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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#171

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #169

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 g…

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-Pir...

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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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#172

Post by bitbasher »

grishka wrote: post #170

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…

> 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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#173

Post by ndriscoll »

drew_lytle wrote: post #105
singpolyma3 wrote: post #41

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 nee…

> 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. I…

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=.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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#174

Post by potatolicious »

the_snooze wrote: post #142
xnx wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point is that while phones are able to do what you suggest, they're not fit for purpose. A phone shouldn't be used as a long-term server because it turns into a fire hazard as the battery degrades. And you can't just remove the battery because most phones won't even power on without a battery (even when plugged in). At that point, you're better off going with some N100 mini-PC or such. But that's not a phone.

Yep, at that point we've circled back to the original years-long conversation about home servers, except now instead of a cheap mini-PC it's a phone. The distinction isn't meaningful.

And I'll remind folks that we've been talking about the power of people owning their own servers in their homes for decades, and yet the vast vast vast vast majority of users aren't doing it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#175

Post by thbb123 »

grishka wrote: post #170

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…

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#176

Post by Aurornis »

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…

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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#177

Post by ryandrake »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #103
esseph wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Who is more highly incentivized than oneself, to keep their valuable data and treasured memories safe and sustained?

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#178

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#179

Post by jahewson »

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…

Most traffic nowadays is HTTPS so as long as you configure your router to use a non-ISP DNS resolver such 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google) then your ISP cannot see your traffic.

However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees for remote support. As they are your router they also get to see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP have access to my hardware.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#180

Post by bevr1337 »

ryandrake wrote: post #166
garciasn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sel…

The person you're replying to said they maintained a homelab for 15 years. I'm sure they have the experience to correctly gauge the amount of effort required. What you're arguing is qualitative. There is _some_ maintenance, as you admitted, and the OP has other priorities.

I personally relate to the person you're replying to. I sleep better not worrying about HDD health or if my APs can reach their controller. Tried it - not for me.

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