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I have this idea that I'm probably too stupid to implement. It's a what-if scenario so just follow along for the moment.

What if someone made an image board style web page, similar to 4chan, with a space for people to upload pictures and comments as well as a blog section. Just a polished javascript application that would be fully open source.

Let's say 1000 people downloaded this application and made their own image boards. You could pull the image data from each of the 1000 chan boards and take the top 100 posts from each category and create a master list, without comments, that would act as a sort of newspaper. The ads from the newspaper would go to fund the continual development and maintenance of the system as a whole including the chan board itself.

I like this idea because it would mean that since the *chan board would be open source and written in javascript + some backend language (python?) each of the boards itself would have a javascript template, a backend with SQL for the boards and comments, and an API hook to the master server. Only the API endpoints to the master server (phoenix?) would be non-negotiable and it would allow the community to customize the open source webpage.

There would be no "building-blocks" that are so high level as to be non-functional.

The open source web page itself could be used in standalone mode without the API hooks to the server (but not have added benefits that the server could give such as dashboard analytics, the chance to have posts be on the main newspaper, and maybe some AI image classification, a chat hook that connected the chan boards through socketing?).

The newspaper would be a real source of truth because there would be no incentive to game the system - no master website to knock over or gain the top comment off of. The individual websites and the SQL data would all be owned by individual devs running their own environments. The application itself would be continuously improved by a community of people who cared about open source software and not by an algorithmically driven corporation.

Like I say I'm probably too dumb to build this, but I'm working on a small website and maybe I can turn it into that. Or maybe someone else will start building this and I can help. But I think that this is important given where the news and social media is these days so it would be exciting if this were made.

Like so many things, this is just all about trade-offs. Self-host is not a silver bullet, it just swaps in a different set of problems.

Risk is part of it. Cloud service disappearing, discontinuing, failing, changing pricing, or modifying product, vs fire/flood, theft, hardware failure or software update breaking things.

Responsibility for maintenance is a whole thing, too. Maybe you like that sort of thing, but is still a time suck and for most people it eventually gets boring (especially if it's similar to your day job). Do it less often and eventually you will find yourself upgrading something through major versions with all kinds of breaking changes.

Security is a constant concern, and it's unfortunately not as simple as "it's firewalled on my LAN with no inbound access"

Media disappearing from a cloud service is incredibly irritating, but you know what else is bad? Trying to watch a movie with your spouse but instead spending your evening diagnosing why your NAS refuses to boot.

I wish self hosting was a bit easier. Right now it seems you need to know so much. I've always wondered if there was a way of making self hosting products that were easy to set up and secure by default.

I'd love to spend $100 for a mail server that I just plug into my router, as an example.

I tried it but there are so many traps you can fall in, like security settings as mentioned by you. When i had my server online back then, it was hacked 1 week later :D

A lot of hosting providers do offer OSS applications which can be installed with one click, like WordPress or Coppermine. The latter is, I quote:

> a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.

And SSL certificates are for free and automatically generated.

An example: https://www.netcup.eu/hosting/#webhosting-details

https://www.netcup.eu/hosting/webhosting-application-hosting...