claim often but bypassing DRM is an inevitability to the point where it's commonly done within hours of a new release simply for the fun of doing it. And to quote Gabe Newell (founder and owner of Valve, the company that operates Steam): > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable." > The proof is in the proverbial pudding. “Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam’s] largest market in Europe,” Newell said. from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir... --------- There are certainly cases where people will pirate to avoid paying but in the event that the option to pirate is not available, they will generally just go without instead. The only situations where piracy really becomes a matter of pricing is in the openly exploitative services like Academic Journals.
    • sashank_1509 1y ago
      If you have 2 options, get the product for paying a market price, and get the product for free, I think 90%+ of all humans will get it for free. The only thing stopping them is friction and consequences. I’m not as optimistic as you, that the only reason people pirate is because it’s available in their geography (why not use a VPN and buy it then). Some people will pay for stuff, I never use pirated stuff, but I’m pretty sure that group of humans is a rarity.
• grishka 1y ago
  There are different kinds of self-hosting. Sure, you can own your server and have it at home. It must be nice to have enough space at home to dedicate some to a server room (servers are noisy btw). But many people live in small apartments in a city and so don't have that luxury. You can own your server but rent some rack space from a data center to put it into. That would still be self-hosting. You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting. The author seems to not consider the fact that this is a spectrum but also, from a practical standpoint, mostly the same thing.
  • bitbasher 1y ago
    > You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting. That's what I do. I use Linode/Akamai, which now has encrypted VPS instances. Ideally, I'd have my own hardware but I don't want to deal with the maintenance and failure cases (house fire, etc). I think a VPS is a solid tradeoff.
    • udev4096 1y ago
      Agreed. I have shifted a lot of my services to VPSes just because it's easier to deal with. However, it comes with less freedom and control
  • thbb123 1y ago
    I disagree that you need a lot of space for self hosting. Unless you want to host streaming content for thousands of users, Intel NUC or raspberry PI on top of your router is plenty enough to host nextcloud, some webservers with decent traffic (assuming you have gigabit connection, which is now commonplace), email, backups and media server for family and friends.
    • grishka 1y ago
      Wouldn't it be rather awkward to set up a redundant RAID array on one of those though? Which is something you definitely want on a server that stores backups. I know you can obviously connect as many hard drives as you want to a Raspberry Pi via USB, but that feels wrong for a server. Intel Nuc at least has Thunderbolt and probably some internal SATA ports.
• waldopat 1y ago
  Moxie Marlinspike nailed this in his web3 critique from a couple years ago: "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as infrastructure... However – and I don't think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want." That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience. And to be honest, public libraries already do this, y'all. GO GET A LIBRARY CARD. You can stream from Kanopy at home. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
  • nine_k 1y ago
    How come that a public library, one of the earliest examples of centralized information infrastructure, is not an example of outsourcing and relinquishing control? Instead of your own (small) books collection you get to use some external (huge) book collection. But now you only can borrow a physical book, or some recorded media. You have to return it, and making a copy for personal use only is still a bit problematic. Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option. A best, you can outsource your stuff piecewise: run your own software on a cloud VM, or bring your own furniture into a rented apartment, or give a valet the keys to the car you own for parking, etc. But there's always some relinquishing of control in exchange to some other aspect of efficiency / comfort. It's also easy to mistake what most people want for what everyone wants, and miss an important market.
    • rel_ic 1y ago
      > Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option. I think there's a full spectrum you're missing. You can own something with other people, and your level of control can be continuous, not discrete & binary. For example, my public library is funded by my local government, which I can influence with lobbying and voting. I can join the board of the library, and I can just go and talk to the librarians in charge to influence their decisions. In an individualist consumerist mindset things are pretty stark : full self-hosting or full submission. If you reject that mindset there are many more options.
• neutronicus 1y ago
  LLMs slot into this conversation in a really interesting way. The things the author set up are technologically mature enough that, as long as you have the media, or as long as you can get your friends to use it, the self-hosted versions are largely better than the commercial ones. The last decade or so of innovation has really been about figuring out how to monetize these technologies, at the expense of UX. This is in contrast to LLMs, where the commercial ones kind of wipe the floor with the self-hosted options. On the other hand, LLMs essentially give average people superpowers for self-hosting mature technologies. My wife used Claude Code to vibe-code an educational game for our five-year-old, tailored to his preferences and the skills he needs to work on (she's a UX designer and now, a couple weeks in, reads enough Javascript to understand when Claude is doing something stupid). If we want to buy a computer to use a server, write, and host a bespoke family to-do-list / photo store / knowledge base / calendar that syncs my wife's Google Calendar with my .org files ... we are so much more able to do that than we were even two years ago.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Totally agree! I relied a lot on Claude Code to help me with issues I was having setting up hardware encoding in Immich. But I also think – as accessible as LLMs are as a tool – they still don't make the complexities of self-hosting trivial. Maybe they'll get there, but I feel like LLMs really are just another coding abstraction. It's like a programming language. You still need to know how the language works and how the underlying "bare metal" works to make anything reliably. But, I could be wrong! Thanks for reading and commenting!
• dboreham 1y ago
  Hosting without vendor lock-in is fine. However after a bit of thought, you'll realize that's the same thing as self-hosting. Self-hosting with an agent doing your hosting.
• ksec 1y ago
  I think Synology NAS is already 95% there. So the technical difficulty isn't much of an argument. Sharing of Photos also isn't a hurdle, mostly because I use Whatsapp for it. I think the biggest pain point is that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google all wants services revenue. And they will go out of their way to force everything on their platform to become subscription based and you dont own anything.
• _jplc 1y ago
  - Post about self hosting and how centralization is bad - Uses a centralised service for VPN: Tailscale Name a more iconic duo
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Eh, I can see your point. But Tailscale is a very different kind of centralized. It's just fancy, more convenient Wireguard at the end of the day. If I wanted to move away from it, it's pretty easy. Moving off of something like Google Photos however, was much harder in comparison. Thanks for reading and commenting!
    • _jplc 1y ago
      The convenient part is having a public IP address to connect to from anywhere. You would need either exposing your home infrastructure to the internet or a cheap VPS. Not that hard to solve, but it's an extra hurdle in the setup for something as critical as the networking to connect to your stuff from anywhere. I just think everyone is over-reliant on Tailscale when it's pretty obvious they'll rug-pull as soon as they run out of VC money to burn or get acquired. So, it's convenient... for now. A future migration is inevitable when using Tailscale, and I prefer to solve problems once.
• wmf 1y ago
  Just say socialism, this is taking forever.
  • msla 1y ago
    Self-hosting would not have been congruent with how the USSR edited history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Hahaha thanks for reading!
• TacticalCoder 1y ago
  Many in this thread are totally missing the point of self-hosting. It's not "self-hosting and hence not having an Internet connection". It's self-hosting in addition to having the Internet (yeah, no, I didn't post this very message on my self-hosted island: shocker, I know). > I understand that to some (maybe most) of you, those words meant nothing. That's kind of the point. All of that took 138 words to describe but took me the better part of two weeks to actually do. I fully understand. I happen to also run a Proxmox server at home. I also installed the "I'm Mich" (immich) photo sharing app on it. I'm also running a Movies/Series/Music streaming service (Plex) (although I haven't containerized that one yet). Private pastebin is sweet. Private Git repo is always nice too. Youtube downloader with a Web UI is convenient. I run a serious ad-blocking DNS server: but when you self-host a service, it's zero ad by default. Thing is: machines keep getting more and more powerful, so it only got easier and easier to self-host. Back then self-hosting meant buying huge used servers and put them in a rack. And you can still do that. But you can also just a NUC and slap Proxmox on it and that'll already get you a long way (usual notice about lack of ECC / need for backups / RAID not being backups / ZFS not being backups etc. apply). It got simpler to self-host, not harder. Self-hosting doesn't mean you're a luddite with no Internet access. It just means there are a few services you host yourself. I don't know what's hard to understand about that? Something has to be said too about what you'll learn in the process of setting all that up. I understand you may need big corps to help you put your diapers on and feed you your baby bottle "because convenience": I do too. Just not 100% of the time.
• nope577 1y ago
  Yes, it is.
• nirav72 1y ago
  I like self hosting . It’s not just about privacy or owning something. To me a homelab is also a hobby. No different than previous generations that tinkered with their cars as a hobby. As someone who works in IT - there are also ancillary benefits. What I learn at work, I apply to my home lab and vice versa.
  • movedx 1y ago
    I'd be interested to know what you run on your home lab thats assisting with your professional life :)
    • nirav72 1y ago
      Two quick examples that I can think from the recent past - I work in a fairly tech conservative IT environment for mid-size industrial company. We're slow to adopt lot of industry trends. So when containers became popular in the mid-2010s, we pretty much stayed away until around 2020-2021. I've been running containers in my home lab for years and had a very grasp of building and deploying containers. So I was able to drive that change and also pass on that self-gained knowledge to many on team that were to new to the concept. Another example - for years we were mostly a Oracle shop. With some SQL Server thrown in. But management wanted us to trim our annual licensing cost. So we switched a lot of our in-house applications to Postgres. I was using Postgres for years at home and had gained a lot of experience with it. So again, it was an area I was able to contribute a lot when transitioning away Oracle and Sql server. On the flip side there are things I learned at work, that I was able to bring home and apply to my home lab. One being Ansible and other being network segmentation. Specifically around using VLANs and access control
      • movedx 1y ago
        Very cool. Thanks for sharing.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Couldn't agree more! It's been a very fun hobby
• jtrn 1y ago
  I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services. I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents. This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files. Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits: * Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite. * Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain. * Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers. It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it. And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
  • isaacremuant 1y ago
    > centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The war on drugs and the prohibition and many invasions also claim good intentions.
    • lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Are you against governments issuing passports too? I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport. Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who. Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government cannot be trusted to maintain a database of all the people's electronic money accounts directly? (in the US, I know in some countries, the government does operate electronic money accounts and transfers)
• superkuh 1y ago
  And the future isn't growing your own food at home. But we all know a garden in the yard is a wonderful thing and often better than what you can get at the store while being rewarding to tend. There are two "futures" to disambiguate here. The future for for-profit and institutional entities, which is not self-hosted. And the future for human persons, which is. The former will probably be HTTP/3 (quic over UDP) exclusively with CA TLS required while the future for humans remains on HTTP+HTTPS HTTP/1.1. I won't be too many more years before the corporate future completely divorces itself from the actual web and goes full HTTP-IS-JUST-A-TRANSPORT-FOR-JS-APPS and becomes unable to even visit normal websites. For "security" reasons, of course.
• kocial 1y ago
  It's all about the data, people and enterprise in many cases are not comfortable sharing in SAAS.
• colinsane 1y ago
  so you watch videos, listen to music, read books, and take/share photos on a phone, ipad, or tv. you seek a better experience doing those things, and your solution is to spin up some software _on a totally new device_ (a server). that's a huge leap! i think most of us gloss over it, but the rest of the article is predicated on that leap. the tv you're streaming video to probably runs Android by now. it has a stable internet connection, CPU, RAM, and probably a couple USB ports. why not install the Jellyfin server software on it, attach a USB hard drive, and let it be the machine that hosts all your media? why, actually, do you need to go out of your way to buy a completely new machine for this? similar argument applies to Immich. you're wanting to co-edit an album among several contacts. you're probably all uploading your photos from a phone. why not just have one of your always-on phones host that album? i shouldn't expect the drain on your battery to serve an album to a few friends is that much more than it took to take those photos in the first place. to a certain degree, you're "self-hosting" things on a physical server because that's the only platform on which we all still have the ability to run arbitrary workloads on. solve that problem and everything becomes a _lot_ simpler.
• gerdesj 1y ago
  The title is showing quite a lot of ankle! OP is a proud self hoster. I run my own email, DNS and the rest. Yes: email. I run several domains including my own company and my own vanity domain and several more for friends. I have been doing it for decades. Goog, MS and co do follow standards and if you do too, they will be largely merciful if you keep your nose clean. I have even managed to run an email system from my home connection as a test IPv4 and 6. I'm UK based. It does seem that IP denylists do seem to be a bit brutal in the USofA, so that might explain the downer meme on self hosting email. The future is and always will be self hosted if you give a shit.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Haha! "Showing a lot of ankle" – I've never heard that before! Thanks for reading and commenting – very cool that you've managed to successfully host email. I'm sad advertisers and spammers have turned that into essentially an unusable technology. Definitely a proud self hoster, but the main point is really that I don't think we're going to live in a world where self-hosting is the dominant method of using internet-based apps and services. Would love to be wrong though! Maybe we'll all be self-hosting email in a few years!
    • gerdesj 1y ago
      Self hosting email will always be niche and frankly it was pretty niche in the noughties too. I do find that if you carefully curate an IP address ... now that's the real problem. Most IP blacklists aggregate and generally end up roll up to cover entire AS ranges and allocations instead of actual individual perpetrators. However, if you can grab a "corporate ISP" static IP address, you are normally OK, at least in the UK. Then you need to get a reverse DNS entry sorted out, although this only bit one of my friends recently after five years of not me not bothering. rDNS used to be rule one in anti spam. Oh well 8) Modern (lol) email systems generally look for SSL/TLS and SPF, DKIM is nice and if you have DMARC then you are clearly a jolly good chap. Then they have a ... rule set, some of which are as old as my email management experience and some of which are down right odd (and probably based on Bayesian learning) Anyway, email self hosting isn't impossible. Anyone who claims to be a nerd really should be able to manage it ... 8) I don't want to live in a world where self hosting is impossible. It'll be the same one where I don't own a drill-driver and that would be bloody weird.
• adamtaylor_13 1y ago
  This feels like one of those very big problems in theory that so far has never materialized and likely never will. I can read the books and acquire the knowledge from my kindle. If Amazon removes it, I can just pirate it? I get the theoretical argument but as a very pragmatic person it just seems like tilting against the windmill.
• protocolture 1y ago
  >Which raises the question: do they even own those books? No you never owned them, only a really permissive (for amazon) license that permitted access to them.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Thanks for commenting!
• man4 1y ago
  [dead]
• coastalpuma 1y ago
  I think people are dismissing the possibility of universally accessible self-hosting too quickly. We really need to be ambitious as engineers and imagine a future where people have sovereignty over their own computing. In 1990, we wouldn't have accepted someone else taking custodianship of our personal documents, memories, books, music, and films, and yet it's normalized today. With the benefit of hindsight, we need to brutally simplify every single layer of the stack and optimize it for being usable by non-technical people.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Thanks for your comment! I still think though that this puts way too much on each individual – no matter how easy you make the tech. But, I could see a world where just like running tech support for my parent's computers, I also do so for their server. That's an interesting take!
• jrm4 1y ago
  The actual solution is extremely simple in explanation, though really hard to pull off. It's "skin in the game." Right now, cloud services fail horribly at much of what they promise or merely imply; safety, security, long term availability, etc. And so, to make them not fail at this, they must be punished when they fail at this. The other side of this coin is probably "you have to pay them," but that's not so bad either.
• setnone 1y ago
  One thing i know about the future is that it brings more powerful chips, available storage and more tech in general. Which is much needed to come up with consumer level self-hosting solution so that 'cloud is just someone esle's computer' becomes 'this cloud is just my computer'
• Nevermark 1y ago
  Why not self-cloud, on the cloud? Hardware: The Cloud Applications, Data, Control: Self
• dmje 1y ago
  I’m never clear why the solution I have - a kind of hybrid of cloud and local - isn’t more popular. I make use of google drive, apps and google photos and therefore suffer the knowledge that my stuff is probably being used to train AI (I’m personally comfortable with this) - but then I have local backups and sync for everything. InsycHQ gives me a locally (and NAS) backed up version of all my documents, I also backup all photos shot by my wife and I to my Synology, and then daily backup in 2x places that I own from there. My films and media are locally stored, and I buy a fair bit from BandCamp and I use Plex to serve but I also have Spotify for the convenience factor. …and so on In other words - it’s a sort of multi-tiered approach. I’m not subject to the whims of cloud providers because if they change their pricing or terms radically I’ve still got all my stuff locally; ditto backups on infrastructure that I own and control in-house. It’s always seemed to me like this is a pretty good setup, combining the utility of cloud with the reassurance of self hosting.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    I think that's a great setup! I actually am still using Google Photos for this reason. I think of it as a kind of "offsite" backup. I take a lot of photos and videos though so I'm probably going to have to move to a more affordable approach like Backblaze. Thanks for your comment!
• hammyhavoc 1y ago
  "The future" is relative and contextual. Different tools for different tasks, different solutions for different problems.
• ggirelli 1y ago
  To me, the major issue of self-hosting (once overcome the tech barrier etc...) has always been protection. Not from external actors or attacks, but from incidents. By which I mean backups. Safest option is online backup, which is expensive and takes your data sovereignty away once again. Or I can once a year make a hard copy and take it to my parents (who live in a different country) for storage, and swap the backups out. Either way, very suboptimal. If anyone has a good way to achieve this, please lmk
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Agree backups are hard and can be expensive! A lot of people recommend Backblaze https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage and it cost ~$6/month per TB
• domenicd 1y ago
  I honestly would be totally fine with large providers being the ones to host and "own" all my media---_if_ they were obsessive stewards of data quality. To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors. But in practice, this isn't how it turns out: * Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes. * Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether. * The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence. * Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.) * I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere. If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work. I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    This is such an interesting point and a great comment. Thank you!
• nektro 1y ago
  excellent read, thanks for sharing
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Thanks for reading and commenting!
• mosquitobiten 1y ago
  Is it such crazy of an ask to have some it guys sell me the box already set up to be used as a self-host solution aio ? Why can't I find any company that sells this?
• _V_ 1y ago
  Future is, unfortunately, probably getting back to piracy in some shape or form. Especially with the general idea of the industry that buying something does not mean you own it. In that case all I can say is: F'em. It is definitely true that piracy is primarily a service problem, not an ethical one.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    "If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing". Thanks for your comment!
• wobfan 1y ago
  What. The article reads just as an ad for clouds. It tips into the benefits, ownership problems, setup. Then it says "but how do I share photos???" and this apparently is enough to counter all benefits. Even if I had to (and this is what I actually do actively) push the photos I want to share to Google Photos, ALL the benefits remain. I see it, it's a slight inconvenience of having to do like 2 more taps and wait for the upload, but that's it. You get so much for this small inconvenience. You own your data, your infrastructure, you're not locked in, and your data is private. But having to share the photos via another app is the dealbreaker?
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    You may want to keep reading. Thanks for your comment!
• nobodywillobsrv 1y ago
  Is it just me or is the entire concept of "ownership" kind of wrong in the realm of digital (things that can be copy pasted infinitely and distributed mostly for free)? Instead we should have ideas of AUTH, AUTH fraud (distributing content with wrong authorship), the right to generate revenue by distribution. Restricting distribution of something that is essentially free to distribute feels wrong. If you tried to explain to aliens that you had solved "food" with a replicator but The Gov actually banned this and people had to starve ... you would likely be met with some questions.
• isaacremuant 1y ago
  Translation: this particular user wants to make different privacy choices than the rest and pretends that we should philosophically follow. All because Big Corp does anti open software/anti privacy thing. Give me a break. These platitudes ring like propaganda. I do what I want with my computer and data. You don't get to choose to "connect with me". > Beyond individualism To authoritarianism. It's fine if the author wants to do all this but the kind of "we should all do X, which goes against your privacy/data/control beliefs because it's for our greater good" sounds so Rich CEO that knows better, kind of talk.
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    I think collective, democratic ownership is kind of the opposite of authoritarianism, right haha? But I agree choice is important! Thanks for your comment!
    • isaacremuant 1y ago
      Define collective democratic ownership and how it conflicts with the rights of individuals. Why does the collective good need to be the future instead "get your hands of my data". Don't you see there's no one true collective and that politics corrupt? Every time a party in a democracy wins some group claims they're evil and wrong and suddenly it is not 'democratic'. They will label things along partisan lines whereas I'm making the point of protecting the individual no matter what. We do agree that choice is important so the inflammatory "no future" to one of those choices is a contradiction if you actually want to preserve it.
• yberam123 1y ago
  I hope for a future where confidential computing or FHE tech is widely deployed (and cheap). Any computation can be done on any device without loosing confidentiality.
• yberam1234567 1y ago
  I hope for a future where confidential computing or FHE tech is widely deployed (and cheap). Any computation can be done on any device without loosing confidentiality.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• sameermanek 1y ago
  I really hate to pirate, but when publishers are in bed with scums like amazon and ignore these acts of greed, they might as well deal with piracy because we really need a tool to humble them
• subhobroto 1y ago
  This article took a weird turn midway. I really enjoyed the beginning and the start. My takeaway of the middle part is that the author had certain expectations about self hosting that weren't realistic and they jump to certain conclusions I would not have jumped to. Yes it's true that we here are an extremely privileged bunch but over the decades I've seen tech become widely more accessible even before. People were paid a bunch of money just to write HTML in 1997 and in 2025 anyone can write a production ready website using the SOTA LLMs. I am convinced the future is self-hosted (which is why I clicked on this link!) and as the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. From that lens, majority of the public not self-hosting is a cost-benefit, not a knowledge issue. Ergo, if tomorrow TikTok charged every person $500/mo, most people would figure out a way to run their own federated TikTok (but most likely just start using a similar but cheaper service). Consider, there will be a future when Google will struggle to make money (gasp! how can that be?!) and many years before that day comes, all the "free" gmail accounts will be gone - because by then, email will cease to serve as a method for a company to mine novel information, I imagine there will be no "free" GMail although "free" email might still exist then just because the cost to provide 10GB email would be insignificant and worth good PR to someone (but at that point, not Google).
• tomjuggler 1y ago
  It sounds like the author never heard of a VPS? Yes it's someone else's computer but you own the contents, can switch providers any time. Personally no I would never host cloud connected stuff at home, but neither would I trust Dropbox or Kindle with my stuff. Although actually why ebooks need to be in the cloud at all I don't know - just buy somewhere that lets you download and keep them on your device/backup storage? If my eBook reader ever said I couldn't side load books I would hack it so fast..
  • drew_lytle 1y ago
    Yeah, I chose to ignore the VPS angle because I feel like it presents essentially the same problems as self-hosting – just on rented hardware. It didn't really serve the story. But I get that omitting this makes it confusing for more tech-savvy readers. I use a VPS with Dokploy for hosting apps, but I don't know if I'd use it to host my photo library haha Also, I'm actually working on jailbreaking my Kindle and will probably write a future article about that! Thanks for reading and commenting!
    • tomjuggler 1y ago
      Cool, enjoy jail breaking Kindle. I live for liberating my devices, mostly old android phones and laptops that somehow have the latest updates despite being long forgotten my the companies who made them. I still remember the iPod my wife and I bought to take our music with us while travelling, only to be told we couldn't transfer the mp3's to our laptop. Hacked that thing and never looked back!
• torginus 1y ago
  I'd say self-hosting on the verge of becoming ubiquitous and accepted. The whole sales pitch of cloud providers is that instaling and maintaining a server is just too hard for the average Joe. Thing is the average Joe already has at least 2 dedicated servers in their home - their router and their IoT hub. Both are designed to be servers, and talk to third party endpoints over the internet. While I'm not crazy about IoT, I think we are reaching the point where most people have something digital in their house that makes sense to be networked. And thanks to IoT stuff, running and managing servers has become a certified Dad activity, like woodworking and home improvement. I know multiple dads, who had no prior exposure to IT, who have set up rather complex Raspberry Pi based home automation systems, managing all the complexity of setting up and running a server at home. I think the skills and interest are proliferating, and it's no longer going to be accepted wisdom to just rely on some nebuluous remote cloud provider, esp for simple stuff.
• atoav 1y ago
  Well, my whole ebook collection sits on my computer and is managed via Calibre. I only buy books where I get a file without DRM. If there is DRM I don't buy. My whole music collection sits on my computer in the form of well sorted mp3/flac/wav files. I buy only music where I get files or a physical carrier medium (Vinyl, Tapes, ...) My whole movie/series collection sits on a jellfin server I can reach via wireguard from literally everywhere. You get the idea. For me having the file and being able to scroll through my collection and decide what to pick from my collection is part of the fun. I am a musician myself and I earn more in a week in bandcamp (a few hundred bucks a year) than I would earn in 100 years on Spotify (60 cents a year), so if you wanna support the artists, doing it this way benefits them greatly.
• deleted 1y ago
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• kehiy 1y ago
  Take a look at the Nostr protocol. It can help us to shape both encryption and global identity to achieve your idea. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
• d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
  Not sure if others mentioned this but one can abstract away the configuration and sys-admin type tasks using a declarative language. Then the setup can be recreated effortlessly by others, reviewed and verified on an ongoing basis. If the author found a self-hosting setup that works, it should be packaged and automatically reproduced elsewhere. It is always 10% of the work to make something work, 90% of the work is arranging it to be self-reproducing, self-maintaining, and self-documenting without excessive toil. I call this "self-*" computing.
  • eulenteufel 1y ago
    NixOS does enables this to a degree, for example with nixos-mailserver[0)]. It would be nice if it could enable people with little sysadmin experience to self-host easily, but right now the bar for using NixOS and configuring these projects is still pretty high. Still, with enough work I imagine it could be possible. [0] https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver
• chadcmulligan 1y ago
  There was a time (around y2k iirc) where you could buy a box preconfigured with databases and so on, there was a movement to make these things 'appliances' like toasters but the winds changed, sun and oracle were selling them and maybe netscape? I have a time capsule (which is still working) sitting in the corner quietly keeping backups for me - I don't do anything to it and it just keeps working. Maybe the issue isn't that the future is not self hosted but the future is appliances, it would be nice to have a server thing with some icons on it to make it a photo server/database server etc. One of the reasons people use the cloud is because these things have become hard to set up, they really shouldn't be.
• dwoldrich 1y ago
  Users don't know what they want. There is simply a lack of vision for a human-focused self-service platform with a hook to get ever-expansive services over consumer-grade internet. Corporate/investor greed is a limiting factor to the design. Network security and hardware/software vulnerabilities are the near impossible barriers to long-term viability. A solution basically needs to be unhackable to compete with cloud. I have a platform vision that would definitely work, but I have no idea how to solve the greed or security issues. (No, Rust won't solve it! ;) EDIT: Oh, and nation-state actors and corporate espionage. An independent, successful cloud competitor would be a prime target - they'd be relentless and burn it to the ground. Impossible problems.
  • erikerikson 1y ago
    > Users don't know what they want. Users don't know what's possible and without knowing what's possible they can't imagine it well enough to evaluate whether they will want it.
    • dwoldrich 1y ago
      Yep, gotta sneak it into their network under the cloak of some other product and then go, "oh btw, it's like a cloud. Here's our new 2026 features you can buy into." Only then will they realize what is possible and decide they want it.
• monksy 1y ago
  I host a immich server that is publicly accessible and is mostly locked down. I've never had an issue with sharing an albium. It makes a configurable public URL that you can share out to people on whatever medium that you'd like.
• teiferer 1y ago
  Couldn't this be solved by technical means? All those self-hosted boxes in people's homes could federate. That would allow the friends to upload their photos to an album. If you want to have copies of them on your local hard drive, a config flag could duplicate the data, automatically providing redundancy that's even useful for others. Not everyone wants to run a server at home and thoae who don't want to could rely on some third party, be it a public library, a non-profit, or even a for-profit offering some extra perks. The basic tech could be all the same, even the software stack. I wonder if there are any startups in that space, there likely are. YC anyone? Whatare the obstacles?
  • teiferer 1y ago
    Is Peergos the answer I'm looking for? If so, what's missing is a big push on the business/PR side. They'll need to replicate what Signal did for chat so that even my 80-year old mom can use it. Any other alternatives?
    • ianopolous 1y ago
      You're absolutely right. We need a big push on marketing and PR (Peergos founder here). We are self, grant and customer funded and a not-for-profit so we necessarily need to grow more slowly than a VC backed company, but that lets us keep our incentives aligned with our users. Our aim is absolutely ease of use, there shouldn't be a usability tradeoff for privacy in our view. We do already have some very non-technical users who love it.
• saltysalt 1y ago
  Physically books for the win.
• chris_engel 1y ago
  I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees. To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed. I can also very simply assign a domain to it and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it. Am I missing something?
  • Maledictus 1y ago
    you are not, I consider both self hosting. I used hetzner for a long time and they were doing a great job. These days I run a server in my basement, because I had the hardware around. Most months of the year it also contributes to heating the house :D
  • MisterSandman 1y ago
    Why do you claim that Hetzner won’t screw you over with your data? What you’re doing with Hetzner is just a few less layers of abstraction compared to AWS or Azure. They can still theoretically take down the machine or steal your data, if they wanted to. I don’t know what the correct definition of self hosted is, but there is a big ideological difference between what you’re doing and self-hosting actual, physical hardware in your home.
    • chris_engel 1y ago
      Sure, in theory Hetzner could pull the plug or access the data on my VPS. But that’s true of any infrastructure... just like someone could break into my house and steal my self-hosted server. In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring. It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.
• deleted 1y ago
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• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  Funny the author describes his "self-hosting" but chooses Tailscale over Headscale. It seems like some do not see control over the "coordination server" as being significant.
• robmao 1y ago
  I really appreciated this post. It goes much deeper than most critiques of cloud platforms, and I respect that the author didn’t just complain — he actually tried self-hosting, experienced its ups and downs, and came to an honest conclusion: self-hosting isn't the future. I agree. But I also believe that doesn’t mean we stop here. The real issue isn’t about where the server is — it’s about who owns the identity and the data, and whether we have a shared protocol layer to make true user agency possible. In case it's useful to others thinking along similar lines, I wrote a response piece called “The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign” https://www.robertmao.com/blog/en/the-future-is-not-self-hosted-but-self-sovereign https://www.robertmao.com/blog/en/the-future-is-not-self-hos... It builds on the same dilemma but goes further into decentralized identity (DID), protocol-level ownership, and why self-sovereign systems might be the real way forward — beyond both cloud and self-hosting. Would love to hear what others here think about protocol vs platform thinking.
• requilence 1y ago
  Self‑hosting swaps one risk for another. A cleaner option may be local‑first apps that speak an open sync protocol: your data lives on your phone/laptop/homeserver; an optional, end‑to‑end‑encrypted relay just moves opaque blobs for backup and multi‑device access. Why this matters: the No. 1 failure I see isn’t servers getting hacked. It’s users losing the only copy of their files. * ~70 million phones are lost annually; most are never recovered. https://snohomishcountywa.gov/Archive.asp?ADID=543 https://snohomishcountywa.gov/Archive.asp?ADID=543 * Consumer hard‑drive AFR hovers around 1‑2 %—≈7 % fail within five years. https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/05/02/disk-failure-rates-in-data-centres-are-falling-says-backblaze/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/05/02/disk-failure-rates-in-... * 29 % of people have already suffered data loss from deletion, ransomware, or disk death. https://www.worldbackupday.com/en https://www.worldbackupday.com/en With odds like these, an off‑device, unreadable backup is basic hygiene, not a luxury. Disclaimer: I work on Anytype, which follows this model: local ownership, open‑source sync protocol, source‑available clients.
• sam_goody 1y ago
  Th solution would be services that use encrypted S3 as a backend. If services like immich, nextcloud, etc. were designed to have the bulk of the files on a 3rd party S3 compatible encrypted server (eg - only thumbnails and pointers to the encrypted database on the local server), then it would be much more practical to be able to use the big companies for private, safe, metered usage. I envision the following: Some company offers a phone app which with one click will install your own "self-hosted" Immich or whatever. Immich (in this future version) relies on encrypted S3 files for hosting, and in the contract it says the host will not steal your encryption keys. Since this gives MUCH more control to the user, this service become popular and the hosting company grows (like. Whatsapp hockey stick growth). Soon, other hosting companies offering competing apps. (Hopefully, these apps continue to be developed, and agree on some interoperable standards between them.) Since the data storage is all on S3 you can easilly move from service to service or from S3 host to S3 host. There is nothing conceptually difficult about such a future, and it would be worlds better than what we have now.
• michael-hainz 1y ago
  I agree that selfhosting can digitally isolate someone. Most of the time, I try to share the services I host with my friends so they also benefit from them. Maybe ideas like the fediverse will play a bigger role in the future to connect many of us, but community maintained.
• charles_f 1y ago
  > Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet's inception. Purchased digital goods have always been licenses more than owned assets. There was a time when you actually purchased software. Owning a key gave you perpetual access to that software. And then SaaS came and now the only model ever considered is paying rent, even for stuff that runs on your computer. That hasn't always been the case, and self-hosting seems to be the only way around that.