[poisonborz]

Deeply disagree.

Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks".

I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.

If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.

Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks.

Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.

[irishloop]

> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent.

You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups.

It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.

[Spooky23]

Physical dependency is different than logical.

With my computer, I’m dependent on my supplier for the tools. There’s usually a reasonable market serving a variety of tools. With a storage service provider, I’m dependent on their rules, and there’s high friction (migration) to escape from those rules.

[hdgvhicv]

I can change a colo location in minutes if it’s virtual or a couple of days if it’s a rack of equipment. I can change my transit provider too. Supermicro seem to have supply problems right now, but dell don’t.

If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are dependent on one company.

[manquer]

We are tied to ASML and TSMC and to an extent to the likes of NVIDIA .

As cost of innovation in the industry soars, you are bound to end up with a monopoly or at best an oligopoly who will collude.

Competitors get acquired or fully fail when their research is not successful .

It is just as true in pharma and healthcare.

Like it or not in tech we are stuck with no real choice.

[QuadmasterXLII]

There’s a difference between dependencies beeded for growth and dependencies needed for continued operations. I can still watch my dvds, but every streaming operator that does sales happily takes away digital movies I “bought”

[atoav]

That's like saying when you grow your own tomatoes you're dependent on the weather or your capability to deal with said weather. That is true. But it misses the point. When you grow your own tomatoes and the store sells only a certain bad tasting kind, suddenly wants to increase the price by factor 10 or stops selling tomatoes at all, then the value of growing it yourself shows. And they are dependent on the weather just like you.

If you self host, you're dependent on things sure. But the point isn't to reach some hypothetical perfect state of independence, the point is to get the flavour you want, not have to deal with them changing their business model, and so on.

The reason I self host my webservers is because my webhoster decided to charge a premium for SSL certs. So much in fact that for the cost of one cert per month I could run a webserver for a year.

Then I had my mailservers noster taking decisions I didn't like, so again I went and self hosted.

Some of those things are running for a decade now and I have yet to experience the catastrophic events you mention. Sure you need to do your due diligence and know your craft, but at least I am ot affected by someone changing their business model or deciding it isn't profitable anymore.

[dare944]

Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing.

The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?

[ndriscoll]

It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete.

I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).

[tarruda]

> I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server

If you only need to stream media and serve files, sure.

[dingnuts]

You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand

I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean.

Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.

[korse]

I don't know anyone who thinks chickens are the path to complete freedom from society. I do know many who feel that chickens and other such measures provide a level of independence from societal structures they wish not to associate with or do not trust.

Having your own infra is similar. You still need electricity, replacement components and perhaps friends with similar ideas that you can trade information/services with over packet radio links but it is certainly better than whoops, no internet for a few days, nothing works, touch grass.

It also is a nice backup in case anyone starts actively censoring (versus the passive self-censoring created by tempting people into walled gardens) the internet where I live. Being able to shitpost over encrypted packet radio and exchange files/news is certainly better than radio silence and state media.

[Retr0id]

> "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks"

Very prescient indeed for someone in 1970 to predict the success of AWS

[loceng]

Until you understand how 1984 extrapolates with today's technologies - and the only defense against corrupt-captured state(s) and industrial complexes toeing the establishment line, in ever increasing consolidation of so-called power-control, is decentralized-distributed tech - and then where the centralization [especially physical infrastructure] becomes their major weakness; yes, there is the control of means of production-funnel of resources-energy issue but if shit really hits the fan than guerilla tactics appear to always reign supreme, whereby major supply lines, energy production, an CPU architecture will be first to be targeted.

The bad actors through subversion are currently attempting their best to not cause panic for the herds to react more strongly and more quickly than their apparatus they're currently ready to handle [at least that they believe they're ready to handle] - however things can fall apart very quickly, the Berlin wall fell much sooner than practically all predicted.

[ls612]

Guerrilla tactics only work against an enemy with too weak a stomach to exterminate civilians. You’ll notice for instance that there is little guerrilla activity in Russian occupied Ukraine, due to Russia not possessing any such scruples.

[tmcdos]

Perhaps they realize by first hand that Russian army is the lesser evil than the Ukrainian government or the local oligarchy. On the other hand, there apparently is some guirilla activity in Palestina and Gaza against the Israel occupation. Does it mean that Israel army possess too weak a stomach?

[harvey9]

We had timesharing on mainframes. Everything old is new again.

[majormajor]

It's right for business (partially - how are the business employees managing AWS?), wrong for personal use.

Nobody's renting their phone on a task-by-task basis, they're staring at a personal computer for hours a day in their leisure time by choice.

[ants_everywhere]

That's how computers were before the rise of personal computers

[Retr0id]

That was GP's point, it's just also how things are today.

[hdgvhicv]

These things are cyclical. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

[em-bee]

how are you disagreeing? self-hosting is not being ruled out. do you think me, my siblings, our parents and children, each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine? we are going to trust each other. but why wouldn't we. it's easier to share our photo albums this way. it's that or facebook. pretty much.

and again, self-hosting is not ruled out, it's still an option. what robert says is that regardless of the choice we need self-sovereignty. that is orthogonal. you are still free to self-host. but we have to face the reality that not everyone is going to do it. even if we have the tools to make self-hosting easy.

[poisonborz]

> each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine?

Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that.

So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most independence and freedom. The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

[monsieurbanana]

Now you lost me. Expecting one server per person in a household is unrealistic. Even if software becomes perfect, what about the hardware aspect? Expecting a family of 5 to have 5 servers all available and reachable from anywhere sounds like a nightmare, and just a waste of electricity.

Your whole premise is that self hosting software can become a one-click deploy, if they can achieve that I'm sure different settings per user is possible. If who is legally responsible about what your brother does with the family serve is really such a big question, then let's just accept widely adoption of self hosting is not going to happen.

[poisonborz]

A server could be a $30 silent soap-sized box hanging on the router consuming 5 watts, you plug it in and it sets up services and domains ready to access. Why would this be a nightmare? It is already feasible on all levels. Assuming the house has fiber, reliability shouldn't be much of an issue.

[grepfru_it]

A server could be a VM taps head

[xp84]

“Hello, Metropolitan Police here. We have a warrant to seize… docker container ab38asdf8765jk on your home server. Go ahead and export its attached volumes and the image. We’ll wait.”

[akerl_]

Why do you think this hasn't already happened?

[lotsofpulp]

CGNAT (lack of ipv6), and lack of fiber, meaning lack of upload bandwidth.

[monsieurbanana]

A 30 dollars box will replace cloud storage, photo storage, video steaming, and all the other services people expect to have? I don't think you have though through what exactly you're trying to replace, we're not talking about tech people wanting to host their static blog here.

[DocTomoe]

A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that.

Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.

[em-bee]

if the servers are all in the same house then the police is not going to ask who's server they can take, they are just going to take all of them. so if that is a concern, it would be lost. but GP is not talking about people living together, but not sharing with relatives who live elsewhere.

[xp84]

Yeah, this makes intuitive sense too. You share lots of that potential IRL liability with live-in family members anyway.

[cjbgkagh]

> The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others.

How is that the golden rule? I self host and somehow missed that. I think of it more as devolution, you can self host if you want to, or you can use a family hosted option, or a community. That way a balance can be struck between convenience and sovereignty such that as convenience naturally improves so does sovereignty. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good, is a soft gradient all the way down.

Edit: I googled the ‘golden rule of self-hosting’ and all I could find the the parents comment but that seemed to be enough for google AI summary to accept it, so stating it as fact appears to have done so in so far as Googles AI is concerned.

[smeej]

> The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

Some people think otherwise because they trust each other, and understand that specialization allows efficiency and economies of scale.

Even if it's stupid easy to run five servers at home, there's sure to be one person who likes maintaining them more than the other four.

It's stupid easy to load and unload the dishwasher, but my sister didn't like handling the dirty dishes and I didn't like running around and putting them away, so I loaded and she unloaded, and we were both slightly but meaningfully better off on a daily basis because of it. Of course we could each just load and unload our own dishes, but a slight reduction in independence and freedom (counting on each other to do our part) improves things for both of us.

People often--I'd even say usually--work together because they benefit from it, not just because they lack the technical chops to do otherwise.

[em-bee]

it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it).

and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i see everything that is posted. if he needs different software he can still host that himself, that's besides the point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a platform for the family to use. a private facebook alternative.

i don't know about your family relationships, but for me family means to support and stand by each other.

[poisonborz]

> it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that

That's just an usability issue that needs to be solved. In 2002 nobody could believe that even elderly and children could use smartphones 20 years later.

[BobaFloutist]

And it turns out maybe children.shouldn't be using smartphones 20 years later.

[benreesman]

There's a spectrum OP / their LLM (hat tip the disclaimer, not shade) I think blurs into this false dichotomy.

Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough Cloud SQL).

At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in their view).

In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf war.

It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable authority.

[mnahkies]

A basic way to head off most of the security issues is throwing it behind a VPN (eg: wireguard) - no need to put stuff on the public internet if it's just for your own consumption. You can still include your mobile devices etc.

Separately I think k8s is a solution to much of the difficulty. I don't use it outside of work as the baseline costs are too much (my personal cloud bill is under $10 and I want to keep it in that range), but the packaging offered by well maintained helm charts is hard to pass by - people dunk on it for being complex but imo it only exposes inherent complexity and simplifies a lot of other stuff.

[raybb]

Selfhosting has been tricky for a while. It's still not simple but things like https://Coolify.io (selfhosted Heroku) make it so so much easier to maintain and feel more dependable. Backups and upgrades will still be tricky but they seem resolvable.

[velomash]

The UX vs value provided for self hosting doesn’t make sense for normal people