The future is not self-hosted • Hacker News Board

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#221

Post by grishka » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

thbb123 wrote: post #175

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.

Wouldn't it be rather awkward to set up a redundant RAID array on one of those though? Which is something you definitely want on a server that stores backups. I know you can obviously connect as many hard drives as you want to a Raspberry Pi via USB, but that feels wrong for a server. Intel Nuc at least has Thunderbolt and probably some internal SATA ports.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#222

Post by jtrn » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services.

I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.

This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.

Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits: * Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite. * Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain. * Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers. It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.

And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#223

Post by movedx » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

nirav72 wrote: post #217

I like self hosting . It’s not just about privacy or owning something. To me a homelab is also a hobby. No different than previous generations that tinkered with their cars as a hobby. As someone who works in IT - there are also ancillary benefits. What I learn at work, I apply to my home lab and vice versa.

I'd be interested to know what you run on your home lab thats assisting with your professional life :)

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#224

Post by smeej » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:44 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #200

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've thought deeply about this topic but from the pro-suburbia side and I actually agree with the analogy. At a bare minimum if you want to be independent you need a domain which is ~$10/year. That's a small amount but it's already more than most people will pay. (IMO this is irrational if you're paying >$500/year for cellular service but I digress.) Good home servers like Helm (RIP) or Umbrel are $300+ upfront. A go…

The one thing I desperately wish Umbrel shipped with was an easy way to network with other Umbrel users for backup and accessibility. Let people set limits in terms of how much storage they're willing to allocate to others. REQUIRE end-to-end encryption on backed up files. But help people create their own community micro-clouds using each other's computers.

To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in my own town regularly enough to rotate my backups is too high. But if my family members and I could easily back up each other's systems from our various states? Or my group of dorky college friends who are now all over the world could easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#225

Post by smeej » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #203

rel_ic wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And, the author is right.

Most people do not give a rat's ass about the security of their data. They know their social media apps are tracking where they go and who they meet, and they'll say it's creepy if you ask them, but they don't actually care enough to lift a finger to do anything about it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#226

Post by whilenot-dev » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

movedx wrote: post #220

whilenot-dev wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> includes stuff that documents my own individual history. By this do you mean family photos and the like? I'd like to hear more about this. I'm building up a personal library like this too.

Family photos, letters, contracts, receipts etc.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#227

Post by Root_Denied » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see.

I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.

So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#228

Post by superkuh » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

And the future isn't growing your own food at home. But we all know a garden in the yard is a wonderful thing and often better than what you can get at the store while being rewarding to tend.

There are two "futures" to disambiguate here. The future for for-profit and institutional entities, which is not self-hosted. And the future for human persons, which is. The former will probably be HTTP/3 (quic over UDP) exclusively with CA TLS required while the future for humans remains on HTTP+HTTPS HTTP/1.1.

I won't be too many more years before the corporate future completely divorces itself from the actual web and goes full HTTP-IS-JUST-A-TRANSPORT-FOR-JS-APPS and becomes unable to even visit normal websites. For "security" reasons, of course.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#229

Post by smeej » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:54 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #214

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…

> That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience. If I were to run my own version of Google Photos and the like, I'd probably go with the hybrid option: Run all the software I'd run if I was self-hosting, but in the cloud, possibly with a b…

I want something easy to set up that lets me easily backup things like this within a user-chosen circle of family or friends. Build my own trusted "micro cloud."

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#230

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 10:56 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Absolute bullocks.

For most people running a home server, a Raspberry Pi is plenty and is about the size of a deck of cards, maybe two decks if you want extra storage and use an external storage device.

If you need something beefier, you can probably just use an old laptop, or maybe a full second PC under your desk if you need more. You could easily fit a Threadripper or Xeon system with 128 GB of RAM, multiple drives, and a GPU or even two in a single ATX PC case.

If you need a full server rack, you're an extreme outlier beyond even 99% of homelab creators.