I get that. And I self host the things I care about. But for the average layman? I don't see self hosting as a real option. Unless you are decently tech savvy, and have an aptitude for troubleshooting, most people aren't gonna put in the time or effort of initial setup. Even if maintenance is minimal once it's running. That first leap into self-hosted is daunting.
I think of it this way.. would I expect my dad to be able to do it? Absolutely not. And my dad is decently tech savvy for 70.
The first step is normalising the idea of privacy so people can even see the point of paying for something they can easily get for free.
The next step would be to make products people can easily use without being tech savvy. A synology NAS has been great for me and I praise the setup to anyone who will listen, but even with something like Synology people will need some basic knowledge.
YunoHost is trying to make it easier than a synology NAS to install services and get them setup properly but I agree that to configure your network properly is difficult and everyone's setup is different so specific knowledge is required.
Yeah yunohost is pretty great for less than 10 users. Perhaps more depending on the service. Its very easy to get setup in a weekend with a plethora of services. And its pretty stable.
Nextcloud was somewhat difficult for me the first time I installed it, though I did have a usable system in the end. Then I discovered Nextcloud AIO and haven't had an issue since.
I don't get this counter-argument. Is TFA actually suggesting that the average grandma quit using Yahoo mail or Facebook and set up her own email server and mastodon instance? The only people even considering self-hosting are people with technology interest and reasonable passion. It's an article written for a niche techie website, and we're discussing it on a forum for self-hosting nerds.
The counter-argument is like saying the average layman should stick to televised football, because they don't have the physical savvy or aptitude for the game, and most people aren't gonna put in the time or effort to build their strength & endurance to compete. It may be an accurate statement, but the people you're addressing (grandma) weren't TFA's target audience and weren't even going to try in the first place, and you discourage people who might really enjoy giving the hobby a try.
If you're not paying for a service, you're likely being monetized by watching ads or providing personal data to companies that don't necessarily have your best interests at heart.
This is a bit out of date. Nowadays, you pay for the service and are monetized by watching ads and providing personal data to companies that definitely don't have your best interests at heart.
People said it back then too. The ad and tracking industry will always invade more and more of our privacy. When will there be enough tracking to make them stop and be happy? Never. Never is the only answer.
And here’s the reason why layman should not: they’re much more likely to make that one wrong move and suffer irrecoverable data loss than some faceless corporation selling their data.
At the end of the day, those of us who are technical enough will take the risk and learn, but for vast majority of the people, it is and will continue to remain as a non starter for the foreseeable future.
So just because they don’t know technology like you do, they should be left behind the times instead of taking advantage of advancements? A bit elitist and gate keeping there, don’t you think?
Everyone have their own choices to make, and for most, they’ve already decided they’d rather benefit from advancements than care about what you care about.
There are actually easy solutions out there. For example CasaOS, it's a oneliner and you get a docker orchestration with an app-store and built-in file and smb management. I bet even non technicals could use this.
And here’s the reason why layman should not: they’re much more likely to make that one wrong move and suffer irrecoverable data loss than some faceless corporation selling their data.
and yet americans still drive cars.
I don't disagree, but you just have to be aware that you can fuck shit up. And if you do, that's not my problem, or anybody elses at the end of the day.
On a financial aspect, self hosting is more expensive most of the time, if you convert time to money, even if you calculate using less than 100$ per hour (In my country we charge about 200$ per work hour)
Depends on how you calculate costs. Like, I have Kodi running on a RPi for home entertainment/theater. There's no way to outsource that, but the RPi is idle most of the time. Adding services to it is effectively or marginally free, except for my time, and there's still a significant time cost to get paid, off-site cloud services set up.
But charging for your own time is kind of disingenuous. You don't include your time in the cost of eating (a Big Mac worth $60??), watching a video, or going on vacation. The only people self-hosting have a personal, hobby/entertainment interest in it, and I think it's more accurate to compare the costs of self hosting with the costs of other forms of entertainment. Do you get more fun-value out of the costs of self hosting or out of a theater ticket?
Well, you can calculate how much money you would make in the time you do hobby, entertainment and eating.
And I bet, "everyone" includes some people, that see setting up home/private IT not as hobby, for those people the comparison is like spending time x or paying amount x (data or/and money) (you could compare it to housekeeping)
In such cases it makes sense to give the spent time a value in data or money, so that it is comparable
Maybe you spend time on selfhosting and now you have less time for other things that need to be done and now you have to outsource it (for money) giving time as well calculateable value
Should we do that though? I'm choosing between playing PS5 and configuring my home server. I'm not being paid for either of that. But skills I obtain while tinkering with the server actually help me with some tasks at work.
Sure, you can compare to what else you would do in that time slot, but money would be the more general thing (you can compare better, since everything is in the base of money)
Back to your example: time spent on each task is equal -> same value invested but output may have different value (game skills/progress vs IT skills/progress)
So since investing value is the same for both task, you can ignore that part and concentrate on the output.
Oh, I wouldn't if I could avoid it. The "fun" of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that's not usually how it works.
Self hosting isn't super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.
I like the idea, but I don't like that everything is tied to a single account. If it's compromised so are your emails, calendar, contacts, files, and passwords. But the service is good enough to replace Google, and choosing between the two, I'd choose Proton.
If you self-host all the same services you have the same exposure level if root on your hosting machine is compromised. I suppose it depends on how confident you feel in how agile you can patch if a vulnerability becomes known in postfix for example. I wouldn’t consider self hosting something that reduces your cybersecurity risk typically
That's true. But as we were speaking about an external service (Proton), I was thinking about diversification. I use Proton for emails, but I don't use Proton Pass opting for another external password manager.
Mail servers are the one thing I refuse to self host. Years of managing enterprise email taught me that I don't need that kind of negativity in my life
I agree. I was thinking about using different services for different tasks instead of putting everything into the same basket. I'm not self-hosting an email server either.
I agree that it would be very bad if your Proton account got compromised with so much data tied to it. However, I'm personally comfortable with a strong password and 2FA for my Proton account.
I nowadays manage my private stuff with the ansible scripts I develop for work - so mostly my own stuff is a development environment for work, and therefore doesn't need to be done on private time.
I sell my time for like $30/hr. How much money would self hosting cost me vs a data leak where my information was actually used? I have a feeling it’s more.
It’s a nice hobby and I’m sorry I ruffled feathers with my opinion.
Sure. Like if you enjoy doing that stuff it would be totally worth it I’m sure.
There is a particular kind of person who prefers setup and config to doing anything with a computer, and it’s hard to hide my disdain for that sometimes but that doesn’t make it wrong. It also doesn’t mean I’m doing anything with a computer. We’re biased towards ourselves, I get that.
Like, we just put a dog down so I was thinking about my own mortality and how much time I have in life. It’s not a lot, and the idea of making sure an email address is functioning today sounds like hell.
I’m leaving the original statement up because I don’t think enough people walk back hasty statements online.
For me specifically, the setup and config oftentimes is what I'm doing with the computer, the learning and knowledge gained from the practice is what I'm after, which is good because it's significantly less fun than it used to be.
Admittedly mine is probably a non-standard case and it ties in with other things in my life.
What if the life I'm imagining I'm protecting is one where I have the option of choosing a platform/application that isn't scraping the absolute dregs of the barrel to squeeze out that last bit of profit margin.
Of course it would be self hosting. If the website isn’t hosted on fastly, and is hosted by an individual, that would be the definition of self hosting. You’re also assuming that Fastly is caching responses, do you know that for certain?
Literally all you’ve done so far is resolve the host name to a DNS record. You think you’ve done something, but you haven’t.
lol what the fuck is your problem? How about you do something and explain to me how you self host a CDN hosted by fastly?????
When did I resolve the Hostname to a DNS record? Are you fucking stupid you obviously don't know what you are talking about. I resolved it's domain to an IPv4 address which points entirely to a fastly server. It's not a resource that get's delivered by CDN, it's the whole fucking website they are serving, which is a service they sell and that's not self hosting.
God damn why am I even spending my time arguing with someone that didn't understand the basics yet. If you think a domain is a hostname and an IPv4 address is a DNS record, just back off and return to the books. You probably feel so cool and think you have done something, which you did, you ridiculed yourself.
You clearly don’t understand a single thing about how the internet works and are very confused. Let me help you out.
how you self host a CDN hosted by fastly?????
You don’t? The website is what would be self hosted. Not Fastly.
When did I resolve the Hostname to a DNS record? … I resolved it's domain to an IPv4 address which points entirely to a fastly server
Right there. You resolved the host record, probably an A record or ANAME for the website (dev.to) into an IPv4 address, using DNS.
It's not a resource that get's delivered by CDN, it's the whole fucking website they are serving, which is a service they sell and that's not self hosting.
Here’s what you’re critically misunderstanding about this. Just because you resolve the record for a website and the IP that’s returned belongs to fastly does not mean fastly is hosting the content. You literally haven’t done anything to prove that the website isn’t self-hosted on a computer in some guys garage. You’re making assumptions based on ignorance and using those assumptions to gatekeep self hosting because you don’t even know what you don’t know. It’s very possible that site isn’t self hosted, but so far you haven’t actually found any proof of that like you think you have.
If you think a domain is a hostname and an IPv4 address is a DNS record
It’s clear that you’re a hobbyist with very little understanding of how the internet and self hosting works on a fundamental level and that’s ok. But I recommend instead of wasting your energy being confidently wrong very publicly for the purpose of gatekeeping, you use that energy to learn how these things actually work instead.
If self-hosting is going to become commonplace, then it needs to be easier than setting up a network printer. People should be able to just buy a computer (maybe a laptop for integral screen and UPS) preloaded with something like Yunohost, but with a sleek GUI. It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
Sounds like a market niche, you could start it up, call it something like "macrosoft". .. then start making scripts that do the work for the user, don't release the scripts because people pay for them. Let this go on for many years and you find yourself shoving "AI" down your users throats and screenshotting their desktop without explicit permission......
I feel attacked by this post.
I self host Home Assistant, recursive proxy servers, RSS readers, photo managers, vscode, media servers, download managers, backup solutions, git, password databases, economy trackers…
And if I need to print from my macbook I have to email the file to myself because in twenty years I haven’t ONCE been able to host my printer on the network in a way that works for more than three days before randomly breaking.
Yeah! Fuck printers and scanners! Imagine one day going to your scanner, putting in it a receipt and then pressing the scan to PC button and actually getting it to work! Instead, you go to your computer and to the folder you named scans and there's nothing!
Lol I know what you mean. Maybe I am speaking more to the ideal of the home network printer than real life. My experience with them over the last twelve years or so hasn't been as terrible as yours, but it hasn't been perfect either.
I have yeeted printers out of non-ground level apartment windows before, so i feel your pain. i bought a brother laser jet printer and hardwired it to a switch port and have not had connectivity issues for years. i can easily print from my phone, pc, laptop, whatever.
For real, how is it that Brother makes the only printer that everything from my phone to my servers can use without problems. Bonus points for not gouging on toner.
Xerox has been great for me. They dont just make giant copiers you need a forklift to deliver and a giant service contract. They still make small home office desk printers.
After wiring up to my network and giving it a static, it's just worked, for all devices for everyone. No need to download or install anything either.
It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
i disagree honestly.
Part of the point behind self hosting is to empower people with the knowledge and capability that they can do this shit, and fix any problems that result.
You aren't really getting people into right to repair, if they aren't at least espousing it, and trying to engage in it themselves. Sure you can always go to a third party to do something at the end of the day, but with how broad right to repair is, there is almost certainly something in your life that you can fix and repair.
Like it'd be good that people are doing that, but you also need to remember that this is literally a turn key product, that literally every cloud provider sells, and every company ever who will try to force proprietary buggy garbage on you, will pretend is good, and functional. Will try to sell you, because you don't know any better. I think it's just a cultural difference. Car guys that spend time working on their car simply wouldn't understand the average persons conceptual understanding of repairing vehicles, and vice versa. It's the same here.
What you are suggesting here, is a sold, turn key solution, except fully open source, no bugs, no issues, and wide reaching community support. I don't think that's reasonably possible.
I think ultimately, we need to make learning, and accessing learning materials easy (we already do a great job at it) and we just need to get people interested in this shit, some people won't. That's fine, they probably know someone that is though. And at the end of the day, that's probably good enough.
you also need to remember that this is literally a turn key product, that literally every cloud provider sells
I am unaware of server products that I can just buy, plug in, and get up and running in minutes with my own ActivityPub instances, media storage/streaming, XMPP messaging, and etc. If they really exist, please share links.
There's certainly value in doing this stuff the hard way, but the goal should be for self-hosting to be as easy as signing up with Google, Facebook, Spotify, etc. There aren't enough people with the time and curiosity to figure out the current state of self-hosting and make a dent in the three website problem.
im not saying they do exist, i'm saying that what you're talking about, is something that doesn't exist, for good reason. Because this is literally already a market place that has done it's job.
XMPP? Discord, it's literally discord. Storage and streaming? The cloud, netflix, etc. It's already a thing.
There aren’t enough people with the time and curiosity to figure out the current state of self-hosting and make a dent in the three website problem.
and yet, here we are, on lemmy. Funny how that works. You simply have to be willing to put in time and effort if you want to reap the benefits. You simply can't wish for everything to be handed to you on a silver platter.
Jellyfin and Yunohost are two projects that have simplified self-hosting and made it accessible for me. I just think more progress can be made in that direction.
and yet, here we are, on lemmy.
As far as I can tell, you are not self-hosting the Divisions by Zero Lemmy instance, so I'm not sure what your point is there. I am actually self-hosting my lemmy.crimedad.work instance with the help of Yunohost.
I just think more progress can be made in that direction.
I don't disagree, but a big problem with jellyfin specifically, is that it's just kind of a mess, don't get me wrong, great piece of software, super functional, and works really well. but it's also kind of fucking messy client side transcoding is still rather confusing, and some would be pretty nice UI and user elements simply don't exist right now.
I think i would prefer a more featured rather bare bones system that requires a higher level of configuration, than something with less features, that ships what is ostensibly the minimum viable product, while being plug and play. Having good features is often going to make software better, even if it's harder to use.
As far as I can tell, you are not self-hosting the Divisions by Zero Lemmy instance, so I’m not sure what your point is there. I am actually self-hosting my lemmy.crimedad.work instance with the help of Yunohost.
i am not, no, and that's kind of my point. Not everybody has to self host their own individual instance, one person can host an instance of something for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I simply do not think that you need that many people actively interested in this.
The entire world runs on software programming, yet the entire population is not programmers, it must follow that we will be fine without everybody liking this stuff.
Raspberry Pi won't do unfortunately, unless you run up to 4 lightweight containers.
Does the author know how much compute power a Raspberry Pi 5 has? If the software that just hosts personal data can't run in Raspberry Pi 5, that should be a terrible software. For most people and their families, a RPi5 is enough to host anything that they would ever need.
For most stuff the pi4 is also enough. Jellyfin (no transcoding) works fine on mine. It takes a bit to generate the chapter images and the timeline peek images when ingesting a new movie, but I've never had any issues with playback.
Well I run an ntp stratum 1 server handling 2800 requests a second on average (3.6mbit/s total average traffic), and a flight radar24 reporting station, plus some other rarely used services.
The fan only comes on during boot, I've never heard it used in normal operation. Load averages 0.3-0.5. Most of that is Fr24. Chrony takes <5% of a single core usually.
Is there like a list where you can enter your server so that other people use it as an ntp server? Or how did you advertise it to have 2800 requests flooding in?
I'm in the ntppool.org pool for the UK. It randomly assigns servers which could be any stratum really (but there is quality control on the time provided). I also have stratum 2 servers in .fi, and .fr (which are dedicated servers I also use for other things, rather than a raspberry pi).
I've ran multiple containers on a Pi 3 before "upgrading" to a Pi 4. Yes not even a Pi 5. Sure it's not rapid and drags it's heels at times but for the most part it's great for hosting stuff for my household.
Home assistant, Plex, Syncthing, Wireguard, Ad Guard, nginx, nginx proxy manager, duckdns, mongodb and unifi network appliance. I was also running Jellyfin along side Plex but it keeps causing the Pi to lock up.
was this article even written when the pi5 was out? The pi4 was out, and pretty good for quite a while, but really expensive in the last four years. The pi 5 is up there, but the price almost makes sense, so.
you can do quite a bit on these machines, but they are inherently limited, running a proper nas is going to be rather goofy, and probably just justifies getting proper hardware at the end of the day.
Someday I hope we have a server technology that's platform-agnostic and you can just add things like "Minecraft Server" or "Email Server" to a list and it'll install, configure, and host everything in the list with a sensible default config. I imagine you could make the technology fairly easily, although keeping up with new services, versions, security updates, etc. would be quite the hassle. But that's what collaboration is for!
As someone who has had a career in hosting: good luck.
Don’t forget backups, logging, monitoring, alerting on top of security updates, hardware failure, power outages, OS updates, app updates, and tech being deprecated and obsolete at a rapid pace.
I’m in favor of a decentralized net with more self-hosting, but that requires more education and skill. You can’t automate away all the unpleasant and technical bits.
Cosmos Server, Yunohost, CasaOS, Tipi, TrueNAS. There's projects like this that have 'app stores' that are just an interface for you to enter parameters for a Docker compose file (or something similar) like the default username and password, etc. They aren't flawless but flawless is an unrealistic standard for things with so many config options.
Honestly at this point that is docker and docker compose.
As to what to run it on that very much depends on preference. I use a proxmox server but it could just as easily be pure Debian. A basic webui like cockpit can make system management operations a bit more simplified.
Docker is in theory nice, if it works. Docker doesn't run on my computer(i have no fucking clue why). Every time I try to do anything I get the Error "Unknown Server: OS" also there is literally nothing you can find online about how to Fux this problem.
What computer and OS do you have that can't run docker? You can run a full stack of services on a random windows laptop as easily as a dedicated server.
That doesn't make any sense to me. It can be installed directly from pacman. It may be something silly like adding docker to your user group. Have you done something like below for docker?
I thought it would. If it still requires sudo to run it is probably just docker wanting your user account added to the docker group. If the "docker" group doesn't exist you can safely create it.
You will likely need to log out and log back in for the system to recognize the new group permissions.
I self host mail/smtp(opensmtpd)+imap(dovecot), znc (irc bouncer), ssh, vpn (ipsec/ikev2), www/http (httpd), git (git-daemon), and gotweb, on an extremely cheap ($2 a month, 512M ram 10G storage) vps all very easily on openbsd. With all these servers I'm using an immense 178M/512M of my available memory.
