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.
I don’t think self hosting is average person territory at all.
I noticed 2 services out of dozens weren’t working last week and restarted their docker containers when I got home. Working again! Easy.
Nope. They only work on local LAN. Turns out IPv6 wasn’t working so I had a heck of a time tracking that down.
Home assistant kept giving me errors about my reverse proxy not being trusted, but all the settings were correct. Tried adding IPv6 addresses too, but never got that working. The only thing that worked was change the network interface from Ethernet to wireless.
There are a LOT of gremlins in selfhosting. It’s a fun hobby and rewarding, but definitely not for everyone.
Totally make sense. But, can you imagine a way for a company / non-profit to make it easier for people not able / willing to learn to fix things themselves?
My thought is it could happen, if structured correctly to keep the public good as its aim.
Hmmmm. We’ve had single click LAMP installs way back in the early 00’s. Heck, web servers were a single check box in OSX. It’s just gotten really complicated since then.
Data centers work great because tech and staff work together in proximity to keep things smooth. To decentralized a data center …
I’d start with a VPN; without which, you’d have too many unknowns. I’d have local user space (probably a VM or docker environment) linked to a remote auto-magically configured proxy server and network infrastructure. (A lot of people do this anyway with wire guard or the like) Complete automation is the key here.
Users would install apps from docker (preconfigured) and the environment automatically establishes the VPN and sends port data and settings to the proxy service. DNS/fail2ban/security is set up, and goes live in a minute or two. Of course that wouldn’t work for things like Pihole or adguard.
User is responsible for disk/CPU, service provider for networking, well except ISP stuff. But anything average-user-easy will have to be mostly prepackaged for ease of use.
Oh, and if there are things that go wrong, clear explanations are essential. Things like “could not bind 0.0.0.0:80” could be “Hey dimwit, you already used port 80 for XXXX program. Pick something else!”
Or, you know, a script could do that.
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.
Imagine this scenario:
-
You go to a store, buy a little server in a box, something the size of an Apple TV or a Roku.
-
Bring it home, plug it in, fire up its home page on your phone, tablet or PC.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
This sounds like a FOSS utopian future :)
There’s a few projects that have started towards this path with single-click deployable apps, you could even say HomeAssistant OS does this to some extent my managing the services for you.
I believe one of the biggest hurdle for a “self hosting appliance” is resilience to hardware failure. Noone wants to loose decades of family photos or legal documents due to a SSD going bad , or the cat spilling water on their “hosting box”. So automated reliable off-site backups and recovery procedures for both data and configs is key.
Databox from BBC / Nottingham University is also a very interesting concept worth looking in to:
A platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner authenticated control and accountability.
-
1 click installs.
