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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#391

Post by PKop »

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…

This is AI slop. @dang this degrades this forum more than any flame wars. I can't stand people that outsource their entire thought process to an AI then post it like we can't use the tool ourselves. It adds nothing to the conversation.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#392

Post by swores »

brailsafe wrote: post #163
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…

My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that…

Not only were there Shazam apps on phones pre the first iPhone, but in the first place Shazam was a service you didn't even need a smartphone for! When I first started using it, they had a telephone number (in the UK, I'm not sure which other countries) to call up while music is playing, and 30 seconds or so later it would text you the song that it detected during the call.

I agree that "combining phone with one of the most popular / best in some ways mp3 player on the market" was a big part of it (with web browsing and video playing equally important), but Shazam wasn't a new thing that iPhones brought us.

(I also agree with danieldk that Shazam just wasn't a significant factor for most people on any devices, before or after iPhones.)

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#393

Post by PKop »

jjani wrote: post #388
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…

At least 3 of your last 4 comments are purely GPT-generated, which isn't great for discussion here. I feel sorry for the 37 others who took the time to genuinely respond. And no, it's not just the em-dashes. I do this for a living, FWIW.

Agree, this is annoying, these comments shouldn't get elevated in the threads and moderators must flag these accounts. We can all use LLM's on our own people posting that output here is worthless and just pollutes this website.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#394

Post by subarctic »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #300
subarctic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benef…

privacy and control are things which people dont tend to think about until: * online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?"). * some service people use shuts down, stranding their data. * some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off fro…

>>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

>This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

Ya but it turned out that smartphones ended up being super convenient once they got good/usable enough, and it unlocked really useful things that you couldn't do before, or just made things more convenient. If I have all my gmail data at home (or on a machine I control in a data center somewhere), does that make anything more convenient for me? Whereas being able to navigate around a new city with zero knowledge of it, translate food packaging when I'm grocery shopping in a foreign country, communicate with with any of people from wherever I am as long as I have my phone on me - those are real benefits.

I do kind of like how you're thinking about this because I'd love to live in a world where I could have ownership over all my emails, social media data, music, etc and have it all be just as convenient (or more convenient than) and work just as well as gmail, instagram, spotify etc do today. But we've definitely been moving in the opposite direction for the last 20+ years and there's good reasons for that:

1. It's easier to have someone else (like google, facebook etc) manage something for you then manage it yourself. And in many cases when there's network effects it's impossible for you to replace the experience you get from one of these services on your own.

2. Most of the time, people aren't gonna do hard things like making good software (and solving the hard problems, not just the fun problems) or building a social network without some way of making money from it (either you paying for a service or them monetizing your data via ads or selling it)

3. It's way easier for them to manage everything if the data is on machines that they control than on your machine, and it way easier for them to get people to pay for a service (and deny them access if they don't pay) if its on their machines too

All that said I'd love to see the iphone of self-hosting someday

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#395

Post by econ »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #210
bee_rider wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like

You are not allowed to do that!

The reality is that with minimal effort and money you can cheaply buy some multi TB drives. Get a 100 euro computer, a 50ish internet connection, a torrent feed and a usenet sub. Netflix has very little stuff by comparison.

You can also set up a crawler with some archiving and crawl that part of the internet that is interesting to you specifically. Feed it the urls you've visited, crawl 1-3 links deep from there and you will be in awe how fantastic the search results are. If you type "banana" in the search box it will give you a surreal page full of interesting pages about bananas. (Interesting to you only)

As the collection grows and time expires you will also be increasingly shocked how many of those website are not around anymore.

I ran a dead link checker on 10k old bookmarks for a niche topic one time. I didn't pay much attention to the topic for 8 years or so. I was very excited thinking I would find all kinds of new developments. In stead it was depressing as f. Something like 50 links worked. Stuff like a link to a Google search result.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#396

Post by MrJohz »

valenterry wrote: post #363
MrJohz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it is now easier than ever to make copies of materials that we see. Famously, the internet never forgets, and even the smallest mistakes or slip-ups are retained in perpetuity, as long as someone is interested enough in keeping hold of the original copies. And there are a lot of organisations that are very interested in keeping hold of original copies. I would argue that the opposite is true: it is…

> On the other hand, it is now easier than ever to make copies of materials that we see. Is it? I feel it's the other way around. For example, just 10 years ago, there were no apps that forbid me from taking screenshots. Copying CDs and DVDs was comparably easy, even for normal folks. How do I copy a Netflix episode again?

I meant "now" in that sentence to refer to the internet era in general, in comparison with other technological leaps. But still, these protections are usually very limited, and fairly easy to circumvent. Most people I know might not be able to convince their laptop to let them screenshot Netflix, but they do normally know how to find pirated copies of the TV show they want to watch. Paying for the convenience of Netflix might still be worth it for them, but the ability to step beyond that should that convenience disappear is definitely there.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#397

Post by serbuvlad »

whartung wrote: post #373
serbuvlad wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> 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. Support has costs. Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay w…

Yeah, you need to have (I would argue basic) Linux sysadmin skills. If you don't have those skills, and aren't interested to learn them, then you shouldn't self-host, just because it's the hot new trend.

The thing I like the most is the area effect. I have those skills so 5-20 people get a self-hosted experience managed by me. But even so, many people will be left outside of any such area. This too, is fine.

My dad knows how to do basic woodworking, so if I need a simple piece of wooden furniture, I go to him. I have a friend who knows how to 3D print stuff (I know nothing about it) and another who's in medical school and gives me medical advice (including "go to the doctor" when the problem is not minor). But I don't have any friends which are good at car mechanics, so I go to the shop (and get charged) for all problems related to that.

Now, I do not live in the US, so maybe these sorts of relationships spanning wide fields are less common there, but the solution to rugged individualism doesn't seem to me to be "collectivism on a grand scale", be it corporations or the government. The solution seems to me to be "collectivism on a small scale", building friend-family groups that can solve the most common 80% of problems in most fields within themselves, and that reach into professionals from the larger collective for the other 20% of problems, or for the problems in fields they have no experience in.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#398

Post by fsflover »

PKop wrote: post #391
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…

This is AI slop. @dang this degrades this forum more than any flame wars. I can't stand people that outsource their entire thought process to an AI then post it like we can't use the tool ourselves. It adds nothing to the conversation.

Even though it may be AI-generated, it clearly received a lot of upvotes, including from me, because it said exactly what I wanted to say. Why is AI a problem? You didn't explain how exactly it degrades the forum or adds nothing to the discussion.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#399

Post by kristianbrigman »

eldaisfish wrote: post #247
MrJohz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge. I don't think that's any different to any other period of time when communication was suddenly able to expand. Gutenberg's press didn't come with an automatic lie detector that meant the printed word could only contain true facts and nothing else. Instead,…

it has never been easier to poison the well of knowledge at the scale possible today. the internet enabled instantaneous dissemination whatever version of reality tickles your fancy. the effort required is also minimal. This has never been possible in the past.

Everyone says this… but everyone also complains about access to eyeballs. Posting is cheap, getting people to see it is not cheap or easy, and getting harder.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#400

Post by fsflover »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #147
xnx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting. Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

What kind of apps would you want to self host on phones?

Offline maps, music/video library, all/most photos. This is all working on my GNU/Linux phone.
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