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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#31

Post by dylnuge »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think... beyond individualism What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting. Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever. In other words, you're on your own for the most pa…

I'm part of several small/mid-sized communities where people voluntarily do sysadmin work so that the group can have some nice shared services, and that's to say nothing of the number of people I know running personal homelabs/self-hosting setups at decent cost just for fun. You could of course say that fun, maintaining something for friends you care about, or having a dream of less corporately locked-in software are all incentives, but they're not monetary ones.

Really, it's easy to get sysadmin types interested in this; the problem is that most people aren't sysadmins and don't know any. If you really wanted a business model out of this, it'd probably be a managed service that lets non-tech-savvy users spin up their own versions of this without learning the details.

> Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.

There are plenty of successful economic models around open source, and plenty of open source software is used in high-reliability contexts. What comparison are you trying to make?

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#32

Post by cmilton »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think... beyond individualism What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting. Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever. In other words, you're on your own for the most pa…

I agree better incentives are needed for community hosting.

Co-location is still readily available. Which service and reliability improvements are you looking for that competent sys admins couldn't provide with multiple co-lo's? Not everyone made the cloud jump.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#33

Post by jeffbee »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #9

Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone. Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call". SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all b…

This did not happen with the iPhone. It happened with the BlackBerry.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#34

Post by sgarland »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think... beyond individualism What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting. Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever. In other words, you're on your own for the most pa…

> What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.

I’d do it for free. I’ve long been frustrated that I have more reliable infrastructure in my homelab than most companies I’ve worked for, and that none of them have any interest in shifting out of the cloud.

I don’t see a market for it, though. Most people are generally happy with Google, Apple, etc. to host their stuff, and I get it - it’s quite reliable, integrates with the rest of their respective products nicely, and Just Works. Add to that the economies of scale, and it’s a non-starter unless you find a niche group of people.

Google One is $99/year for 2 TB of storage. For me to have confidence in uptime to offer public storage, I’d need at least 4U of colo rack space, and ideally 6U (2x 2U for HDD servers, 2x 1U for hosting applications in HA-ish). That would cost a few hundred USD/month, not to mention an initial outlay of tens of thousands of dollars for servers and drives (mostly the drives… high capacity enterprise-rated HDDs aren’t cheap). And that’s only for one site - ideally, of course, there are at least two, or at the very least, off-site backup like rsync.net.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#35

Post by xnx »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #9

Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone. Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call". SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all b…

> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#37

Post by kbody »

There have been solid efforts with niche adoption that have quite nice UX like Umbrel [1] that allows installing all the mentioned and a ton more open-source apps [2] just by using a UI. It was spawned as bitcoin node hardware+software combo but expanded and is now primarily about self-hosting.

The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.

[1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos

[2] https://apps.umbrel.com/

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#38

Post by crashabr »

mystraline wrote: post #10

That all depends if you're willing to run stuff yourself, or be subservient on the good will of companies not to enshittify (pro-tip, they always will). I self-host the following: Video: Jellyfin Audio: Navidrome Audiobooks: Audiobookshelf Phone image sharing: Immich Home automation: Homeassistant Office suite: NextCloud Monitoring: LibreNMS Compute: Proxmox AI/LLM local: open-webui

What kind of machine do you need to run all of this concurrently?

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#39

Post by torium »

> Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers

I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.

Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.

[1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#40

Post by palata »

theamk wrote: post #28
MoreQARespect wrote: post #9

Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone. Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call". SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all b…

This still exists... OsmAnd, offline map app for Android, has 10M+ downloads. Maps.me has 50M+ downloads. Sure, that's not 10B+ of Google Maps users, but still a lot of users. I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.

Isn't Organic Maps the open source successor of Maps.me?
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