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 on gatekeepers.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
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 streaming world. 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. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.
Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.
> 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.
> 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 streaming world. 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. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.
The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see.
I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.
So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.
> 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.
I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian.
If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.
I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives:
I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to align perfectly with historical feudalism.
Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".
Knowledge is not proliferating faster than ever. It's being gobbled up and locked down by companies whose sole interest is making as much money as they can instead of improving the world and profiting from the improvement.
Media is being deleted or locked in vaults.
Games are being shut down with no way to restore them.
The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge.
I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)
We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.
> 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).
> it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.
To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.
The blog post talks about our self-hosting movies, photos, and podcasts, in nice Netflix-like interfaces. Sharing photos. That sort of thing.
You are talking about preserving intellectual independence.
Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems, right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of digital textbooks.
IMO one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish (which is getting worse every year anyway).
> one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish
That's an interesting take. I think matching these services isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit.
My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a private selection of media with a strong personal preference - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to reconsider my preferences.
Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.
I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will stop paying and do the more convenient thing. There's a tension there that I don't think they can ignore.
Beware of believing everything is available over torrents: They’re probably hosting, waiting for every library to dwindle, so one day they will close the tap. There are already very few websites that index torrents. It’s a classing monopoly-then-disappear, Google-Reader-then-no-RSS situation.
At least 3 of your last 4 comments are purely GPT-generated, which isn't great for discussion here. I feel sorry for the 37 others who took the time to genuinely respond.
Agree, this is annoying, these comments shouldn't get elevated in the threads and moderators must flag these accounts. We can all use LLM's on our own people posting that output here is worthless and just pollutes this website.
> 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.
This is AI slop. @dang this degrades this forum more than any flame wars. I can't stand people that outsource their entire thought process to an AI then post it like we can't use the tool ourselves. It adds nothing to the conversation.
Even though it may be AI-generated, it clearly received a lot of upvotes, including from me, because it said exactly what I wanted to say. Why is AI a problem? You didn't explain how exactly it degrades the forum or adds nothing to the discussion.
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 brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game:
- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing
- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on
- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.
- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.
- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini
- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.
- The Mac App Store was introduced
- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks
And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"
Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.
Basically a Mac Server would have fixed 99% of our needs. Apple could make a Local iCloud Server / iOS Time Capsule where I still have all the content, but would require a subscription just for the backup services. And Apple could charge 3x the Amazon Cold Storage pricing just for reselling it.
I do think this is within realm of possibility if Steve Jobs is still alive. Or at least could be convinced.
Tim Coo only cares about services revenue. And iCloud it is.
SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.
The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.
The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.
A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.
I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.
> This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.
Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.
It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.
At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.
I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.
I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.
It doesn't have to be difficult to self-host. Like another commenter said, in a diffe world that could be the default. iCloud gives apps an API to sync. The backend doesn't have to be a data center, it could be a time capsule in your living room. You could connect using a private wireguard lan. The protocol could even be built out to support redundant time capsules in case one failed.
But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.
Yeah, at one point in writing this article I had a brief aside about more "off-the-shelf", accessible solutions to self-hosting like Synology. But I cut it because I honestly don't think they make the process that much easier. They help with hardware, but the software setup I think is still pretty difficult. Thanks for reading!
Pre-iphone I had my MythTV server recording and transcoding TV shows and then adding them to an RSS feed that my flip-phone would sync whenever plugged in. Unplug my phone in the morning and watch last night's Daily Show on the bus ride to work. Kind of crazy to think of what we could do even back then
My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that also died as they stagnated). I thought people were a bit silly for spending so much on a phone then, and still do, because by the time I eventually got a "smartphone" with a touchscreen, there was enough competition in the market that still to this day I've never felt compelled by any phone product >$600
I had the iPod Touch and iPhone relatively early (well, much earlier than the general population). I don't remember Shazam being important at all, I think I only discovered it a few years later.
What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most smartphones at the time had clunky resistive touch screens or even little joysticks to move a mouse pointer. With the iPhone, you could scroll with your fingers and it was butter-smooth (at least for the day). The iPhone was a game-changer because you had a device in your pocket that you could browse the web with and it was at least as easy as on a desktop, if not easier.
Just for comparison, this is how you browsed the web at the time on probably the most iconic smartphone at the time (Blackberry):
Not only were there Shazam apps on phones pre the first iPhone, but in the first place Shazam was a service you didn't even need a smartphone for! When I first started using it, they had a telephone number (in the UK, I'm not sure which other countries) to call up while music is playing, and 30 seconds or so later it would text you the song that it detected during the call.
I agree that "combining phone with one of the most popular / best in some ways mp3 player on the market" was a big part of it (with web browsing and video playing equally important), but Shazam wasn't a new thing that iPhones brought us.
(I also agree with danieldk that Shazam just wasn't a significant factor for most people on any devices, before or after iPhones.)
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.
Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benefit like that from self hosting. I only see better privacy, more control and ownership over your data, and in some cases lower cost (but often higher), and those aren't nearly as powerful motivators for people.
I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
privacy and control are things which people dont tend to think about until:
* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").
* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.
* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).
* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.
* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).
* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.
Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.
And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.
>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.
I think there is an effort being made for this. Some folks have created https://selfprivacy.org/ and continuously developing it. I follow this project by heart
- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.
- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.
For single-user single-device scenarios, that's totally doable. It's called a purely-local app.
Where it gets complicated is there's a (totally understandable) expectation these days that your data is synced across multiple devices, and you can collaborate with other users, who may also have multiple devices themselves. In practice, that necessitates some kind of always-on server that maintains state for everyone. A phone can technically do that, but you'd probably kill your battery in the process.
> I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.
So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.
They however can run their own app or desktop app that can to peer to peer communication. The whole point of self hosting is that we can have data and network sovereignty.
I think, money is not really the problem here. Self-hosting is a shitshow on the same level and for the same reasons because of which package-management on python has been such a shitshow for so many years. There are too many conflicting usecases, and not enough effort for standardization.
I set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here:
The author mostly just hand waves away self-hosting. There's an analogy that compares it to suburbia, but unlike the suburbs where you have to drive 40 minutes to get anywhere interesting, … an Internet hosted service is just as accessible, anywhere. It's a vapid analogy.
The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.
One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)
(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
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 good NAS that can also self-host is even more. As you said, if your ISP sucks maybe you have to upgrade to "pro" broadband that's more expensive. Ultimately you're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a worse replacement for services that are already "free".
Self-hosting is like spending money putting a swimming pool in your backyard when you could walk to a public pool instead.
I've always thought it would be great for the government to provide a free domain name for every citizen. There's really not much you can do without DNS.
Paying $10/yr for a domain is well worth the cost just to be free of attaching your entire digital life to a gmail etc account that can be easily taken from you with no recourse.
But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.
There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.
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 high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in my own town regularly enough to rotate my backups is too high. But if my family members and I could easily back up each other's systems from our various states? Or my group of dorky college friends who are now all over the world could easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.
You get this wrong. The expensive part isn't the tech at all. You can self-host a lot of things on a old laptop in a drawer while you access it via your routers wireguard VPN connection, without any domain renting.
The expensive part is aquiring the skills needed to pull that off.
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.
The problem is that people still believe that if they don't pay money, a service is free. But so many do not question why it is free. Hint: Not because Google just wants you to succeed and have a good life. And then, without any second thought, they literally upload their whole private digital life.
I totally agree. I see this "people don't want to do hard stuff" argument used all over - completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff.
It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.
> completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff
a) Just because humanity as a whole did hard things, doesn't mean that most humans did or were willing to. It's perfectly possible that all the hard things we did were accomplished by a handful of remarkable individuals, doing things that the majority never would have been willing to.
b) just because people in one age have been willing to do things, doesn't mean they are willing to do so in all ages. So it's not like the past necessarily proves anything here.
If you want to be relatively certain hetzner cannot access your data, you need your own server and confidential computing enabled, that’s not cheap anymore.
You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.
And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't negate the next part...
> and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
> in the standards, OIDC overcomes this
It's not the signup that's the hurdle. It's the fragmentation. Sure, if you implement OIDC, your friends can sign up to your photo app. And they can sign up to Sam's, and Joe's, and the app of the cute bakery on the street, and a couple others. What then? The whole value of a network is that the components are interconnected and can intercommunicate. If I have to upload my photos seventeen times to seventeen different partitioned applications for my various social groups to see them, I'm just as likely to not bother.
Fediverse-like ideas go some way towards addressing that, but they don't seem to be in any state of usability for anyone non-technical (I say that as someone who was using Mastodon as my only social media for the last couple of years)
> you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.
You don't have to. The article mentions Tailscale--the whole point of which is to not have any Internet-facing app exposed. Everything is done peer to peer between clients that are behind firewalls. There's nothing listening on an Internet exposed socket for random connections to come in.
I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
> I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up.
I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.
> Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason why people prefer letting other people doing this work.
> I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP
I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking here about separate modem & router?
> People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.
I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP, httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing many of the same things I did at home.
I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with work, I just want to go outside or read a book.
I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications; but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more to me at this point in my life.
> most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place
Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.
I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.
Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who is.
Most traffic nowadays is HTTPS so as long as you configure your router to use a non-ISP DNS resolver such 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google) then your ISP cannot see your traffic.
However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees for remote support. As they are your router they also get to see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP have access to my hardware.
If it was easier to do the work yourself I think more would out of privacy, price, and longevity concerns.
Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.
It is not just that it is a lot of work, it is that you lose power, or add a lot of risk. The example doesn't mention backups at all - when (not if) the computer fails then what? How do you access this cloud when not at home - again I didn't see this. How do you share data (only some please) with friends? How will you handle zero-days if the attacker decides to attack you - will you even notice or be the bad guy on the internet enabling attacks on others? Once you get things working when/how will you update - I've had several services that worked good until I updated and something in the config didn't migrate correctly and so it doesn't work.
I have some self hosted things, but because of the above I'm realizing that it is better to find someone to pay to take care of things for me. Someone large enough to get a sysadmin around 24x7, do trail upgrades, write the software/features... Unfortunately finding someone you can trust to do the above is important, and for many things there is no option.
I will likely always run jellyfix (or similar) for legal reasons. However for most things it would be better to pay someone I trust.
- Backups can be sent to the commercial cloud (encrypted) using Duplicati among other solutions. Or just a separate hard drive.
- You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned it.
- You can allow external access to your apps safely using cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google photos and there's even a really good app!
- Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic hygiene and monitoring it should be fine. And you aren't a profitable target anyway.
- Update require to restart the container with the latest release, your data isn't erased. Solutions such as Umbrel have a community of open source devs doing the updates for you.
Overall, it's not about removing all of our dependency to commercial services, but to do the switch slowly and regain autonomy. Having an alternative, however how imperfect it is (Jellyfin often freezes for me!) is worth it - otherwise the future is bleak.
For every person that has “giving something up” compared to what they had, there are five people gaining what they never had before. That is why these hosted services are popular. They bring cutting edge tools and platforms to people who would never have been able to set them up and maintained them themselves.
That’s not to say there aren’t issues of ownership and control to be concerned about, but they are providing real value to many users, especially those who aren’t technically minded.
Interesting! I'm planning on running PiHole in the near future to block ads at the network level. Excited for some more, "It was DNS" moments.
To the point about people not knowing how much they've given up, I think another way to phrase this is that people don't know how much has been taken away from them. This is why we need better consumer protections for internet services.
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 change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
> 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.
As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.
That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).
> 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.
> 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 change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.
My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.
My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.
> I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world. That's a bunch more diverse than the government doing hosting, as per your suggestion. Or having towns contracting Microsoft for it, which would be the result with kolkhoz or sovkhoz cloud hosting.
> Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world.
Last time I checked, AWS was estimated to have ~5% of all web sites in the world hosted in its infrastructure, while AWS+GCP+Azure combined equate to ~66% of the global cloud compute market. That doesn't even get into the "providers" who are really just reselling major providers at a markup (like Vercel).
It doesn't matter if your town has hundreds of storefronts if one subsidized Walmart is putting them all out of business. Likewise, if every business in town is dependent on the Walmart, then it's really Walmart that controls things and not individual or collective business owners.
> but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs.
Complexity, sure. But for most people, the cost of Netflix, Spotify and whatever will quickly add up to a 500usd server. With 1-10 users you don't need much.
For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up in ~5 minutes with a docker compose and env file.
There are whole OSes built around it, like casaOS which gives users a neat front end/dashboard for their self hosted stuff.
Also for cost eh idk. For $300 you can have enough hardware and storage to self host everything, even a Google photos alternative. Most people spend much more than that on subscriptions for storage, streaming, etc. I guess a UPS is necessary and adds a bit of cost. There are also plenty of pre-built kits for this.
I do agree that it isn't for everyone. Its finicky to get just right and security can be very annoying. Security is already a crapshoot though so I'm not sure that's necessarily a ding for self-hosted.
Docker has kida solved the "run application" issue. The real stuff most people care about is the data those applications manage.
If you don't realize what this means (and I won't fault you for it) just imagine what would happen if the $300 hardware and storage were burned down in a house fire or stolen by a burglar.
I self host and have offsite backups on rsync.net and a sneakernet network of people where we exchange a few TBs of encrypted storage with one another to hedge this risk but even then there are scenarios where we could lose valuable data.
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 part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
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?
It's easy to trust a corporate overlord with your pictures or your email, because the immediate damage doable by somebody who has compromised those things is relatively low. Privacy is important I guess, but not when compared to things like whether your car or your insulin pump does what it needs to to keep you alive.
Eventually, the bad guys will be sophisticated enough, and the tech will be integrated enough, that it's no longer safe to trust economic incentives alone. You're going to want your sysadmin to share your interests (in a more specific way than you get from they-also-like-money).
> 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.
> When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
Not all corporate overloads are equal. Or rather, if you and your buddies get together and pay the $350+fees to legalzoom to start a corporation, you too, can be a corporate overload. There's still miles to go before you're Facebook, but congratulations, you're now... still the same person you were before you clicked that button on legalzoom's webpage and spent $500 or whatever.
Where is the problem of people turning into corporate overloads for you? Is it at 10 employees? 100? 1,000? 10,000? If we're too stupid to differentiate specific corporations because their legal structure means they're all exactly the same, then yeah, I guess there's no hope and we're all doomed.
Totally agree that without economic infrastructure supporting the model, it's completely unsustainable. Good-will is not a business model. Thanks for reading!
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.
There has been a big move to web based apps (SAAS) as web-based software has improved. The biggest plus to web based software for the user is that there is no need to install anything.
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services.
I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.
This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.
Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits:
* Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite.
* Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain.
* Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers.
It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.
And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment! I think this is a great path to fight for. I think it's very funny that most people (in the U.S. at least) scoff whenever I talk about a "public, centralized provider for digital identity". There's so much governmental distrust. Meanwhile, everyone I know logs in with Google. Have a great day and thanks for reading!
> centralized provider for digital identity and authentication.
No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The war on drugs and the prohibition and many invasions also claim good intentions.
Are you against governments issuing passports too?
I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport.
Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who.
Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government cannot be trusted to maintain a database of all the people's electronic money accounts directly? (in the US, I know in some countries, the government does operate electronic money accounts and transfers)
It's really hard not to become impolite with this kind of disrespectful comment, but I try. Let me articulate my thinking...
The suggestion is not based on nothing; it's based on years of banging our heads against the wall with various governmental and non-governmental systems that we need to communicate with, in the context of our firm wanting to talk to government servers to, for instance, get money for providing health care, or communicate with a GP.
We already have a need to authenticate and communicate. In the same way we have passports and driving licenses, these kinds of basic utility services seem to be worth it.
I'm just advocating for the same thing, for the basic functionality, digitally, before we start dreaming of other kinds of solutions.
I'm really not happy with the solution that has emerged in Norway, where one private entity is basically the de facto identity provider for everything (BankID). Then there's a mishmash of all other providers with various levels of motives, usability, restrictions, technology, and cost.
The same way we found out national identity cards can be useful, to ensure we have proper basic communication and identification within our country when using that country's services and portals.
This is my logic: We already have to communicate and authenticate, no way around it. And our government is already mandating login and communication digitally. So, a service like I described would not affect the concern you seem to have, since we have already handed over the key, so to speak. But it would alleviate a lot of unnecessary and, frankly, security-reducing complexity.
I would assume you are extremely skeptical of anything governmental and centralized. Maybe you live in a country with more problems, so that your fear is more realistic. But here in Norway, we seem to have found a stable balance of powers and a stable relationship between the people and our government. So maybe your situation you live in makes the "tyranny" claim more palpable.
Sadly, this, to me, just reinforces my experience I have every time I run into libertarian values. There seems to be much more focus on angrily denouncing others' ideas and not contributing to any realistic or practical solution. And it's too bad you have to resort to absolutes, unnuanced ad hominem attack. I think a measured response would have been something like (my caricature of how I would have said it): "I see you want to improve inefficiencies, but I fear that you don't properly account for the dangers of abuse from the government." Instead, you come out swinging when all I suggest is that we just do what we are already doing, but better.
Readit News
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.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
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 streaming world. 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. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.
Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.
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.
The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see.
I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.
So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.
I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian.
If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.
I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives:
https://wiby.me/https://clew.se/https://kagi.com/
But that's not the majority experience and more importantly, it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.
Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".
Media is being deleted or locked in vaults.
Games are being shut down with no way to restore them.
The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge.
I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
Oh wait, they didn’t.
As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)
We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.
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).
To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.
You are talking about preserving intellectual independence.
Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems, right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of digital textbooks.
IMO one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish (which is getting worse every year anyway).
That's an interesting take. I think matching these services isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit.
My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a private selection of media with a strong personal preference - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to reconsider my preferences.
Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.
And no, it's not just the em-dashes.
I do this for a living, FWIW.
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.
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.
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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 brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing
- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on
- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.
- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.
- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini
- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.
- The Mac App Store was introduced
- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks
And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"
Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.
I do think this is within realm of possibility if Steve Jobs is still alive. Or at least could be convinced.
Tim Coo only cares about services revenue. And iCloud it is.
The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.
The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.
A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.
I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.
Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.
It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.
At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.
I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.
I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.
But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.
What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most smartphones at the time had clunky resistive touch screens or even little joysticks to move a mouse pointer. With the iPhone, you could scroll with your fingers and it was butter-smooth (at least for the day). The iPhone was a game-changer because you had a device in your pocket that you could browse the web with and it was at least as easy as on a desktop, if not easier.
Just for comparison, this is how you browsed the web at the time on probably the most iconic smartphone at the time (Blackberry):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NuQrjBIofo&t=6s
and on an iPhone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euNlVt60hwk
I agree that "combining phone with one of the most popular / best in some ways mp3 player on the market" was a big part of it (with web browsing and video playing equally important), but Shazam wasn't a new thing that iPhones brought us.
(I also agree with danieldk that Shazam just wasn't a significant factor for most people on any devices, before or after iPhones.)
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.
I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").
* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.
* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).
* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.
* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).
* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.
Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.
And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.
>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud
This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.
Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?
- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.
- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.
Where it gets complicated is there's a (totally understandable) expectation these days that your data is synced across multiple devices, and you can collaborate with other users, who may also have multiple devices themselves. In practice, that necessitates some kind of always-on server that maintains state for everyone. A phone can technically do that, but you'd probably kill your battery in the process.
They're already doing that on the hardware side. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/synology-confirms-ne...
if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.
So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.
https://www.pikapods.com/
https://thebox.youatme.email/
Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.
The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.
One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)
(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
Self-hosting is like spending money putting a swimming pool in your backyard when you could walk to a public pool instead.
But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.
There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.
To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in my own town regularly enough to rotate my backups is too high. But if my family members and I could easily back up each other's systems from our various states? Or my group of dorky college friends who are now all over the world could easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.
The expensive part is aquiring the skills needed to pull that off.
The problem is that people still believe that if they don't pay money, a service is free. But so many do not question why it is free. Hint: Not because Google just wants you to succeed and have a good life. And then, without any second thought, they literally upload their whole private digital life.
If you don't pay, usually, you're the product.
self-hosting has a lot of degrees. if you want your own TLD and peer with Tier1s, then it's astronomical, woo! But using dynDNS is also an option.
Especially if you compare to non-self-hosted services. You get a subdomain and that's it. (Or nothing, maybe some handle on Instagram.)
It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.
Unfair IMO. The author _did_ the hard work. And recognized that most other people, not similarly motivated, would not.
a) Just because humanity as a whole did hard things, doesn't mean that most humans did or were willing to. It's perfectly possible that all the hard things we did were accomplished by a handful of remarkable individuals, doing things that the majority never would have been willing to.
b) just because people in one age have been willing to do things, doesn't mean they are willing to do so in all ages. So it's not like the past necessarily proves anything here.
If you want to be relatively certain hetzner cannot access your data, you need your own server and confidential computing enabled, that’s not cheap anymore.
You yourself have hand-waved away an important part - security. It's not (just) about the friction of signup (though, I'll get to that later) - it's the fact that you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.
And sure, you can give them a login to your VPN, but that doesn't negate the next part...
> and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app > in the standards, OIDC overcomes this
It's not the signup that's the hurdle. It's the fragmentation. Sure, if you implement OIDC, your friends can sign up to your photo app. And they can sign up to Sam's, and Joe's, and the app of the cute bakery on the street, and a couple others. What then? The whole value of a network is that the components are interconnected and can intercommunicate. If I have to upload my photos seventeen times to seventeen different partitioned applications for my various social groups to see them, I'm just as likely to not bother.
Fediverse-like ideas go some way towards addressing that, but they don't seem to be in any state of usability for anyone non-technical (I say that as someone who was using Mastodon as my only social media for the last couple of years)
You don't have to. The article mentions Tailscale--the whole point of which is to not have any Internet-facing app exposed. Everything is done peer to peer between clients that are behind firewalls. There's nothing listening on an Internet exposed socket for random connections to come in.
SaaS/cloud providers propagate this FUD 24/7 and then Okta, which should be pinnacle of security gets hacked and has issues with disclosure.
Relax. Most companies has security team incapable of operating beyond checklist.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.
> Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason why people prefer letting other people doing this work.
> I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP
I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking here about separate modem & router?
I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP, httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing many of the same things I did at home.
I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with work, I just want to go outside or read a book.
I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications; but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more to me at this point in my life.
Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.
I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.
Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who is.
However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees for remote support. As they are your router they also get to see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP have access to my hardware.
Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.
Or, because they do not know and do not care what is happening. Yes, they only care about comfort, who reads TOS anyway, right?! : /
But if the same was happening to their physical not digital properties then they might be furious.
"People exchange free speech for comfort, but most people never need the former anyway, so it's okay".
I have some self hosted things, but because of the above I'm realizing that it is better to find someone to pay to take care of things for me. Someone large enough to get a sysadmin around 24x7, do trail upgrades, write the software/features... Unfortunately finding someone you can trust to do the above is important, and for many things there is no option.
I will likely always run jellyfix (or similar) for legal reasons. However for most things it would be better to pay someone I trust.
- You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned it.
- You can allow external access to your apps safely using cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google photos and there's even a really good app!
- Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic hygiene and monitoring it should be fine. And you aren't a profitable target anyway.
- Update require to restart the container with the latest release, your data isn't erased. Solutions such as Umbrel have a community of open source devs doing the updates for you.
Overall, it's not about removing all of our dependency to commercial services, but to do the switch slowly and regain autonomy. Having an alternative, however how imperfect it is (Jellyfin often freezes for me!) is worth it - otherwise the future is bleak.
That’s not to say there aren’t issues of ownership and control to be concerned about, but they are providing real value to many users, especially those who aren’t technically minded.
To the point about people not knowing how much they've given up, I think another way to phrase this is that people don't know how much has been taken away from them. This is why we need better consumer protections for internet services.
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
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.
As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.
That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).
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.
That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.
My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.
My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.
Lets connect! Send me an email – hn@drewlyton.com!
Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world. That's a bunch more diverse than the government doing hosting, as per your suggestion. Or having towns contracting Microsoft for it, which would be the result with kolkhoz or sovkhoz cloud hosting.
Last time I checked, AWS was estimated to have ~5% of all web sites in the world hosted in its infrastructure, while AWS+GCP+Azure combined equate to ~66% of the global cloud compute market. That doesn't even get into the "providers" who are really just reselling major providers at a markup (like Vercel).
It doesn't matter if your town has hundreds of storefronts if one subsidized Walmart is putting them all out of business. Likewise, if every business in town is dependent on the Walmart, then it's really Walmart that controls things and not individual or collective business owners.
Complexity, sure. But for most people, the cost of Netflix, Spotify and whatever will quickly add up to a 500usd server. With 1-10 users you don't need much.
For 9 out of 10 self hosted programs you can have them up in ~5 minutes with a docker compose and env file.
There are whole OSes built around it, like casaOS which gives users a neat front end/dashboard for their self hosted stuff.
Also for cost eh idk. For $300 you can have enough hardware and storage to self host everything, even a Google photos alternative. Most people spend much more than that on subscriptions for storage, streaming, etc. I guess a UPS is necessary and adds a bit of cost. There are also plenty of pre-built kits for this.
I do agree that it isn't for everyone. Its finicky to get just right and security can be very annoying. Security is already a crapshoot though so I'm not sure that's necessarily a ding for self-hosted.
That is a very small part of operating. How about keeping it update and running? Data backed up?
If you don't realize what this means (and I won't fault you for it) just imagine what would happen if the $300 hardware and storage were burned down in a house fire or stolen by a burglar.
I self host and have offsite backups on rsync.net and a sneakernet network of people where we exchange a few TBs of encrypted storage with one another to hedge this risk but even then there are scenarios where we could lose valuable data.
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 part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.
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?
It's easy to trust a corporate overlord with your pictures or your email, because the immediate damage doable by somebody who has compromised those things is relatively low. Privacy is important I guess, but not when compared to things like whether your car or your insulin pump does what it needs to to keep you alive.
Eventually, the bad guys will be sophisticated enough, and the tech will be integrated enough, that it's no longer safe to trust economic incentives alone. You're going to want your sysadmin to share your interests (in a more specific way than you get from they-also-like-money).
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.
And if you get hit by a car? Or worse --- maybe you get married and have kids<g>?
One big reason people *buy* service is sustainability/longevity/redundancy.
There are no absolute guarantees but I think most commercial endeavors nowadays would bet on AWS/Google/MS/Apple over "Hosting by Joe and Friends".
Not all corporate overloads are equal. Or rather, if you and your buddies get together and pay the $350+fees to legalzoom to start a corporation, you too, can be a corporate overload. There's still miles to go before you're Facebook, but congratulations, you're now... still the same person you were before you clicked that button on legalzoom's webpage and spent $500 or whatever.
Where is the problem of people turning into corporate overloads for you? Is it at 10 employees? 100? 1,000? 10,000? If we're too stupid to differentiate specific corporations because their legal structure means they're all exactly the same, then yeah, I guess there's no hope and we're all doomed.
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.
I moved to AWS and haven't had that problem since.
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.
This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.
Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits: * Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite. * Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain. * Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers. It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.
And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
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No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The war on drugs and the prohibition and many invasions also claim good intentions.
I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport.
Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who.
Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government cannot be trusted to maintain a database of all the people's electronic money accounts directly? (in the US, I know in some countries, the government does operate electronic money accounts and transfers)
We already have a need to authenticate and communicate. In the same way we have passports and driving licenses, these kinds of basic utility services seem to be worth it.
I'm just advocating for the same thing, for the basic functionality, digitally, before we start dreaming of other kinds of solutions.
I'm really not happy with the solution that has emerged in Norway, where one private entity is basically the de facto identity provider for everything (BankID). Then there's a mishmash of all other providers with various levels of motives, usability, restrictions, technology, and cost.
The same way we found out national identity cards can be useful, to ensure we have proper basic communication and identification within our country when using that country's services and portals.
This is my logic: We already have to communicate and authenticate, no way around it. And our government is already mandating login and communication digitally. So, a service like I described would not affect the concern you seem to have, since we have already handed over the key, so to speak. But it would alleviate a lot of unnecessary and, frankly, security-reducing complexity.
I would assume you are extremely skeptical of anything governmental and centralized. Maybe you live in a country with more problems, so that your fear is more realistic. But here in Norway, we seem to have found a stable balance of powers and a stable relationship between the people and our government. So maybe your situation you live in makes the "tyranny" claim more palpable.
Sadly, this, to me, just reinforces my experience I have every time I run into libertarian values. There seems to be much more focus on angrily denouncing others' ideas and not contributing to any realistic or practical solution. And it's too bad you have to resort to absolutes, unnuanced ad hominem attack. I think a measured response would have been something like (my caricature of how I would have said it): "I see you want to improve inefficiencies, but I fear that you don't properly account for the dangers of abuse from the government." Instead, you come out swinging when all I suggest is that we just do what we are already doing, but better.