[retrodaredevil]

I don't really like that "enshittified" is being used here. You could argue that Plex, MinIO or Mattermost is being enshittified, but definitely not self hosting as a whole.

Enshittification also usually implies that switching to an alternative is difficult (usually because creating a competing service is near impossible because you'd have to get users on it). That flaw doesn't really apply to self hosting like it does with centralized social media. You can just switch to Jellyfin or Garage or Zulip. Migration might be a pain, but it's doable.

You can't as easily stop using LinkedIn or GitHub or Facebook, etc.

[overtone1000]

Ctrl+F "jellyfin" to find this excellent comment.

[jghn]

Same. I have been using Plex for 15 years. For my personal use case, it has not changed, ever. I don't encounter any "enshittification". For my purposes it continues to be exactly what I want, just as it always was.

[goku12]

> You could argue that Plex, MinIO or Mattermost is being enshittified, but definitely not self hosting as a whole.

That's probably not how you should interpret it. Self hosting as a whole is still a vastly better option. But if there is a significant enough public movement towards it, you can expect it to be targeted for enshittification too. The incidents related to Plex, MinIO and Mattermost should be taken as warning signals about what this may escalate into in the future. Here are the possible problems I foresee.

1. The situation with Plex, MinIO and Mattermost can be expected to happen more frequently. After a limit, the pain of frequent migration will become untenable. MinIO is a great example. Even the crowd on HN hadn't considered an alternative until then. Some of us learned about Garage, RustFS and Ceph S3 for the first time and we were debating about each of their pros and cons. It's very telling that that discussion was very lengthy.

2. There is a gradual nudge to move everything to the cloud and then monetize it. Mandatory online account for Win11, monetization of GH self-hosted runner (now suspended after backlash, I think) and cloudification of MS Office are good examples. You can expect a similar attempt on self hosted applications. Of course, most of our self-hosted software is currently open source. But if these big companies decide to embrace, extend and extinguish it, I'm not sure that the market will be prudent enough to stick with the FOSS options. Half of HN was fighting me a few days back when I suggested that we should strive to push the market towards serviceable modular hardware.

3. FOSS projects developed under companies are always at a higher risk of being hijacked or going rogue. To be clear, I'm not against that model. For example, I'm happy with Zulip's development and monetization model - ethical, generous and not too pushy. But mattermost shows where that can go wrong. Sure, they're are open source. But there are practical difficulties in easily overriding such issues.

4. At one time, we were expecting small form-factor headless computers (Plug computers [1]) like SheevaPlug and FreedomBox to become ubiquitous. That should still be an option, though I'm not sure where it's headed, given the current RAM situation. But even if they make a come back, it's very likely that OEMs will lock it down like smartphones today and make it difficult for you to exercise your choices of servers, if not outright restrict them. (If anybody wants to argue that normal people will never consider it, remember how smartphones were, before iPhone. We had a blackberry that was used only by a niche crowd.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer