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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#61

Post by palata »

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).

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#62

Post by jerf »

crashabr wrote: post #38
mystraline wrote: post #10

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

What kind of machine do you need to run all of this concurrently?

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 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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#63

Post by hengheng »

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#64

Post by kamarg »

xnx wrote: post #35
MoreQARespect wrote: post #9

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 b…

> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting. Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

Mostly battery life I would think

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#65

Post by shermantanktop »

cryptonym wrote: post #55
albus0x wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an effort being made for this. Some folks have created https://selfprivacy.org/ and continuously developing it. I follow this project by heart

The very first thing they show on the website is a list of cloud providers.

I don’t think that’s a gotcha. Using a cloud provider in a way that provides easy migration options can be valid on the spectrum of self-hosting options. The ones they list specialize in renting virts by the hour/day/month, not lock-in services with no external equivalent.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#66

Post by bayindirh »

palata wrote: post #61

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 worki…

> 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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#67

Post by chneu »

Saline9515 wrote: post #49
bluGill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not just that it is a lot of work, it is that you lose power, or add a lot of risk. The example doesn't mention backups at all - when (not if) the computer fails then what? How do you access this cloud when not at home - again I didn't see this. How do you share data (only some please) with friends? How will you handle zero-days if the attacker decides to attack you - will you even notice or be the bad guy on t…

- Backups can be sent to the commercial cloud (encrypted) using Duplicati among other solutions. Or just a separate hard drive. - You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned it. - You can allow external access to your apps safely using cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google photos and there's even a really good app! - Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic hygiene and…

Immich rules. They just dropped a pretty big release that improved the android app experience quite a bit.

Everyone go checkout immich.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#68

Post by the_snooze »

xnx wrote: post #35
MoreQARespect wrote: post #9

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 b…

> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting. Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

For single-user single-device scenarios, that's totally doable. It's called a purely-local app.

Where it gets complicated is there's a (totally understandable) expectation these days that your data is synced across multiple devices, and you can collaborate with other users, who may also have multiple devices themselves. In practice, that necessitates some kind of always-on server that maintains state for everyone. A phone can technically do that, but you'd probably kill your battery in the process.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#69

Post by armchairhacker »

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#70

Post by 9x39 »

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.

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