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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#231

Post by dgjl »

voxleone wrote: post #155

Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*. During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends…

Everyone who relies on digital content, especially served online, will be sorry one day.

It is only a matter of time before the grid goes down, the country restricts the internet, or the service you rely on goes away.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#232

Post by wmf »

smeej wrote: post #224
wmf wrote: post #200

Earlier 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…

The one thing I desperately wish Umbrel shipped with was an easy way to network with other Umbrel users for backup and accessibility. Let people set limits in terms of how much storage they're willing to allocate to others. REQUIRE end-to-end encryption on backed up files. But help people create their own community micro-clouds using each other's computers. To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too…

It seems much easier to back up to B2 or something but that's even more money and yet another account.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#233

Post by autoexec »

Aurornis wrote: post #176
voxleone wrote: post #155

Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*. During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends…

I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies. But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streami…

> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for

Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge.

> The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track.

You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago.

It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#234

Post by wmf »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #212
wmf wrote: post #200

Earlier 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…

I disagree. From experience (see my username), self-hosting is hardly expensive. A $50 ex-corporate SFF with a couple of large M.2 or SATA SSDs will be a lot more powerful and easier to set up and manage than a Raspberry Pi, while not drawing much power. The ongoing costs are larger than not self-hosting, but not terrible - unless you want a symmetric connection, the domain name renewal is the expensive part.

Normies pay with money; you're paying with time and knowledge.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#235

Post by mindwork »

smeej wrote: post #229
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience. If I were to run my own version of Google Photos and the like, I'd probably go with the hybrid option: Run all the software I'd run if I was self-hosting, but in the cloud, possibly with a b…

I want something easy to set up that lets me easily backup things like this within a user-chosen circle of family or friends. Build my own trusted "micro cloud."

have you tried CasaOs or Zima board? It's their premise your own micro cloud

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#237

Post by mindwork »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #214
waldopat wrote: post #183

Moxie 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…

> That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience. If I were to run my own version of Google Photos and the like, I'd probably go with the hybrid option: Run all the software I'd run if I was self-hosting, but in the cloud, possibly with a b…

When running your own backup server, you're forgetting about scenario(however less-likely) when Google Photos will loose your photos, or if your google account gets banned with no ability to call anyone in Google to dispute that. In this case you can safely rely on your own backup to have those files at hand.

I was skeptical about this scenario until one day Gmail lost 1 year worth of my emails. It's just gone. All other emails are there, but not this particular year. And there is no person who you can call to talk about that.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#238

Post by selfhoster11 »

wmf wrote: post #234
selfhoster11 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. From experience (see my username), self-hosting is hardly expensive. A $50 ex-corporate SFF with a couple of large M.2 or SATA SSDs will be a lot more powerful and easier to set up and manage than a Raspberry Pi, while not drawing much power. The ongoing costs are larger than not self-hosting, but not terrible - unless you want a symmetric connection, the domain name renewal is the expensive part.

Normies pay with money; you're paying with time and knowledge.

Nope, normies pay with sovereignty. Given the entire ecosystem (Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta being the main ones) is trying to rob me of it, I'm happy hosting what I need and can handle admining, paying for what I need and can't handle admining, and saying no to the rest.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#239

Post by colinsane »

so you watch videos, listen to music, read books, and take/share photos on a phone, ipad, or tv. you seek a better experience doing those things, and your solution is to spin up some software _on a totally new device_ (a server).

that's a huge leap! i think most of us gloss over it, but the rest of the article is predicated on that leap.

the tv you're streaming video to probably runs Android by now. it has a stable internet connection, CPU, RAM, and probably a couple USB ports. why not install the Jellyfin server software on it, attach a USB hard drive, and let it be the machine that hosts all your media? why, actually, do you need to go out of your way to buy a completely new machine for this?

similar argument applies to Immich. you're wanting to co-edit an album among several contacts. you're probably all uploading your photos from a phone. why not just have one of your always-on phones host that album? i shouldn't expect the drain on your battery to serve an album to a few friends is that much more than it took to take those photos in the first place.

to a certain degree, you're "self-hosting" things on a physical server because that's the only platform on which we all still have the ability to run arbitrary workloads on. solve that problem and everything becomes a _lot_ simpler.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#240

Post by movedx »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #226
movedx wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> includes stuff that documents my own individual history. By this do you mean family photos and the like? I'd like to hear more about this. I'm building up a personal library like this too.

Family photos, letters, contracts, receipts etc.

Ah OK. So basically: life. Roger. Do you use paperless-ng and the likes?
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