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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#341

Post by serbuvlad »

stego-tech wrote: post #47

The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to chan…

> Self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs.

What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.

As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.

That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#342

Post by drew_lytle »

m3nu wrote: post #289
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 set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here: https://www.pikapods.com/

Looks cool! Thanks for commenting!

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#343

Post by WillDaSilva »

smeej wrote: post #224
wmf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Distributing your backup over the spare storage of many other NAS servers is the main idea behind Storj, which provides a remarkably cheap price per TB per month.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#344

Post by youatme »

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…

A current delusion of mine is creating the iphone of self-hosting. Claude has me stuck in a manic state where I think I can do anything.

https://thebox.youatme.email/

Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#345

Post by jqpabc123 »

udev4096 wrote: post #266
jqpabc123 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one. But unfortunately, more than just incentive is required to make it happen.

Good luck being owned. If you don't take the action to safe guard your personal data, no one will. Stop living in a fantasy

Thanks for your concern but all my personal data is perfectly safe. I keep it in an old fashioned thing called a "backup" --- complete with encryption.

I maintain 3 copies --- no hosting required. One copy is strapped to my wrist at all times so it is always just as safe as I am --- if not safer.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6784665

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#346

Post by hahajk »

Aurornis wrote: post #181
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…

> This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced. I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone. Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly bette…

It doesn't have to be difficult to self-host. Like another commenter said, in a diffe world that could be the default. iCloud gives apps an API to sync. The backend doesn't have to be a data center, it could be a time capsule in your living room. You could connect using a private wireguard lan. The protocol could even be built out to support redundant time capsules in case one failed.

But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#348

Post by d4rkn0d3z »

Not sure if others mentioned this but one can abstract away the configuration and sys-admin type tasks using a declarative language. Then the setup can be recreated effortlessly by others, reviewed and verified on an ongoing basis.

If the author found a self-hosting setup that works, it should be packaged and automatically reproduced elsewhere. It is always 10% of the work to make something work, 90% of the work is arranging it to be self-reproducing, self-maintaining, and self-documenting without excessive toil. I call this "self-*" computing.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#349

Post by waldopat »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #249
waldopat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a public institution you, the citizen, own it. What you are talking about is hoarding access. You want complete unfettered access to content without barriers and without friction. Typically the only way to do that is via pirating. Let me remind you of the open source credo about free as in freedom not free beer. You are right that there may be exchanges or compromises at play, but it was a bit shocking to me when…

> As a public institution you, the citizen, own it. Nominally, yes. In terms of that meaning anything, no. The benefit of ownership is not exclusivity, but control. If the library doesn't have a book (or other piece of media, of course), I have no power to influence them to get it despite that theoretical ownership. If the librarian decides a book is offensive and removes it from the collection, I have no power to in…

Right. You want free beer not freedom.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#350

Post by ianopolous »

smeej wrote: post #224
wmf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be interested in Peergos which lets you easily live mirror to another instance and everything is E2EE.
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