Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phone apps could backup data to another location the same way a laptop can.
but then why not host from that second location?
Battery life, offline access.
The future is not self-hosted
401–410 of 459 posts
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's, we can do that on our own. I want to come here to engage directly with other actual people and their brains. Not as an interface to ChatGPT.
That's not something to be proud of that you upvoted it.
It's not a discussion, unless you think talking to an LLM is a discussion or equivalent to HN.
And obviously if this is permitted or rewarded with upvotes it's just going to become an endless spam site of people posting low effort cotton candy they didn't need any thought to produce. No signal all noise
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#403I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees. To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed. I can also very sim…
You probably mean "federated is more important, cheaper, more practical than self-hosted at home", and I agree.
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#404I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows. I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
> I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular. > Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows. This work would be necessary any…
> People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place
"People exchange free speech for comfort, but most people never need the former anyway, so it's okay".
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#405Moxie 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…
Moxie is wrong, he likes to project his own ideas as wisdom and always factually correct. P2P networks have flourished. Bittorrent, bitcoin, Tor just to name a few successful ones
This. There's a good reply to Moxie's article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936929
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's, we can do that on our own. I want to come here to engage directly with other actual people and their brains. Not as an interface to ChatGPT. That's not something to be proud of that you upvoted it. It's not a discussion, unless you think talking to an LLM is a discussion or equivalent to HN. And obviously if this is permitted or rewarded with upvotes it's ju…
>There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's we can do that on our own
There's at least one value to LLM content: it always outputs correct grammar and punctuation. Unlike this human sentence of yours, which took me two attempts to parse because it's missing a necessary clause separator.
But on the substance of your comment, I (generally) agree.
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#407Earlier 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…
you went from 10USD to thousands in a few sentences. self-hosting has a lot of degrees. if you want your own TLD and peer with Tier1s, then it's astronomical, woo! But using dynDNS is also an option. Especially if you compare to non-self-hosted services. You get a subdomain and that's it. (Or nothing, maybe some handle on Instagram.)
I have a .net domain that used to point to the nameserver at my house. It works fine, although if your IP changes you have to update your glue records and whatnot. You can get free secondary DNS service from a several places. All I paid was the cost of the domain registration.
These days I have a Debian instance running at DigitalOcean that costs me $6/mo that acts as my primary DNS, with my home server as the secondary. I'm paying more, but I use that Debian instance for a few other things as well so I don't mind. The major benefit is I no longer worry about my IP changing at home, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#408Earlier 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…
You should go talk to your librarians, you can totally influence all these things!
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#409Self 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/
I use your site and it rules! Thanks for building it. Was scrolling to see if someone was gonna mention it. Such a great idea and great execution
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#410I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees. To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed. I can also very sim…
Why do you claim that Hetzner won’t screw you over with your data? What you’re doing with Hetzner is just a few less layers of abstraction compared to AWS or Azure. They can still theoretically take down the machine or steal your data, if they wanted to. I don’t know what the correct definition of self hosted is, but there is a big ideological difference between what you’re doing and self-hosting actual, physical har…
Sure, in theory Hetzner could pull the plug or access the data on my VPS. But that’s true of any infrastructure... just like someone could break into my house and steal my self-hosted server.
In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring.
It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.