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The future is not self-hosted

drewlyton.com

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Re: The future is not self-hosted

#371

Post by tryauuum »

v3xro wrote: post #159

What I see is that it's trivial to 'self-host' locally - go buy a product from Synology/QNAP etc. - they have an ecosystem, easy setup, apps, everything. Three issues from my perspective: 1) cost and 2) security+privacy 3) not so easy to integrate networking (visibility from internet side) for things like email hosting. I can also see it possible to 'self-host' things once you use a cloud where you can do 'confidenti…

> at a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption

that's an interesting statement. These all feel like patches to mitigate the evil maid problem, but they can never solve it fully

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#372

Post by teiferer »

teiferer wrote: post #370

Couldn't this be solved by technical means? All those self-hosted boxes in people's homes could federate. That would allow the friends to upload their photos to an album. If you want to have copies of them on your local hard drive, a config flag could duplicate the data, automatically providing redundancy that's even useful for others. Not everyone wants to run a server at home and thoae who don't want to could rely…

Is Peergos the answer I'm looking for? If so, what's missing is a big push on the business/PR side. They'll need to replicate what Signal did for chat so that even my 80-year old mom can use it.

Any other alternatives?

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#373

Post by whartung »

serbuvlad wrote: post #341
stego-tech wrote: post #47

The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to chan…

> Self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.…

> What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.

Support has costs.

Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay with a 50-100% markup. "Plug and play, self hosted. Plug in a TB drive for more storage. Total solution!"

And it's still not enough. They need a domain, they need a tunnel, they need to hook up with Lets Encrypt. They need to leave the machine on, and they need a backup strategy. Much less now having to cope with all of the Fine People that inhabit the wild interwebs and will soon come knocking...and knocking...and knocking.

This all has to be explained to folks that don't know, have no aptitude for, and simply don't care, about the mechanics of this process. They just want it to work.

It's not just a couple of dockers shoved onto a small Linux box. It's free like a puppy.

Self hosting is arcane, fiddly stuff. Fine for those comfortable with it, but a nightmare to those who are not.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#374

Post by fn-mote »

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 […]

Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#376

Post by stego-tech »

whartung wrote: post #373
serbuvlad wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.…

> What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends. Support has costs. Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay w…

This. It’s come a long way since the early days of hosting content out of the home off Torrent Seeders, FTP Servers, and Shoutcast offerings, but support is still the biggest bugbear - both end user support, and product support of industry best practices.

Plex doesn’t automatically generate a valid certificate, for instance, even though Let’s Encrypt is a drop-in affair. Home Assistant’s own SSL support is an arcane nightmare out of the box, reminiscent of mid-2000s certificate processes. Proxies like HAProxy and NGINX can better support connection security and encryption termination, but now you have an additional layer to support and manage.

This is what I mean by “support has to improve [for self-hosting to be viable for the masses]”: if something isn’t as easy to setup in a secure manner as install, point to your content, and tie a DNS record to it, then that eliminates 99% of the potential customer base right then and there.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#377

Post by myaccountonhn »

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…

I don't feel like most people even know self-hosting is an option.

I wasn't aware of how most ingredients were made and what effect they had to my body. Once I learnt I started being way more careful with how I source food.

Same goes with technology: people don't understand that what they upload can be used against them or arbitrarily taken away from them, what they buy can be removed, that companies spy and abuse them. Once they do, many look into self-hosting or at least other alternatives from big tech. I've met many who want to self-host, but they lack the technical literacy to do so.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#378

Post by tpmoney »

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…

> 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 on gatekeepers.

I get your broad point, but I would argue that for the vast majority of time most people did "rent ideas". Most people didn't have massive private libraries of books. Knowledge was locked in public or private institutions where if you were granted access by the owners of that institution, you would be allowed to go there and read the knowledge. If it was a public library you might even be able to take that knowledge home with you temporarily. But you wouldn't be able to keep anything you couldn't keep in your head, or transcribe yourself into your own documents. If the library closed, burned down, or you lost access to the institution, you also lost access to the knowledge contained within.

Which seems like then the argument should be for systems that allow you to take advantage of the ease and relative cheapness of copying and archiving digital forms of knowledge. To that end, "Print to PDF" being built into the operating system on mac OS might be one of my most favorite features. I have more than a handful of archived information from pages that don't exist anymore because of it.

Re: The future is not self-hosted

#379

Post by chris_engel »

I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees.

To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.

I can also very simply assign a domain to it and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.

Am I missing something?

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