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

201–210 of 459 posts

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#201

Post by ainiriand »

waldopat wrote: post #183

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 be…

Exactly! Here in Spain there is a network of web libraries that are proxies of your corresponding local library that allow lending as long as you have a library card. You even have magazines and newspapers, I know because I developed such network!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#202

Post by scubbo »

deathanatos wrote: post #162

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 forc…

> exposing our services to the public internet

You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.

And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't negate the next part...

> and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app > in the standards, OIDC overcomes this

It's not the signup that's the hurdle. It's the fragmentation. Sure, if you implement OIDC, your friends can sign up to your photo app. And they can sign up to Sam's, and Joe's, and the app of the cute bakery on the street, and a couple others. What then? The whole value of a network is that the components are interconnected and can intercommunicate. If I have to upload my photos seventeen times to seventeen different partitioned applications for my various social groups to see them, I'm just as likely to not bother.

Fediverse-like ideas go some way towards addressing that, but they don't seem to be in any state of usability for anyone non-technical (I say that as someone who was using Mastodon as my only social media for the last couple of years)

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#203

Post by scubbo »

rel_ic wrote: post #194
deathanatos wrote: post #162

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 forc…

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.

> 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.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#204

Post by koolala »

waldopat wrote: post #183

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 be…

If home networks easily let you have a public server I bet they would be more common. They could of been built into modems.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#205

Post by waldopat »

ainiriand wrote: post #201
waldopat wrote: post #183

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 be…

Exactly! Here in Spain there is a network of web libraries that are proxies of your corresponding local library that allow lending as long as you have a library card. You even have magazines and newspapers, I know because I developed such network!

That's amazing. Do you have a reference to it? I'd love to learn more. I also have some extended family in Spain.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#206

Post by wmf »

lloeki wrote: post #158
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…

I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game: - There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing - There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to…

Apple explicitly called it the Digital Hub strategy. But they never went all the way.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#207

Post by dzikimarian »

scubbo wrote: post #202
deathanatos wrote: post #162

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 forc…

> exposing our services to the public internet You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet. And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't nega…

Apparently I'm utterly insane for years with no consequences.

SaaS/cloud providers propagate this FUD 24/7 and then Okta, which should be pinnacle of security gets hacked and has issues with disclosure.

Relax. Most companies has security team incapable of operating beyond checklist.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#208

Post by Zak »

Aurornis wrote: post #176
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 streami…

I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to align perfectly with historical feudalism.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#209

Post by pdonis »

scubbo wrote: post #202
deathanatos wrote: post #162

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 forc…

> exposing our services to the public internet You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet. And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't nega…

> you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.

You don't have to. The article mentions Tailscale--the whole point of which is to not have any Internet-facing app exposed. Everything is done peer to peer between clients that are behind firewalls. There's nothing listening on an Internet exposed socket for random connections to come in.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#210

Post by whilenot-dev »

bee_rider wrote: post #182
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…

The blog post talks about our self-hosting movies, photos, and podcasts, in nice Netflix-like interfaces. Sharing photos. That sort of thing. You are talking about preserving intellectual independence. Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems, right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of digital textbooks. IMO one da…

> one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish

That's an interesting take. I think matching these services isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit.

My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a private selection of media with a strong personal preference - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to reconsider my preferences.

Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.

Post reply on HN