Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 459 posts

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#161

Post by horsawlarway »

drew_lytle wrote: post #139
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!

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#162

Post by deathanatos »

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.)

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#163

Post by brailsafe »

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…

My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that also died as they stagnated). I thought people were a bit silly for spending so much on a phone then, and still do, because by the time I eventually got a "smartphone" with a touchscreen, there was enough competition in the market that still to this day I've never felt compelled by any phone product >$600

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#164

Post by EGreg »

radlad wrote: post #127
EGreg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

Alright mate, so for the 99.9% of cases encryption at rest is enough. For data you truly don’t want cloud providers to see, just use end-to-end encryption.

But no one has to run their own servers. The only reason I see them doing so is to provide redundancy in case the cloud providers want to DELETE some data or take nodes offline.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#166

Post by ryandrake »

garciasn wrote: post #51
slightwinder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 doi…

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#167

Post by ingohelpinger »

v3xro wrote: post #154
ingohelpinger wrote: post #148

> 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

There's Immich https://immich.app/ and 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 p…

I'm neither using apples cloud, I just find the argument for not self-hosting a bit silly, since nobody is actually doing it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#168

Post by drew_lytle »

voxleone wrote: post #155

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…

Couldn’t have said it better myself! Thanks for reading!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#169

Post by sashank_1509 »

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?

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#170

Post by grishka »

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.

Post reply on HN