The Verge Takes on Self-Hosting for the Masses
The Verge Takes on Self-Hosting for the Masses
A story of trying (and failing) to self-host the internet.
signing into cloud services and downloading apps is just so much easier to do!
This is actually true, but it doesn't speak to why self hosting is "impossible" and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.
There's no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.
I'll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting -- especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)
There's no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers
In the late 2000s, Opera had a very interesting product called "Opera Unite". It was essentially a self-hosting platform built into the web browser. You could use it to chat, host a website, share photos, share files (and let other people share files with you), and a few other things. It had a guest book called "the fridge" where people could leave you post it notes.
They'd give you a subdomain which would either connect to it directly (if your network allows UPnP or you forwarded the port), otherwise they'd proxy it via their servers.
Basically, it was a super simple solution to create a decentralized web. The goal was to let everyone own their own data in a way that anyone could understand, without having to know anything about server hosting. Instead of just browsing the web, you could contribute to it at the same time.
It worked surprisingly well, but never caught on with the general public, and they killed it off about three years later.
My isp doesn't allow self hosting (available to WAN). Isn't that a pretty common condition in ToS for most ISPs?
I've never bothered to check, because I self host to serve 1-5 users, and I've never generated enough traffic for any ISP to notice. I would need to pay them more for a static IP address, but we have dynamic DNS services for that. My ISP doesn't put any actual obstacles in place beyond dynamic IP.
Here we have net neutrality so they legally can't restrict what you're doing with your connection, unless it's illegal or if you are doing stupid shit like messing with their infrastructure.
CGNAT is decently common though and that can restrict your self hosting capabilities substantially, but you can work around it if you want.
Oh you summer child (I upvoted, but won't waste an hour of my life listening to random internet stuff). I don't think it's lack of education, in this world it's very possible to educate yourself, it's a lack of understanding (due to misinformation and corporate sponsored laziness) the implications of that easy click, or of what others can get without your consent. Privacy isn't dead, it's just now mostly for the rich.
They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.
This touches on something that I've been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.
There's also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual "thing". I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.
Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.
Permanently Deleted
Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or
ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I've written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382
More ideas if you're interested at https://upspin.io
TLDR: Selfhosting is hard. Obsidian is easy. Federation is a thing.
Projects like Runtipi have potential for the masses, imo. Single click deployment of apps on your own server....if you can get Runtipi installed first, of course. But hey, a step closer I suppose.
I'm very new to selfhosting, only started in earnest in April of this year. So I definitely felt the hosts frustrations in deploying (or trying to deploy) solutions I wanted to take back from Google and Microsoft. I'm still learning and am almost to the point where I'm comfortable pulling the plug on Google photos entirely. But it's a lot of research for newbs.
The problem with those projects like Runtipi is the same you've with Docker - you'll be hostage to yet another platform that can fuck you up at any moment without notice... like Docker hub did.
That's not really possible with docker TBH, and I say that as a diehard Podman advocate. Docker, the tooling that you install with your package manager, is open source. Sure they have windows and mac desktop stuff that isn't open, but it's not like you're self-hosting with that, right?
Plus there's always Podman to switch to, which can be a (mostly) drop-in replacement, if you want something with a more trustworthy provenience.
@spaduf That's really nice, I actually use Obsidian myself for note taking and I can say that I will never go back to normal note taking software. The internet and software needs to change to be for the user, for if the software doesn't exist in the future. We never know if a service will go but we shouldn't loose everything.
Love Obsidian and linked notes in general. The potential utility there is insane but it's such a steep learning curve. I really think that in the not too distant future they'll be teaching it in schools.
I really hope so, it should be taught, because for me it was a slow learning process. First I started using Obsidian, and moving all my notes from Evernote, Notion, and others manually. After that I moved to Logseq, which is like Obsidian but open-source. And the last step was using an open-source syncing tool (Syncthing) to have my notes synced locally in all devices. And now I have been 2 years self-hosting my notes in a really easy way.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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Good bot.
My respect has increased for the verge
They talked in a recent podcast about how they're doing a full pivot to the fediverse and that certainly got my attention.
I use self-hosting for home assistant and jellyfin (behind two duckdns domains). I started to add more (Joplin server, Immich, tiny tiny RSS etc.) and found my workload increasing a lot, So I've paused that effort for now. For Joplin, I use syncthing with my Pi as a hub instead, which is much simpler.