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Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

cloudinabottle.org

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Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#101

Post by mrtesthah »

noman-land wrote: post #44
cube00 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.

The general public will do whatever their friends do. If there was an iPhone charger sized box they could plug in anywhere and have their own personal cloud that can interconnect with other personal clouds, and a celebrity said it was cool to have one, the general public will do it without giving it a first thought.

You mean like this?

https://freedombox.org/

It’s been around since 2010.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#102

Post by crossroadsguy »

> making self-hosting accessible to everyone

This happens with making many small to medium level resource hungary apps, for personal usage, run on one VPS which is not a heady duty machine costing heavy duty money. I have tried this on similar machines 2GB RAM and 1-2 VCPU and after 2-3 apps it starts swaying like a drunkard in slow motion even in that SSH session. But at least this one seems to be better than something like PikaPods, in combo pricing regard (I am not saying one is generally better over the other), where the pricing is rather per app.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#103

Post by samhclark »

jasongi wrote: post #26

I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated. Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was…

IMO, one way to retain the power user crowd is to do the hard parts that they might have skipped themselves. For a couple examples:

- after selecting your observability apps, every _other_ app could automatically configure centralized logging, its own dashboard of metrics, etc

- the host OS could ask the user simply for the backup destination (S3 url creds, attached local disk, SMB share, etc) and every app is again automatically configured with backups

- the host could have a control panel to roll back apps between versions (maybe it's FS snapshots or something)

- everyone can use containers, but if the project went through the extra effort to make each app its own VM instead, that could be worth something

- if there was a companion Android/iOS app for management and (importantly) alerting?

---

That doesn't really solve the monetization issue you described, but I do think you can still get powerusers on board if you handle even harder problems than they'd want to take on themselves. Or...harder problems than they'd risk taking on themselves if their family uses what's being hosted, for example. Less tolerance for downtime

Edit: formatting

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#104

Post by zplizzi »

silver92bullet wrote: post #91

Now the key question, can the hardware be made accessible to everyone. Its definitely an improvement to make self hosting software easier but the process of setting even a raspberry pi for an average consumer interested in self hosting is still a barrier. They probably will be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way

(author here) I am really excited to make pre-configured Raspberry Pis that people can just plug in at home, and have it work out of the box. It'll take a bit more work to make it seamless but we're definitely aiming in that direction. It's a shame how expensive Pis have gotten recently though with the memory shortage.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#105

Post by krelian »

zplizzi wrote: post #96
KomoD wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user was called adl-collab, when it forked repos to add implementations it made them under a branch called "andrew". The biggest contributor to the project in the last 3mo is andrewlaack... and we can also just take a guess that "adl" in adl-collab is AnDrewLaak.

Yeah, I'll make sure this doesn't continue. To be clear there were 11 total issues posted; this was a mistake, not some huge spamming campaign.

[flagged]

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#106

Post by dom3k »

GZGavinZhao wrote: post #39
drunner wrote: post #6

I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions. Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and…

Looking at my younger sister, I'd risk saying it's the same in all generations. I'll even say more: I think earlier generations had a general thought of "computer consists of separate parts; you can buy them separately and replace if needed / want better performance", even the less technical ones. But now everything is a black box (therefore e.g. why not overspend and always buy a black box from Apple if that's fashionable now).

But maybe that was kind of related to times and the place – where I live people needed to be a bit more savvy, so thought like "why you buy an iPhone if Xiaomi can do the same 4x cheaper; if you chose the right model you may even have a good camera too" was popular even in non-tech circles.

But yeah, now that hardware is a bit more of a commodity and such tradeoff might give you a bit more adware with a bit less convenience, maybe it's different. But the next generation's understanding of computer/phone as something else than a magical black box is gone.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#110

Post by jongjong »

KomoD wrote: post #50

These guys have been spamming issues in repos trying to promote this project and no disclosure whatsoever that they are associated with the project. https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i...

It's not spam if it's the first time I heard of it and it's useful. It shows they care about their project. This makes me want to try it out even more.

Meta and Google can spam their unsolicited ads to a billion users but regular people aren't allowed to promote their own projects on niche forums? This is bs. You're the problem here. Self-promoting your harmful values. You're the spammer.

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