The future is not self-hosted

> I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.

So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.

SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

Yes.

This is the "1" part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

It's really hard not to become impolite with this kind of disrespectful comment, but I try. Let me articulate my thinking... The suggestion is not based on nothing; it's based on years of banging our heads against the wall with various governmental and non-governmental systems that we need to communicate with, in the context of our firm wanting to talk to government servers to, for instance, get money for providing health care, or communicate with a GP.

We already have a need to authenticate and communicate. In the same way we have passports and driving licenses, these kinds of basic utility services seem to be worth it.

I'm just advocating for the same thing, for the basic functionality, digitally, before we start dreaming of other kinds of solutions.

I'm really not happy with the solution that has emerged in Norway, where one private entity is basically the de facto identity provider for everything (BankID). Then there's a mishmash of all other providers with various levels of motives, usability, restrictions, technology, and cost.

The same way we found out national identity cards can be useful, to ensure we have proper basic communication and identification within our country when using that country's services and portals.

This is my logic: We already have to communicate and authenticate, no way around it. And our government is already mandating login and communication digitally. So, a service like I described would not affect the concern you seem to have, since we have already handed over the key, so to speak. But it would alleviate a lot of unnecessary and, frankly, security-reducing complexity.

I would assume you are extremely skeptical of anything governmental and centralized. Maybe you live in a country with more problems, so that your fear is more realistic. But here in Norway, we seem to have found a stable balance of powers and a stable relationship between the people and our government. So maybe your situation you live in makes the "tyranny" claim more palpable.

Sadly, this, to me, just reinforces my experience I have every time I run into libertarian values. There seems to be much more focus on angrily denouncing others' ideas and not contributing to any realistic or practical solution. And it's too bad you have to resort to absolutes, unnuanced ad hominem attack. I think a measured response would have been something like (my caricature of how I would have said it): "I see you want to improve inefficiencies, but I fear that you don't properly account for the dangers of abuse from the government." Instead, you come out swinging when all I suggest is that we just do what we are already doing, but better.

Couldn't this be solved by technical means? All those self-hosted boxes in people's homes could federate. That would allow the friends to upload their photos to an album. If you want to have copies of them on your local hard drive, a config flag could duplicate the data, automatically providing redundancy that's even useful for others. Not everyone wants to run a server at home and thoae who don't want to could rely on some third party, be it a public library, a non-profit, or even a for-profit offering some extra perks. The basic tech could be all the same, even the software stack.

I wonder if there are any startups in that space, there likely are. YC anyone? Whatare the obstacles?