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What I Self Host

fredrikmeyer.net

131–140 of 149 posts

Re: What I Self Host

#131
post #4

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘se…

A host is someone who lets people stay in their house. "Self-hosting" and "bare-metal" have gotten debased in such a strange, commercial-marketing aligned way. The new definition of "self-hosting" is that you play any part in a piece of software that you use (if I click the "install wordpress button in cPANEL, am I self-hosting?), and the new definition of "bare-metal" is "computer." It's just weird. How can you empl…

If you throw a party in your rental apartment you are not a host? I guess you could even claim that renting means you do not actually have a home if you want to be really pedantic.

Perhaps you care about qualifications, but others just care about being in control of the servers they depend on and having options when the providers helping to run those servers become unreliable and choosing the most cost-effective option to achieve that. Unless you have an actual argument why the distinction matters besides "it allows the plebes to play" then few will care about what you think the term "self-hosted" should mean - even more so when you yourself still depend on your ISP and power company.

Re: What I Self Host

#132
post #91

How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.

What this really means is that there are few configuration options, that it works mostly out of the box, and that it fits the tastes and needs of the developer. I can't really fault open source devs for that, it's a way to conserve resources. If I don't like something I go look elsewhere (or think about building my own then abandon the project in a git repo somewhere).

Yeah it's more of a disclaimer than a sales pitch.

Re: What I Self Host

#133
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have backup storage, of course. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync. And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for l…

> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might st…

> Not even listening to music in the car?

I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally.

> I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.

If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).

Re: What I Self Host

#134
post #83
post #2

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want t…

> what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore

As far as I can tell, the price range for consumer PCs hasn't really moved since then. If anything it's worse now for people who expect to have a good quality graphics card. Owning a smartphone outright isn't cheap, either.

Re: What I Self Host

#135

Something pikapods looked neat at first then soon I realised the costs add up and add up a lot. One day I was calculating it at pikapods at I realised I had crossed 27 USD/m and I wasn't even finished. Like those streaming services - everything on a new streaming service i.e a new pod and they cost separately. I wish there was a service which would take away the pain of installation and maintenance away from me but l…

I will say, Pikapods is really nice because they give a cut back to the developers of Open Source. I'm the maintainer of Kavita, a popular self-hosted reading server and pikapods gives me something like 10-15% cut of each user running Kavita.

Re: What I Self Host

#136
post #2

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want t…

I think people don't know what they want, but they like fiddling with computers. So, they imagine future scenarios where they would have problems (which they don't) and imagine solutions for those problems they don't have, and spend time implementing those solutions. For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not…

> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?

I'm curious to know why you think this way of doing is "correct"? I like reading my RSS feeds on my phone. And on my laptop. And on my tablet, sometimes.

Re: What I Self Host

#137
post #77
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need to port that to windows, linux, Mac, android, and ios for a typical device mix of someone doing self-hosting, and no access from more closed platforms that have a browser.

I can understand Linux programs not being easily made to work on Android, but I can't understand why I'd ever need or want a device that runs Android and a device that runs IOS. Unless they're test devices for development, but I wouldn't be using those to access services in my day-to-day life.

I dislike the iOS experience and have used an Android phone daily for nearly 15 years. The iPad Pro is objectively better than any Android tablet, even with the limitations of the OS.

Re: What I Self Host

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might st…

> Not even listening to music in the car? I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally. > I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will. If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyw…

You seem to be an extreme outlier and probably not the target audience for such applications. No offense, but nobody is carrying around multiple devices when the one device we all have can do everything and do it better.

Re: What I Self Host

#139
post #2

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want t…

I don't think it's a fad. Just more people talking about it openly that might be doing it.

New to me might not mean new to others.

Self hosting is not valued on what someone else self-hosts, it's about what you self host that's valuable to you.

Re: What I Self Host

#140

How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.

Came out of nodejs part of the world from what I can tell and spread

Compliment in that it’s supposed to mean something akin to principled I guess

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