Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-hosting is being enshittified

troubled.engineer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 121 posts

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#101

Post by goku12 »

reactordev wrote: post #100
goku12 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the economic incentive. In all the prior cases you mentioned, their commercial interests aligned with our own - at least in part. This time however, I'm worried that they aren't concerned about burning down the world economy, at least in part, since their bottom line won't suffer for it. For example, Micron didn't think about any alternatives for the consumer retail market. They just dumped it entirely…

If Ford stopped making cars… You fail to grasp that if Micron decides the consumer market isn’t for them, others will gladly fill that void.

The economics behind this isn't rocket science. Micron left the retail market because it is more profitable for them to supply exclusively to the hyperscalers. Not because they can't supply the retail market or because it wasn't profitable. What makes you think that any other manufacturer is going to take a different decision? Why would they choose a market that offers less than the biggest bidder?

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#102

Post by reactordev »

goku12 wrote: post #101
reactordev wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Ford stopped making cars… You fail to grasp that if Micron decides the consumer market isn’t for them, others will gladly fill that void.

The economics behind this isn't rocket science. Micron left the retail market because it is more profitable for them to supply exclusively to the hyperscalers. Not because they can't supply the retail market or because it wasn't profitable. What makes you think that any other manufacturer is going to take a different decision? Why would they choose a market that offers less than the biggest bidder?

Someone will fill the void. Another company will sell ram to the retail market if the big players won't. More manufacturing abilities will open up. It's not like ram is becoming extinct. Someone will tool up and produce them for the retail market just as other brands have done in other sectors when the market shows a void.

Last I checked I could still buy Crucial RAM chips. In time, maybe it's Kingston. Or maybe Gigastone.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#103

Post by the_snooze »

em-bee wrote: post #78
yegle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are different degrees of "exposed to the internet." You don't need to make your self-hosted services fully accessible by anyone from everywhere. VPN, IP whitelists, mTLS, HTTP basic auth, etc. change the calculus of security and feature updates. You can afford to lag a bit behind on updates because you're not running critical enterprise infrastructure at scale.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#104

Post by orev »

em-bee wrote: post #78
yegle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much every home router, network firewall, and host-based firewall is set to deny all by default, so the effort is mostly needed to allow exposure to the Internet.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#105

Post by ajdude »

apexalpha wrote: post #77
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.

Also a plex pass holder. Been using it for years, and finally pulled the trigger to buy Plex pass lifetime because I wanted to move away from flickr and love that I could automatically upload photos taken on my phone to Plex.

... not a week later they've announced that they were getting rid of that feature

Then they forced everybody into having us username accounts, change things so I couldn't just visit my media servers address directly.

I also leverage Plex for live TV but they still don't support most OTA HD channels for licensing reasons.

Then they got rid of "watch together" , which has been heavily leveraged by family and friends over the years (re-implementing it is the second highest most requested feature right now in their suggestions).

Now they have the new pricing model where you must have Plex pass or some other subscription service if you want to be able to watch stuff stored on your own media server if you're doing it outside of your local network.

It's getting frustrating and despite people begging for certain things (e.g. Watch together) they seem to just be ignoring what people are asking for and focusing on weird stuff like sharing your watch history with random people or trying to turn Plex into a social media platform.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#106

Post by VerifiedReports »

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #36
VerifiedReports wrote: post #22

I don't understand this fairly sparse "article." "Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me." How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right? The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... wh…

> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)? that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important. People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and…

I don't doubt the validity of those sentiments. I'm just perplexed (see what I did there) as to what the specific issue is in this case because I thought Plex was for streaming stuff from one side of your house to the other (and/or playing it back).

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#107

Post by winstonwinston »

KolenCh wrote: post #89
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…

I think there’s a spectrum and you said it as if there’s only two sides. For me personally, I built my “data centre” as cheap as possible, but there’s a few requirements that the computers you’re using would not cut it: storage server must be using ZFS with ECC. I started this around a decade ago and I only spent ~$300 at the time (reusing old PSU and case I think). There are many requirements of a data centre that c…

Press X to doubt. I also use 150$ NUC for over a decade at home. At first it was ext4 then xfs, without ECC memory..

It looks to me, and i could be wrong, that many “homelabbers” upgraded from hoarding dvds to hoarding docker containers or whatever.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#108

Post by spwa4 »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #43
hsjdndvvbv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right? You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.

That's exactly my point: It runs on your computer, on your LAN, serving your media. How is it doing anything outside your control, then?

For NAT bypass you need infrastructure with a real IP.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#109

Post by hsjdndvvbv »

fooqux wrote: post #33
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…

Do you have any recommendations for decoders? I've been using a fire stick for a bit but I wouldn't mind a better alternative.

Apple TV 4k is my goto. Has Ethernet, can run apps.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#110

Post by hsjdndvvbv »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #43
hsjdndvvbv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right? You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.

That's exactly my point: It runs on your computer, on your LAN, serving your media. How is it doing anything outside your control, then?

It talks to Plex servers to give outside access....
Post reply on HN