I love self-hosting a bunch of apps I use, so I don’t have to rely on anyone but my ISP for my digital life. Jellyfin, Immich, forgejo, memos and more.
But I know this isn’t for everyone. I just recently spent about 3 hours doing routine maintenance and fixing an issue (I caused) and I know not everyone is into doing that kind of thing.
I also wonder what it would take to get more people into this self-hosting thing. I.e., to get them off of subscription streaming services, Google, etc…, so they can own their own data, stop feeding the machine and for the general betterment of humanity. What would the world be like if half of all adults self-hosted their own services? Or even 25%?
So, for discussion, is increasing the number of self hosters a good idea? How can we make help that process along?
Edit: Fixed typos
Most people shouldn’t self host. It’s a hobby for people who want to do it, and there are benefits, but spending 3 hours on a weekend fixing stuff is not how most people wish to spend their time. Furthermore, it’s not a good use of most people’s time. We split labor up into specialties, forcing people to do work outside their specialty causes pointless inefficiency. I agree with what other commenters have said in that a better approach would be to have more small businesses hosting federated together, and anyone not inclined to self host should just purchase service through one of those many small providers instead.
Imagine this scenario:
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You go to a store, buy a little server in a box, something the size of an Apple TV or a Roku.
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Bring it home, plug it in, fire up its home page on your phone, tablet or PC.
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That has a really simple, slick UI which walks you through its set up without asking any technical questions, including enabling services you want to use, getting it connected to the cloud for away-from-home connection and cloud backups (if you want).
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It automatically sets up a Wireguard VPN for you, takes the most secure options with each of the apps you enable. Ties it all to one password or passkey for you. Sets up certs, etc… the right way, without bothering you at all.
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On your phone (mobile first, eh), you use the app as a launcher for the apps you chose to enable (things we all know like Navidrome, Immich, Paperless, etc…). They work the same at home and on the road.
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On your home devices (any kind of PC, Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, music streamers, and so on), you install and run apps which all connect to your little server instead of going outside your home.
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Enjoy your media, backup your documents, chat with friends and family, etc… as you like.
ETA: And share whatever you want with whoever you want. Send your sister some pictures, let your kid at college watch one of your movies. And so on.
I can dream, at least.
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Education of people is always(?) better, I’d say.
It’s good to exercise the mind, just like exercising the body.
What if 25% of car drivers could handle their own car maintenance? The one downside people will scream at first is that fewer mechanics will be needed.
But that is too short sided.
More home mechanics will need to buy more tools, so that’s more store jobs and more manufacturing jobs and more shipping/trucking jobs.
And more people who understand mechanics mean a better workforce who can invent new/better products or processes. And can do more research into manufacturing science, which would improve society.
This would also lead to safer cars because they are better roadworthy, and car manufacturers would have a harder time using low quality parts.
So all of those changes would apply to technology when more people know how to use technology.
And there simply aren’t enough mechanics now, hasn’t been for at least 40 years that I know of.
This would also lead to safer cars because they are better roadworthy
Well, I’m not sure about this literally about car and figuratively about selfhosted: not all the selfhoster have the skills to selfhost, they just think they have and so for the car. If you screw up a service/the whole server you may lose all your data or be at the mercy of some data kidnapper, if you screw up your car brakes, well…bye bye.
In both cases, we don’t have enough skilled people to have that 25% selfhoster (but not even one tenth) nor 25% car self repair drivers. And this is not as bad as it sounds: we can’t be skilled about everything that we need, it’s just impossible! And that’s why we have society!
I am not talking about jank yolo prayer work. I’m talking about people learning how to do something properly. Duct tape a car is not the repair I’m talking about.
You are complaining about there not being enough skilled workers today. I’m talking about people learning the skills over time.
Look at how many types of food and products are starting to promote cleaner ingredients and more sustainable materials as people are starting to learn more about their health and the environment. People can learn and thing can get better.
I recently set up a small home server and started trying to self host stuff. I found it pretty hard to get started. People have been very helpful on this community and other public forums, but I’m afraid it’s often not enough. They give me advice in trying this or that, doing this and avoiding that… but I still don’t understand more than half of the concepts that they use. I consider myself tech literate above the average user: I recently switched to Linux (after years on MacOS, using the command line, and even building a couple of programs from source), I also installed a custom ROM on my phone. I feel comfortable learning and doing these things… but still felt very very lost when trying to self host a few services. At the moment I settled for a local-only network where I run Jellyfin, Navidrome and Syncthing on OpenMediaVault. I’m lost with what I’d need to do to access my server from outside my local network, and terrified of doing something wrong and leaving a hole open so any hacker can access my server. I’d like to do it some day, but I’d rather have a safe local network than screw and get my data stolen or deleted.
So, in my opinion, we would need good tutorials or a MOOC to explain the basics from scratch.
I’m lost with what I’d need to do to access my server from outside my local network, and terrified of doing something wrong and leaving a hole open so any hacker can access my server. I’d like to do it some day, but I’d rather have a safe local network than screw and get my data stolen or deleted.
Setup a VPN via Wireguard or Tailscale. I personally have not done that but I have VPN setup through OpenVPN which I did not find that hard and people say that is significantly harder than Wireguard.
The other (less safe) option would be to setup a DMZ on your network for stuff you want to self host. That is a bit more involved though. I went through it for fun and setup a public Nextcloud instance along with DDNS and a reverse proxy. I was just messing around though and shut it down after testing performance.
Check out this guide to get started with exposing your services via proxy. I started with v1 and migrated to v2. Until I dug this link out for you, I had no idea about v3; but if it’s as good as the first two I can only imagine how good it is now.
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/traefik-v3-docker-compose-guide-2024/
If by “average” you mean someone with little to no technical background AND not willing to make too much of an effort, it’s still super easy by getting something like a Synology or QNAP NAS.
1 click installs.
Sure. Like Apple says, “It just works” and people love that.
The challenge, imo, is that there’s always the variations on home networks, nat, firewalls, etc… maybe someone partners up with Tailscale or a similar service to get the services through people’s home router.
And when it doesn’t work, Apple tells you it’s because you’re holding it wrong, and you’re on your own.
The only part of Apple’s approach worth copying would be the ease of use of their software, imo
