That’s the thing though, free social media was giving them massive returns. But the line must go up. And once they completely saturated the market, there are only two ways to make the line go up: expand the market (give Internet to communities that didn’t have it), or extract more money from your existing users (enshittify). Facebook made a half assed attempt at the first one for a couple years, then pivoted hard to the second.

It’s simpler, there is a client for everything even mobile phones, it has a move command, it has props that can be edited without a copy command, pagination is however you set it up to be rather than a one size fits all approach, it can be just as scalable as S3 if you build it to be, it has much simpler locks that make them easier to use so you might actually use them, keys can be longer than 1024 characters, actual directories exist.

That’s just the protocol level. The biggest benefit for me isn’t really at the protocol level, but part of the design of my own WebDAV server: deduplication. I can throw the same file into my server with 50 different keys, and it will only take up the space of one copy on disk. This basically moved the logic of deduplication from my application to the blob store. Mountains easier from an application design perspective.

There are use cases where S3 is better, but they are few and far between. And, WebDAV is extensible. You can build whatever functionality you need into it, rather than using some proprietary protocol.

I’ve completely switched away from using Minio (and just the S3 protocol in general) in all of my projects.

I’ve found that the WebDAV protocol is better for object storage in almost every case. It’s also way simpler to use and understand.

Now it’s time for me to shill:

I wrote my own WebDAV server called Nephele. It’s free and open source, and you can run it on Docker. Probably doesn’t help if you’re using something that requires S3, but if you’re building something, I implore you to migrate away from S3.

A hosting provider is a business. If your dad is a business and you are buying hosting services from him, then yes, he is a hosting provider and you are not self hosting. But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re hosting on your own hardware on your family’s internet. That’s self hosting.

When you host on Hetzner, you’re hosting on their hardware using their internet. That’s not self hosting. It’s similar, cause like you said, you have to do a lot of the same administration work, but it’s not self hosting.

Where it gets a little murky is rack space providers. Then you’re hosting on your own hardware, but it’s not your own internet, and there’s staff there to help you… kinda iffy whether you’re self hosting, but I’d say yeah, since you own the hardware.

Their dad is not a hosting provider. I mean, maybe he is, but that would be really weird.

Your parents’ house isn’t the cloud, so yeah, it’s self hosted. The “tipping point” is whether you’re using a hosting provider.

Your stuff is still in the cloud, so I would say no. It’s better than using the big tech products, but I wouldn’t say it’s fully “self hosted”. Not that that really makes much of a difference. You’re still pretty much in control of everything, so you should be fine.

I just rsync it once in a while to a home server running in my dad’s house. I want it done manually in a “pull” direction rather than a “push” in case I ever get hit with ransomware.

Ok, thank you! If I can add support for that, I definitely will.

If Calibre-Web can sync with WebDAV, it should work. I don’t know about it though, so I don’t know if that’s possible.

I’ve never even heard of that. There’s an NPM package for it, so I might be able to add it if that package works in React Native.

Is this used for syncing read state, or just keeping a catalog of your own books?

I’ve used WebDAV with Nephele:

https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele

It works with multiple users and has built in browser support.

Owlfiles on mobile makes it easy to import all your photos to it.

Ok, so it’s been long enough for you, that you can’t even conceive of not knowing how to use a GUI anymore. Good for you, I guess.

It’s not any more complicated than a GUI, it’s just that the dozens of hours you spent learning to use a GUI was a long time ago, and you don’t remember how complicated it was.

Also, you’re probably exaggerating, because dozens of hours is way longer than it should take to become proficient at the terminal. There are resources online that you can use to learn in a few hours.

I wouldn’t call it complicated, but yeah, it’s special knowledge. So is all of self hosting.

It’s been a long time since I learned, so I don’t remember exactly what I used, but at a cursory glance, this one looks good:

https://www.terminaltutor.com/

Also, learning to read man pages will help a lot. Here’s an article on that:

https://itsfoss.com/linux-man-page-guide/

I do remember using “terminal cheat sheets” like this:

https://phoenixnap.com/kb/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/linux-commands-cheat-sheet-pdf.pdf

So yeah, even though I specifically said you’d probably accuse me of saying something and specifically told you I wasn’t saying that, you still accused me of it. You should work on your reading comprehension.

Now, you said that a desktop edition is virtually the same as a server edition + a prepackaged GUI. I gave you plenty of reasons they’re not.

As an IT professional, you absolutely should know this. So far, the only skill you’ve shown any true mastery of is misguided condescension. So instead of arguing against a point I didn’t make, if you’d like to argue against my actual point, feel free. Otherwise, maybe realize you’re not as educated as you thought, and learn.

I mean if that’s what you think, I can tell you don’t work in the industry. Desktop editions generally have more than just a “prepackaged GUI” on top of a server edition.

• Server editions generally have text based installers. This might not seem like a big deal, until you’re installing on a system that doesn’t have any graphics, just a serial console.
• They almost always have an easy way to do headless and network installations.
• They sometimes have additional security modules, like SELinux, different kernel boot parameters, or even different kernel versions. (Although this is less common nowadays.)
• They’re also missing an audio server (different than a GUI), and usually a print server.
• They can often be GBs lighter, which makes a difference when you’re installing on virtual machines with limited disk space.
• They sometimes use different file systems by default (like Fedora used to).
• They might create different swap setups.
• They usually have very different network defaults. Like, desktop editions usually have a firewall, whereas server editions usually don’t (or it’s not enabled by default).
• Server editions often include terminal tools that desktop editions don’t.
• They’ll sometimes have a different network manager (Ubuntu Server uses systemd-networkd while Ubuntu Desktop uses Network-Manager).
• Server editions almost never come with userland file mounting tools like gvfs.
• Sometimes (like in Fedora) a server edition will come with remote management solutions like Cockpit.
• The home directory skeletons will be vastly different on a server vs a desktop.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty more I could find.

Now, since you seem like you might accuse me of it, note that I did not say that a server edition and a desktop edition can’t be swapped back and forth by installing and removing packages and changing a bunch of config. They can. But, it’s not “just” some GUI stuff that makes a desktop edition, and it’s not “just” the lack of a GUI that makes a server edition. They are usually quite different.

Source: I’ve been a professional Linux server administrator for 16 years. But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. Install Ubuntu server, then run sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop and see if it’s exactly the same as installing Ubuntu Desktop.

We’re talking about servers here. Linux is the market leader in server software by an absolutely enormous margin.

There’s a reason that’s not very popular outside of corporate intranets.