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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#131

Post by potatolicious »

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?

A whole host of reasons:

- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.

- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#132

Post by bix6 »

slightwinder wrote: post #16
bix6 wrote: post #5

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.

> 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 any…

If it was easier to do the work yourself I think more would out of privacy, price, and longevity concerns.

Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#134

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

Synology is getting there with their one click install of lots of apps, and a "drop a dockerfile here" for anything else.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#135

Post by nancyminusone »

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#136

Post by the_snooze »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #134
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…

Synology is getting there with their one click install of lots of apps, and a "drop a dockerfile here" for anything else.

I suspect that's just a temporary sweet spot before they start locking things down to their "trusted" (i.e., paid-for) partners.

They're already doing that on the hardware side. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/synology-confirms-ne...

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#137

Post by xnx »

potatolicious wrote: post #131
xnx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A whole host of reasons: - Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose. - Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is…

Right, but you can leave a spare phone plugged in and connected to wifi just like a laptop.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#138

Post by aborsy »

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!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#139

Post by drew_lytle »

nancyminusone wrote: post #135

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 th…

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!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#140

Post by drew_lytle »

willquack wrote: post #100

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 set…

You're not crazy! I remember getting one of those remotes with my first iBook!
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