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Self-hosting is being enshittified

troubled.engineer

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Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#71

Post by apexalpha »

crapple8430 wrote: post #69
apexalpha wrote: post #59

This blog seems to be from "that side" of the self-hosting world: the homelabbers. If you ask these people you need to buy expensive hardware and build your own datacenter at home. I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS. That's it. You'll truly be amazed at how much stuff you can actually run on very little hardware if you only h…

A powerful enough machine (usually limited by RAM, not CPU) will let you run a hypervisor OS like Proxmox which helps a lot with making things secure and flexible. You might also want to have RAID, ECC memory. It quickly starts to make sense to build a proper home server rather than cobbling together a bunch of low end hardware. The tipping point is probably when you want more than 1-2 hard drives worth of storage.

If you run everything on Linux you don't need VMs.

What are you putting in the VM, another Linux kernel? Why? Yeah then you need to take into account between 4GB and ~ 8GB of extra ram per VM.

I don't have RAID though I do backup to my NAS at my parents'.

But honestly a NVMe drive is basically like a CPU: it's either dead on arrival or it will just run forever.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#72

Post by goku12 »

Self-hosted FOSS apps are probably the best push towards computing freedom and privacy today. But I wish that the self-hosting community moved towards a true distributed architecture, instead of trying to mimic the paradigms of corporate centralized software. This is not meant as a criticism against the current self-hosted architecture or the apps. But I wish the community focused on a different set of features that suite the home computing conditions more closely:

1. Peer-to-peer model of decentralization like bittorrent, instead of the client-server model. Local web UIs (like Transmission's web UI) may be served locally (either host-only or LAN-only) as frontend for these apps. Consider this as the 'last-mile connectivity' if you will.

2. Applications are resistant to outages. Obviously, home servers can't be expected to be always online. It may even be running on you regular desktops. But you shouldn't lose the utility of the service just because it goes offline. A great example of this is the email service. They can wait for up to 2 days for the destination server to show up before declaring a delivery failure. Even rejections are handled with retries minutes later.

3. The applications should be able to deal with dynamic IPs and NATs. We will probably need a cryptographic identity mechanism and a way to translate that into a connection to the correct end node. But most of these technologies exist today.

4. E2E encrypted and redundant storage and distribution servers for data that must absolutely be online all the time. Nostr relays seem like a good example.

The Solid and Nostr projects embody many of these ideas already. It just needs a bit more polish to feel natural and intuitive. One way to do it is to have a local daemon that acts as a gateway, cache and web-ui to external data.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#73

Post by apexalpha »

goku12 wrote: post #72

Self-hosted FOSS apps are probably the best push towards computing freedom and privacy today. But I wish that the self-hosting community moved towards a true distributed architecture, instead of trying to mimic the paradigms of corporate centralized software. This is not meant as a criticism against the current self-hosted architecture or the apps. But I wish the community focused on a different set of features that…

Sounds like you want a k3s based homelab and then connect it all with Tailscale or Netbird.

FWIW: My Intel Nuc on Ubuntu LTS with a cron apt update / upgrade job works for years without a hickup.

I have reliable electricity and internet at home, though.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#74

Post by ku1ik »

There’s always risk of a rug pull or going the wrong direction with “open-source” software developed by a for-profit company (Plex, MinIO, Mattermost in this example).

When choosing software that I run in my “homelab” I lean towards community developed projects first. They may not always have as high quality as the ones offered by commercial entities but they’re just safer for the long term and have no artificial limits (Plex). I used to be a happy Plex customer (I have Plex Pass) but several years ago I had enough of their bullshit, switched to Jellyfin and couldn’t be happier!

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#75

Post by goku12 »

apexalpha wrote: post #73
goku12 wrote: post #72

Self-hosted FOSS apps are probably the best push towards computing freedom and privacy today. But I wish that the self-hosting community moved towards a true distributed architecture, instead of trying to mimic the paradigms of corporate centralized software. This is not meant as a criticism against the current self-hosted architecture or the apps. But I wish the community focused on a different set of features that…

Sounds like you want a k3s based homelab and then connect it all with Tailscale or Netbird. FWIW: My Intel Nuc on Ubuntu LTS with a cron apt update / upgrade job works for years without a hickup. I have reliable electricity and internet at home, though.

> Sounds like you want a k3s based homelab and then connect it all with Tailscale or Netbird.

I apologize if it was confusing. I was suggesting the exact opposite. It's not about how to build a mini enterprise cluster. It's about how to change the service infrastructure to suit the small computers we usually find at homes, without any modifications. I'm suggesting a more fundamental change.

> I have reliable electricity and internet at home, though.

It isn't too bad where I'm at, either. But sadly, that isn't the practical situation elsewhere. We need to treat power and connectivity as random and intermittent.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#76

Post by doix »

mbirth wrote: post #39
doix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure. I avoid Plex for that reason. I just host my media with nginx + indexing enabled. Wireguard for creating the tunnel between the server-client and Kodi as the frontend to view the media (you can add an indexed http server as a media source). Works great, no transcoding like Plex, but that's less o…

> It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure. Only if you want it to. Your local Plex server is always available on port 32400 - which can be opened up for others as well. But using Plex’s authentication is more convenient, of course.

Yeah, I was specifically talking about the "firewall" bypassing the parent mentioned (most likely combined with NAT punch-through as well). You could of course use Plex without that and use wireguard (or just make it available to the internet) and not rely on their infra.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#77

Post by apexalpha »

ku1ik wrote: post #74

There’s always risk of a rug pull or going the wrong direction with “open-source” software developed by a for-profit company (Plex, MinIO, Mattermost in this example). When choosing software that I run in my “homelab” I lean towards community developed projects first. They may not always have as high quality as the ones offered by commercial entities but they’re just safer for the long term and have no artificial lim…

Another Plex (Pass) user here. What exactly is the bullshit you deal with?

Over the years I have been streaming all my movies and shows to as many people I want.

Plex added HDR support for transcoding, live subtitles syncing and more.

Especially the subtitle syncing is fantastic. It completely solved the problem.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#78

Post by em-bee »

yegle wrote: post #46
figmert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security updates is what's stopping them often. You also realistically can't fork things unless multiple people do, and they all stay interested in the fork.

You don't have to expose your self-hosted services on the Internet to begin with. 0day bugs do exist even if you diligently apply all security updates.

making sure that your system is not exposed to the internet takes effort too. and then you realize you want to share something with friends or family, or access your home server from remote. you also want updates for new features too eventually.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#79

Post by fortyseven »

yegle wrote: post #46
figmert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security updates is what's stopping them often. You also realistically can't fork things unless multiple people do, and they all stay interested in the fork.

You don't have to expose your self-hosted services on the Internet to begin with. 0day bugs do exist even if you diligently apply all security updates.

Have the advantage of hosting content on Plex and other media servers that you can play them remotely. I can be on the other side of the Earth and still access my media. This is an extremely common use case.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#80

Post by moritzruth »

goku12 wrote: post #72

Self-hosted FOSS apps are probably the best push towards computing freedom and privacy today. But I wish that the self-hosting community moved towards a true distributed architecture, instead of trying to mimic the paradigms of corporate centralized software. This is not meant as a criticism against the current self-hosted architecture or the apps. But I wish the community focused on a different set of features that…

You might be interested in https://www.iroh.computer/
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