Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*.
During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
The author mostly just hand waves away self-hosting. There's an analogy that compares it to suburbia, but unlike the suburbs where you have to drive 40 minutes to get anywhere interesting, … an Internet hosted service is just as accessible, anywhere. It's a vapid analogy.
The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.
One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)
(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone.
Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".
SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
I'd say self-hosting on the verge of becoming ubiquitous and accepted.
The whole sales pitch of cloud providers is that instaling and maintaining a server is just too hard for the average Joe.
Thing is the average Joe already has at least 2 dedicated servers in their home - their router and their IoT hub. Both are designed to be servers, and talk to third party endpoints over the internet.
While I'm not crazy about IoT, I think we are reaching the point where most people have something digital in their house that makes sense to be networked.
And thanks to IoT stuff, running and managing servers has become a certified Dad activity, like woodworking and home improvement.
I know multiple dads, who had no prior exposure to IT, who have set up rather complex Raspberry Pi based home automation systems, managing all the complexity of setting up and running a server at home.
I think the skills and interest are proliferating, and it's no longer going to be accepted wisdom to just rely on some nebuluous remote cloud provider, esp for simple stuff.
I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up. Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services.
I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.
This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.
Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits:
* Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite.
* Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain.
* Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers.
It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.
And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins is to think...
beyond individualism
What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.
In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
There has been a big move to web based apps (SAAS) as web-based software has improved. The biggest plus to web based software for the user is that there is no need to install anything.
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
Moxie Marlinspike nailed this in his web3 critique from a couple years ago: "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as infrastructure... However – and I don't think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want."
That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience.
And to be honest, public libraries already do this, y'all. GO GET A LIBRARY CARD. You can stream from Kanopy at home.
It sounds like the author never heard of a VPS? Yes it's someone else's computer but you own the contents, can switch providers any time.
Personally no I would never host cloud connected stuff at home, but neither would I trust Dropbox or Kindle with my stuff. Although actually why ebooks need to be in the cloud at all I don't know - just buy somewhere that lets you download and keep them on your device/backup storage? If my eBook reader ever said I couldn't side load books I would hack it so fast..
If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.
You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.
You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.
Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.
There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks.
I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
Am I crazy or did my 2006 iMac come with a home media server for serving movies / tv shows / music photos from your filesystem. I think it even came with a slick looking remote!
You could stream content from it over your home network (as long as you were connecting from another Apple device)
Is this lost technology or just a figment of my imagination? I've long since switched to linux and run the typical Jellyfin setup etc
To me, the major issue of self-hosting (once overcome the tech barrier etc...) has always been protection. Not from external actors or attacks, but from incidents. By which I mean backups. Safest option is online backup, which is expensive and takes your data sovereignty away once again. Or I can once a year make a hard copy and take it to my parents (who live in a different country) for storage, and swap the backups out. Either way, very suboptimal. If anyone has a good way to achieve this, please lmk
What. The article reads just as an ad for clouds. It tips into the benefits, ownership problems, setup. Then it says "but how do I share photos???" and this apparently is enough to counter all benefits.
Even if I had to (and this is what I actually do actively) push the photos I want to share to Google Photos, ALL the benefits remain. I see it, it's a slight inconvenience of having to do like 2 more taps and wait for the upload, but that's it. You get so much for this small inconvenience. You own your data, your infrastructure, you're not locked in, and your data is private. But having to share the photos via another app is the dealbreaker?
One company comes to mind that is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the current situation by offering a convenient self-hosting solution: Ubiquiti. Despite their pretty bad missteps 5 years ago, their UniFi product range is still very decent and user-friendly for SOHO/SMB networking, and they seem to have the appetite to continue expanding their product line into adjacent markets.
I have deployed simple UniFi setups for all my relatives, and they are very happy (though they couldn't have done it themselves). IMHO, they have the DNA to go further and offer a full self-hosted cloud, if they're willing to put in the effort to make it even easier and more integrated.
> Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers
I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.
Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.
There have been solid efforts with niche adoption that have quite nice UX like Umbrel [1] that allows installing all the mentioned and a ton more open-source apps [2] just by using a UI. It was spawned as bitcoin node hardware+software combo but expanded and is now primarily about self-hosting.
The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.
I’m never clear why the solution I have - a kind of hybrid of cloud and local - isn’t more popular.
I make use of google drive, apps and google photos and therefore suffer the knowledge that my stuff is probably being used to train AI (I’m personally comfortable with this) - but then I have local backups and sync for everything. InsycHQ gives me a locally (and NAS) backed up version of all my documents, I also backup all photos shot by my wife and I to my Synology, and then daily backup in 2x places that I own from there. My films and media are locally stored, and I buy a fair bit from BandCamp and I use Plex to serve but I also have Spotify for the convenience factor. …and so on
In other words - it’s a sort of multi-tiered approach. I’m not subject to the whims of cloud providers because if they change their pricing or terms radically I’ve still got all my stuff locally; ditto backups on infrastructure that I own and control in-house.
It’s always seemed to me like this is a pretty good setup, combining the utility of cloud with the reassurance of self hosting.
I like self hosting . It’s not just about privacy or owning something. To me a homelab is also a hobby. No different than previous generations that tinkered with their cars as a hobby. As someone who works in IT - there are also ancillary benefits. What I learn at work, I apply to my home lab and vice versa.
It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating self hosting with having a physical server in your house.
Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.
Sure, you can own your server and have it at home. It must be nice to have enough space at home to dedicate some to a server room (servers are noisy btw). But many people live in small apartments in a city and so don't have that luxury.
You can own your server but rent some rack space from a data center to put it into. That would still be self-hosting.
You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting.
The author seems to not consider the fact that this is a spectrum but also, from a practical standpoint, mostly the same thing.
Do you really need to self host all these apps just to "take ownership"?
All my pictures are stored as plain files in various folders on a big networked hard drive. So is all my music, audiobooks, movies, documents, projects, etc. This is backed up 5 times over to more hard drives periodically. I give a couple to family that lives out of state when I visit.
You might laugh, but I'm not really sure what I'm missing that would have me do something else. And yes, it's work to take care of it, but that's true of any of your possessions. Just give me my files, man.
Future is, unfortunately, probably getting back to piracy in some shape or form. Especially with the general idea of the industry that buying something does not mean you own it. In that case all I can say is: F'em.
It is definitely true that piracy is primarily a service problem, not an ethical one.
> Which raises the question: do they even own those books?
nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no matter if you bought a license or not
in additions license with clear deadline should always be required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly. It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices or violence .)
I think people are dismissing the possibility of universally accessible self-hosting too quickly. We really need to be ambitious as engineers and imagine a future where people have sovereignty over their own computing. In 1990, we wouldn't have accepted someone else taking custodianship of our personal documents, memories, books, music, and films, and yet it's normalized today. With the benefit of hindsight, we need to brutally simplify every single layer of the stack and optimize it for being usable by non-technical people.
The actual solution is extremely simple in explanation, though really hard to pull off.
It's "skin in the game." Right now, cloud services fail horribly at much of what they promise or merely imply; safety, security, long term availability, etc.
And so, to make them not fail at this, they must be punished when they fail at this. The other side of this coin is probably "you have to pay them," but that's not so bad either.
LLMs slot into this conversation in a really interesting way.
The things the author set up are technologically mature enough that, as long as you have the media, or as long as you can get your friends to use it, the self-hosted versions are largely better than the commercial ones. The last decade or so of innovation has really been about figuring out how to monetize these technologies, at the expense of UX.
This is in contrast to LLMs, where the commercial ones kind of wipe the floor with the self-hosted options.
On the other hand, LLMs essentially give average people superpowers for self-hosting mature technologies. My wife used Claude Code to vibe-code an educational game for our five-year-old, tailored to his preferences and the skills he needs to work on (she's a UX designer and now, a couple weeks in, reads enough Javascript to understand when Claude is doing something stupid).
If we want to buy a computer to use a server, write, and host a bespoke family to-do-list / photo store / knowledge base / calendar that syncs my wife's Google Calendar with my .org files ... we are so much more able to do that than we were even two years ago.
I think Synology NAS is already 95% there. So the technical difficulty isn't much of an argument. Sharing of Photos also isn't a hurdle, mostly because I use Whatsapp for it.
I think the biggest pain point is that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google all wants services revenue. And they will go out of their way to force everything on their platform to become subscription based and you dont own anything.
The title is showing quite a lot of ankle! OP is a proud self hoster.
I run my own email, DNS and the rest. Yes: email. I run several domains including my own company and my own vanity domain and several more for friends. I have been doing it for decades.
Goog, MS and co do follow standards and if you do too, they will be largely merciful if you keep your nose clean. I have even managed to run an email system from my home connection as a test IPv4 and 6. I'm UK based. It does seem that IP denylists do seem to be a bit brutal in the USofA, so that might explain the downer meme on self hosting email.
The future is and always will be self hosted if you give a shit.
So, the thing we have right now is Tailscale - and it's freaking awesome.
But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines.
I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together.
It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this.
I get that you can basically do this with Tailscale. Basically. But I want the next thing to be designed from the ground-up around this kind of design. People, sharing apps with each other.
What I see is that it's trivial to 'self-host' locally - go buy a product from Synology/QNAP etc. - they have an ecosystem, easy setup, apps, everything. Three issues from my perspective: 1) cost and 2) security+privacy 3) not so easy to integrate networking (visibility from internet side) for things like email hosting.
I can also see it possible to 'self-host' things once you use a cloud where you can do 'confidential computing' stuff aka. the hosting provider does not have access to whatever it is you're running. That functionality is there on the major clouds now (EC2, Azure, GCP) all have the Intel/AMD/Arm TME/SEV/RME stuff implemented but finding it on a device that you can self-host in your little storage cupboard is impossible right now (EPYC 9004 seems to be the lowest available with that technology). At a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption if you are not in control of the hardware space itself.
One thing i know about the future is that it brings more powerful chips, available storage and more tech in general. Which is much needed to come up with consumer level self-hosting solution so that 'cloud is just someone esle's computer' becomes 'this cloud is just my computer'
I can't see community-hosting taking off. I do not trust anybody telling me about E2E encryption that I can not prove.
I barely trust Google.
I trust the long bearded neighborhood nerd much less than most companies. Even if I probably am that person in my neighborhood. But nobody should trust me, and I am not going to tell them to trust me.
Even if everything is encrypted, I can almost guarantee that the community shared server will be confiscated by the police once in the next three decades.
This is what I imagined when reading Neuromancer and other sci-fi of that time. A public online space that we share. Sure, some corners will get gross and dangerous. But that's what humanity looks like.
It's strange to me that we never included public spaces in our growth and innovation of the internet over the past 30 years. Of course I expect companies to do their thing as they've had free reign to do, but it wouldn't have taken much cost or effort to add a couple publicly funded data-centers where everyone gets a little space for themselves.
At least in the US, I think it's because we've allowed those who run our government to get far too old. The people running the country have not really understood the public good of the internet outside of commerce. Don't get me wrong, I've benefited from said commerce for my entire career, but I think we, as a society, have lost quite a bit of ground by not collectively owning a piece of this thing as it grew.
Once upon a time the airwaves were ours, and music thrived because of it. These days the airwaves are all practically walled off with massive monopolies controlling them. It's an overall detriment to our creative progress.
I know I'm an old man barking at clouds, but I miss the radio from when I was young - there was actually new and interesting music there. The internet feels the same way for very similar reasons.
Is it such crazy of an ask to have some it guys sell me the box already set up to be used as a self-host solution aio ? Why can't I find any company that sells this?
so you watch videos, listen to music, read books, and take/share photos on a phone, ipad, or tv. you seek a better experience doing those things, and your solution is to spin up some software _on a totally new device_ (a server).
that's a huge leap! i think most of us gloss over it, but the rest of the article is predicated on that leap.
the tv you're streaming video to probably runs Android by now. it has a stable internet connection, CPU, RAM, and probably a couple USB ports. why not install the Jellyfin server software on it, attach a USB hard drive, and let it be the machine that hosts all your media? why, actually, do you need to go out of your way to buy a completely new machine for this?
similar argument applies to Immich. you're wanting to co-edit an album among several contacts. you're probably all uploading your photos from a phone. why not just have one of your always-on phones host that album? i shouldn't expect the drain on your battery to serve an album to a few friends is that much more than it took to take those photos in the first place.
to a certain degree, you're "self-hosting" things on a physical server because that's the only platform on which we all still have the ability to run arbitrary workloads on. solve that problem and everything becomes a _lot_ simpler.
I hope for a future where confidential computing or FHE tech is widely deployed (and cheap). Any computation can be done on any device without loosing confidentiality.
I hope for a future where confidential computing or FHE tech is widely deployed (and cheap). Any computation can be done on any device without loosing confidentiality.
The fundamental problem here is that bad apples don’t respect common sense agreements. If everyone who owned a kindle book, agreed to never share the downloaded version of the book for free on the internet, companies would not have to do this. I don’t see what’s the solution, if buying a kindle ebook is allowing you to share it for free on the internet. In the past people were limited by a physical copy, they could give the copy but only 1 copy could exist at a time, now without that limit, people need to do something to protect against piracy. I don’t like this solution, but I don’t see what’s the alternative?
Well, my whole ebook collection sits on my computer and is managed via Calibre. I only buy books where I get a file without DRM. If there is DRM I don't buy.
My whole music collection sits on my computer in the form of well sorted mp3/flac/wav files. I buy only music where I get files or a physical carrier medium (Vinyl, Tapes, ...)
My whole movie/series collection sits on a jellfin server I can reach via wireguard from literally everywhere.
You get the idea. For me having the file and being able to scroll through my collection and decide what to pick from my collection is part of the fun. I am a musician myself and I earn more in a week in bandcamp (a few hundred bucks a year) than I would earn in 100 years on Spotify (60 cents a year), so if you wanna support the artists, doing it this way benefits them greatly.
Certain things will be cloud-based or otherwise provider-hosted. Some things will remain self-hosted, for those who prefer it.
It's like owning a car: you take the trouble to maintain it, but it's yours and will take you where you want, without the limitations of a taxi or even a rented car. I live in NYC and don't own a car, for I have too little use for it. OTOH if I were a plumbing contractor, I most definitely would own a car, or maybe a light truck. One size does not exactly fit all.
I sometimes wonder about "managed hosting" (or whatever it is called). For instance, some providers like Hetzner or Infomaniak offer a "Nextcloud managed instance". So you pay a subscription and they maintain your Nextcloud instance for you. Which is presumably simpler and safer than doing it yourself at home.
On such an instance, one can share a folder with a friend, for instance. And I think Nextcloud is even working on federation (?).
One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is in your country).
How about an all in one box, like phones or synology boxes that come with packages maintained by the manufacturer? If update goes wrong, it will be on support. They require almost no maintenance.
You would put two in different locations for redundancy and it begins to be a personal “cloud”.
Another option is an app like nextcloud. You learn it and it does everything 80% as good as possible, which is often more than enough!
> Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things
Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of the data and software, than the location of the hardware.
> Well...since our friends can't access our server, the only good way to do that would probably be using an app like Google Photos or iCloud
Get a domain and set up a subdomain for Immich (maybe add a tunnel if it is a home server). I have friends using my Immich instance without problems, it's just another app.
> I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I can't see how one can convince people to switch to a community cloud if Apple Cloud etc. exists. Most people just won't understand the difference or benefits.
I honestly would be totally fine with large providers being the ones to host and "own" all my media---_if_ they were obsessive stewards of data quality.
To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors.
But in practice, this isn't how it turns out:
* Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes.
* Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether.
* The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence.
* Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.)
* I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere.
If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work.
I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.
That all depends if you're willing to run stuff yourself, or be subservient on the good will of companies not to enshittify (pro-tip, they always will).
> Imagine a world where your library card includes 100GB of encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration tools, and media streaming services — all for free.
But why should a (public) library be interested in providing such services? For funding? What about costs? On for example censorship/regulations/compliance/maintenance etc?
I'm not so sure a publicly funded library would have any interest in doing that. Think about it, if libraries can/welling to do any of that, then Amazon would never have any chance to grow this big.
I think that's why only private companies is capable of doing it, at least currently. They found out a way to make a profit while operating a sustainable (all things considered) cloud service.
In fact, the at-cost service provided by the libraries will probably collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a cheaper plan.
Also, host by a library still creates centralized service, which comes with all problems that a centralized service inherits. It only shifts the problem, not solving it.
I really hate to pirate, but when publishers are in bed with scums like amazon and ignore these acts of greed, they might as well deal with piracy because we really need a tool to humble them
You're almost there with your excellent lineup of self-hosted tech. Just throw in Headscale and some Tailscale clients and you'll be there. (Or any number of mesh VPN alternatives, like NetBird)
Could the friends access the server through the VPN?
> It's secured behind our own VPN.
> So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Well...since our friends can't access our server
I don't know if this idea was inspired by the Library Socialism movement or if it is an instance of "great minds think alike", but people who like this idea, may find Library Socialism appealing as well
It seems like the main benefit of self-hosting (and community-hosting) is “what if the bigco SAAS enshittifies”? i.e. it’s a backup plan.
What if instead, you just store local copies of your data, possibly organized and synchronized? If necessary it can be done manually, just download anything important enough that you might want it later. If a service decays, then import it into another.
A big point the author makes is that many cloud providers don’t let you download the data. But any media that can’t be accessed outside bigco’s cloud can’t be uploaded to your cloud in the first place. If bigco’s cloud prevents you from downloading data that you create or upload, only then the solution is to use a (possibly self-hosted) alternative. However, in practice I rarely see this happening, for example downloading from Google Workspace and OneDrive is very easy (it can even synchronize a folder on your local machine), and if you’re worried about it happening in the future, again, you can backup important files.
The reason why giving this storage and control over to any company doesn't work is because their incentives are always towards enshitiffication. The issue of community access can always be solved by self hosting on a rented cloud server, its still your data under your control its just someone elses box with a high speed internet connection and global accessibility, self hosting gives you the choice who sees and uses it and how. The hardware isn't actually the important bit, its the software.
I think its not the future in its current form either, because it requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays. But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.
> My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open-source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us.
Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full of negative impact.
This is exactly what I’ve been building for a decade, but it’s not just a “community hosted cloud platform”, it is an entire reimagining of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram and all the other community platforms, for an open source world.
I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes.
If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu
For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
I agree with the title, but not the solution and that’s okay. Is the future endlessly tinkering with and running stuff out of your house? I think nope, that’s just your hobby.
I think of the centralization of content and the licensing as something that works so long as it’s a commodity market, that is, it’s hard to 2x the price of an ebook over a dead tree which I can own. Investors may wish otherwise, but they have to add tons of value to get consumers to play along.
I’m fine with commodities in my life. Power and water and gas come to mind. They cost what they cost and I don’t have problems with it.
I could build a nas and run software and admin it, or I could pay $20/mo to Adobe and another $33 to Apple for my family’s shared storage. Done. Of course, if the benefits of commoditization evaporate and it looks like the streaming market, then I’m wrong and would have to change track.
The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah, that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the hard thing because it's the right thing. Heck, maybe the right thing will also be the easy thing if we come up with better ideas like yours.
It is nice that he created a cloud environment for a pointy/clicky people :)
But if I where to do such a thing:
1. Cloud only used to send and store locally encrypted compressed backup data
2. Open an ssh port to the public, but deny logins. Only allow logins using ssh keys.
3. Download data from my system using sftp/scp
This protects you from being chased by DRM lawyers because the system is not public. Plus it is very simple to setup.
Setting up a Cloud System like described here is very great for end users, but it could get you into court, or at the very least lots of take-down notices.
And the future isn't growing your own food at home. But we all know a garden in the yard is a wonderful thing and often better than what you can get at the store while being rewarding to tend.
There are two "futures" to disambiguate here. The future for for-profit and institutional entities, which is not self-hosted. And the future for human persons, which is. The former will probably be HTTP/3 (quic over UDP) exclusively with CA TLS required while the future for humans remains on HTTP+HTTPS HTTP/1.1.
I won't be too many more years before the corporate future completely divorces itself from the actual web and goes full HTTP-IS-JUST-A-TRANSPORT-FOR-JS-APPS and becomes unable to even visit normal websites. For "security" reasons, of course.
This article took a weird turn midway. I really enjoyed the beginning and the start.
My takeaway of the middle part is that the author had certain expectations about self hosting that weren't realistic and they jump to certain conclusions I would not have jumped to.
Yes it's true that we here are an extremely privileged bunch but over the decades I've seen tech become widely more accessible even before. People were paid a bunch of money just to write HTML in 1997 and in 2025 anyone can write a production ready website using the SOTA LLMs.
I am convinced the future is self-hosted (which is why I clicked on this link!) and as the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. From that lens, majority of the public not self-hosting is a cost-benefit, not a knowledge issue. Ergo, if tomorrow TikTok charged every person $500/mo, most people would figure out a way to run their own federated TikTok (but most likely just start using a similar but cheaper service).
Consider, there will be a future when Google will struggle to make money (gasp! how can that be?!) and many years before that day comes, all the "free" gmail accounts will be gone - because by then, email will cease to serve as a method for a company to mine novel information, I imagine there will be no "free" GMail although "free" email might still exist then just because the cost to provide 10GB email would be insignificant and worth good PR to someone (but at that point, not Google).
Hosting without vendor lock-in is fine. However after a bit of thought, you'll realize that's the same thing as self-hosting. Self-hosting with an agent doing your hosting.
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app...
You do exactly that.
"Oh but security."
Any security you get from hiding behind a firewall is illusory at best. You still need to keep on top of updates and tech news. And I want to be able to access my stuff from wherever too.
Most of my friends don't have to, because they have me and at least 3 other friends who also self host.
There's a couple of things I won't let others in (like, my email domain. That's like my last name, so nope). But things like _sharing a video_? Yeah, I'll let them log in.
Translation: this particular user wants to make different privacy choices than the rest and pretends that we should philosophically follow.
All because Big Corp does anti open software/anti privacy thing.
Give me a break.
These platitudes ring like propaganda. I do what I want with my computer and data. You don't get to choose to "connect with me".
> Beyond individualism
To authoritarianism.
It's fine if the author wants to do all this but the kind of "we should all do X, which goes against your privacy/data/control beliefs because it's for our greater good" sounds so Rich CEO that knows better, kind of talk.
This article misses the point. The future will be self-hosted (or local community hosted) when automation technology actually matures and shows some real innovations.
Is it just me or is the entire concept of "ownership" kind of wrong in the realm of digital (things that can be copy pasted infinitely and distributed mostly for free)?
Instead we should have ideas of AUTH, AUTH fraud (distributing content with wrong authorship), the right to generate revenue by distribution.
Restricting distribution of something that is essentially free to distribute feels wrong. If you tried to explain to aliens that you had solved "food" with a replicator but The Gov actually banned this and people had to starve ... you would likely be met with some questions.
The future is not self-hosted
(drewlyton.com)350 points by drew_lytle 25 July 2025 | 337 comments
Comments
During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.
In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.
Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.
The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.
One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)
(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)
Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".
SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.
This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.
I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.
The whole sales pitch of cloud providers is that instaling and maintaining a server is just too hard for the average Joe.
Thing is the average Joe already has at least 2 dedicated servers in their home - their router and their IoT hub. Both are designed to be servers, and talk to third party endpoints over the internet.
While I'm not crazy about IoT, I think we are reaching the point where most people have something digital in their house that makes sense to be networked.
And thanks to IoT stuff, running and managing servers has become a certified Dad activity, like woodworking and home improvement.
I know multiple dads, who had no prior exposure to IT, who have set up rather complex Raspberry Pi based home automation systems, managing all the complexity of setting up and running a server at home.
I think the skills and interest are proliferating, and it's no longer going to be accepted wisdom to just rely on some nebuluous remote cloud provider, esp for simple stuff.
I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.
This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.
Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits: * Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite. * Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain. * Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers. It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.
And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.
What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.
Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.
In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".
When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.
But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.
BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.
So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.
I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.
I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.
I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.
That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience.
And to be honest, public libraries already do this, y'all. GO GET A LIBRARY CARD. You can stream from Kanopy at home.
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Personally no I would never host cloud connected stuff at home, but neither would I trust Dropbox or Kindle with my stuff. Although actually why ebooks need to be in the cloud at all I don't know - just buy somewhere that lets you download and keep them on your device/backup storage? If my eBook reader ever said I couldn't side load books I would hack it so fast..
If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.
You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.
You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.
Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.
There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks. I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.
You could stream content from it over your home network (as long as you were connecting from another Apple device)
Is this lost technology or just a figment of my imagination? I've long since switched to linux and run the typical Jellyfin setup etc
Even if I had to (and this is what I actually do actively) push the photos I want to share to Google Photos, ALL the benefits remain. I see it, it's a slight inconvenience of having to do like 2 more taps and wait for the upload, but that's it. You get so much for this small inconvenience. You own your data, your infrastructure, you're not locked in, and your data is private. But having to share the photos via another app is the dealbreaker?
I have deployed simple UniFi setups for all my relatives, and they are very happy (though they couldn't have done it themselves). IMHO, they have the DNA to go further and offer a full self-hosted cloud, if they're willing to put in the effort to make it even easier and more integrated.
I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.
Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.
[1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch
The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.
[1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos
[2] https://apps.umbrel.com/
I make use of google drive, apps and google photos and therefore suffer the knowledge that my stuff is probably being used to train AI (I’m personally comfortable with this) - but then I have local backups and sync for everything. InsycHQ gives me a locally (and NAS) backed up version of all my documents, I also backup all photos shot by my wife and I to my Synology, and then daily backup in 2x places that I own from there. My films and media are locally stored, and I buy a fair bit from BandCamp and I use Plex to serve but I also have Spotify for the convenience factor. …and so on
In other words - it’s a sort of multi-tiered approach. I’m not subject to the whims of cloud providers because if they change their pricing or terms radically I’ve still got all my stuff locally; ditto backups on infrastructure that I own and control in-house.
It’s always seemed to me like this is a pretty good setup, combining the utility of cloud with the reassurance of self hosting.
Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.
Sure, you can own your server and have it at home. It must be nice to have enough space at home to dedicate some to a server room (servers are noisy btw). But many people live in small apartments in a city and so don't have that luxury.
You can own your server but rent some rack space from a data center to put it into. That would still be self-hosting.
You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting.
The author seems to not consider the fact that this is a spectrum but also, from a practical standpoint, mostly the same thing.
All my pictures are stored as plain files in various folders on a big networked hard drive. So is all my music, audiobooks, movies, documents, projects, etc. This is backed up 5 times over to more hard drives periodically. I give a couple to family that lives out of state when I visit.
You might laugh, but I'm not really sure what I'm missing that would have me do something else. And yes, it's work to take care of it, but that's true of any of your possessions. Just give me my files, man.
It is definitely true that piracy is primarily a service problem, not an ethical one.
nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no matter if you bought a license or not
in additions license with clear deadline should always be required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly. It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices or violence .)
It's "skin in the game." Right now, cloud services fail horribly at much of what they promise or merely imply; safety, security, long term availability, etc.
And so, to make them not fail at this, they must be punished when they fail at this. The other side of this coin is probably "you have to pay them," but that's not so bad either.
The things the author set up are technologically mature enough that, as long as you have the media, or as long as you can get your friends to use it, the self-hosted versions are largely better than the commercial ones. The last decade or so of innovation has really been about figuring out how to monetize these technologies, at the expense of UX.
This is in contrast to LLMs, where the commercial ones kind of wipe the floor with the self-hosted options.
On the other hand, LLMs essentially give average people superpowers for self-hosting mature technologies. My wife used Claude Code to vibe-code an educational game for our five-year-old, tailored to his preferences and the skills he needs to work on (she's a UX designer and now, a couple weeks in, reads enough Javascript to understand when Claude is doing something stupid).
If we want to buy a computer to use a server, write, and host a bespoke family to-do-list / photo store / knowledge base / calendar that syncs my wife's Google Calendar with my .org files ... we are so much more able to do that than we were even two years ago.
I think the biggest pain point is that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google all wants services revenue. And they will go out of their way to force everything on their platform to become subscription based and you dont own anything.
I run my own email, DNS and the rest. Yes: email. I run several domains including my own company and my own vanity domain and several more for friends. I have been doing it for decades.
Goog, MS and co do follow standards and if you do too, they will be largely merciful if you keep your nose clean. I have even managed to run an email system from my home connection as a test IPv4 and 6. I'm UK based. It does seem that IP denylists do seem to be a bit brutal in the USofA, so that might explain the downer meme on self hosting email.
The future is and always will be self hosted if you give a shit.
But I want the next thing. Which is like Tailscale2, but for people, not machines.
I want to tell Tailscale2 about all of the people in my life, and which of my self-hosted apps they're allowed to talk to. And if they're also running a self-hosted app, then I want our apps to federate together.
It feels like we're suuuuuper close to having this.
I get that you can basically do this with Tailscale. Basically. But I want the next thing to be designed from the ground-up around this kind of design. People, sharing apps with each other.
I can also see it possible to 'self-host' things once you use a cloud where you can do 'confidential computing' stuff aka. the hosting provider does not have access to whatever it is you're running. That functionality is there on the major clouds now (EC2, Azure, GCP) all have the Intel/AMD/Arm TME/SEV/RME stuff implemented but finding it on a device that you can self-host in your little storage cupboard is impossible right now (EPYC 9004 seems to be the lowest available with that technology). At a minimum you want secure boot + attestation + memory encryption if you are not in control of the hardware space itself.
I barely trust Google.
I trust the long bearded neighborhood nerd much less than most companies. Even if I probably am that person in my neighborhood. But nobody should trust me, and I am not going to tell them to trust me.
Even if everything is encrypted, I can almost guarantee that the community shared server will be confiscated by the police once in the next three decades.
It's strange to me that we never included public spaces in our growth and innovation of the internet over the past 30 years. Of course I expect companies to do their thing as they've had free reign to do, but it wouldn't have taken much cost or effort to add a couple publicly funded data-centers where everyone gets a little space for themselves.
At least in the US, I think it's because we've allowed those who run our government to get far too old. The people running the country have not really understood the public good of the internet outside of commerce. Don't get me wrong, I've benefited from said commerce for my entire career, but I think we, as a society, have lost quite a bit of ground by not collectively owning a piece of this thing as it grew.
Once upon a time the airwaves were ours, and music thrived because of it. These days the airwaves are all practically walled off with massive monopolies controlling them. It's an overall detriment to our creative progress.
I know I'm an old man barking at clouds, but I miss the radio from when I was young - there was actually new and interesting music there. The internet feels the same way for very similar reasons.
that's a huge leap! i think most of us gloss over it, but the rest of the article is predicated on that leap.
the tv you're streaming video to probably runs Android by now. it has a stable internet connection, CPU, RAM, and probably a couple USB ports. why not install the Jellyfin server software on it, attach a USB hard drive, and let it be the machine that hosts all your media? why, actually, do you need to go out of your way to buy a completely new machine for this?
similar argument applies to Immich. you're wanting to co-edit an album among several contacts. you're probably all uploading your photos from a phone. why not just have one of your always-on phones host that album? i shouldn't expect the drain on your battery to serve an album to a few friends is that much more than it took to take those photos in the first place.
to a certain degree, you're "self-hosting" things on a physical server because that's the only platform on which we all still have the ability to run arbitrary workloads on. solve that problem and everything becomes a _lot_ simpler.
I can read the books and acquire the knowledge from my kindle. If Amazon removes it, I can just pirate it?
I get the theoretical argument but as a very pragmatic person it just seems like tilting against the windmill.
My whole music collection sits on my computer in the form of well sorted mp3/flac/wav files. I buy only music where I get files or a physical carrier medium (Vinyl, Tapes, ...)
My whole movie/series collection sits on a jellfin server I can reach via wireguard from literally everywhere.
You get the idea. For me having the file and being able to scroll through my collection and decide what to pick from my collection is part of the fun. I am a musician myself and I earn more in a week in bandcamp (a few hundred bucks a year) than I would earn in 100 years on Spotify (60 cents a year), so if you wanna support the artists, doing it this way benefits them greatly.
Certain things will be cloud-based or otherwise provider-hosted. Some things will remain self-hosted, for those who prefer it.
It's like owning a car: you take the trouble to maintain it, but it's yours and will take you where you want, without the limitations of a taxi or even a rented car. I live in NYC and don't own a car, for I have too little use for it. OTOH if I were a plumbing contractor, I most definitely would own a car, or maybe a light truck. One size does not exactly fit all.
https://selfh.st
On such an instance, one can share a folder with a friend, for instance. And I think Nextcloud is even working on federation (?).
One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is in your country).
You would put two in different locations for redundancy and it begins to be a personal “cloud”.
Another option is an app like nextcloud. You learn it and it does everything 80% as good as possible, which is often more than enough!
No you never owned them, only a really permissive (for amazon) license that permitted access to them.
> Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things
Self-hosting is more about deploying self-selected software onto a server. It can be a server at home, but I for one have a lot of services running on a VPS. Self-hosting is more about control of the data and software, than the location of the hardware.
> Well...since our friends can't access our server, the only good way to do that would probably be using an app like Google Photos or iCloud
Get a domain and set up a subdomain for Immich (maybe add a tunnel if it is a home server). I have friends using my Immich instance without problems, it's just another app.
> I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I can't see how one can convince people to switch to a community cloud if Apple Cloud etc. exists. Most people just won't understand the difference or benefits.
(and many comments here didn't seem to read it)
To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors.
But in practice, this isn't how it turns out:
* Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes.
* Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether.
* The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence.
* Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.)
* I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere.
If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work.
I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.
Who is doing this anyway? Nowadays everyone has his instagram profile on private and if you need to share some pics, you do it via Airdrop. lol
I self-host the following:
But why should a (public) library be interested in providing such services? For funding? What about costs? On for example censorship/regulations/compliance/maintenance etc?
I'm not so sure a publicly funded library would have any interest in doing that. Think about it, if libraries can/welling to do any of that, then Amazon would never have any chance to grow this big.
I think that's why only private companies is capable of doing it, at least currently. They found out a way to make a profit while operating a sustainable (all things considered) cloud service.
In fact, the at-cost service provided by the libraries will probably collapse as soon as a for-profit company comes up with a cheaper plan.
Also, host by a library still creates centralized service, which comes with all problems that a centralized service inherits. It only shifts the problem, not solving it.
You're almost there with your excellent lineup of self-hosted tech. Just throw in Headscale and some Tailscale clients and you'll be there. (Or any number of mesh VPN alternatives, like NetBird)
> It's secured behind our own VPN.
> So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip? Well...since our friends can't access our server
Hardware: The Cloud
Applications, Data, Control: Self
https://librarysocialism.org/
What if instead, you just store local copies of your data, possibly organized and synchronized? If necessary it can be done manually, just download anything important enough that you might want it later. If a service decays, then import it into another.
A big point the author makes is that many cloud providers don’t let you download the data. But any media that can’t be accessed outside bigco’s cloud can’t be uploaded to your cloud in the first place. If bigco’s cloud prevents you from downloading data that you create or upload, only then the solution is to use a (possibly self-hosted) alternative. However, in practice I rarely see this happening, for example downloading from Google Workspace and OneDrive is very easy (it can even synchronize a folder on your local machine), and if you’re worried about it happening in the future, again, you can backup important files.
I think its not the future in its current form either, because it requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays. But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.
Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full of negative impact.
Here is an overview of how the payments work: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
And here is the software you can try for yourself over a weekend: https://github.com/Qbix
If any of you do, let me know what you think!
I have interviewed a lot of people on my channel, including founders of Freenet and MaidSAFE (now called Autonomi) which do in fact replace “the cloud” already, through entirely peer-to-peer nodes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179795
If anyone here knows Ted Nelson, please put us in touch! I would love to interview him about his vision for Xanadu
For my part, however, I am embracing a different model, where a “QBOX” black box would be hosted by our franchisees in the cloud, among other places. Placing the protocols inside the EC2 instances makes them untouchable by Amazon. Because AWS, Google et al legally are not allowed to go inside those boxes and mess with the software, or even read the contents of the RAM. And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?
I think of the centralization of content and the licensing as something that works so long as it’s a commodity market, that is, it’s hard to 2x the price of an ebook over a dead tree which I can own. Investors may wish otherwise, but they have to add tons of value to get consumers to play along.
I’m fine with commodities in my life. Power and water and gas come to mind. They cost what they cost and I don’t have problems with it.
I could build a nas and run software and admin it, or I could pay $20/mo to Adobe and another $33 to Apple for my family’s shared storage. Done. Of course, if the benefits of commoditization evaporate and it looks like the streaming market, then I’m wrong and would have to change track.
The privileged enjoy far more privacy and autonomy and this is brought into sharp focus with wonderful hobbies like self-hosting. Perhaps it all boils down to end-stage capitalism, and perhaps there's a technical solution where selflessness overcomes end-stage capitalism. Someone else mentioned incentives and yeah, that'll help, but hopefully we'll collectively choose to do the hard thing because it's the right thing. Heck, maybe the right thing will also be the easy thing if we come up with better ideas like yours.
But if I where to do such a thing:
1. Cloud only used to send and store locally encrypted compressed backup data
2. Open an ssh port to the public, but deny logins. Only allow logins using ssh keys.
3. Download data from my system using sftp/scp
This protects you from being chased by DRM lawyers because the system is not public. Plus it is very simple to setup.
Setting up a Cloud System like described here is very great for end users, but it could get you into court, or at the very least lots of take-down notices.
That's old school P2P since 25 year. this is not new and not future...
There are two "futures" to disambiguate here. The future for for-profit and institutional entities, which is not self-hosted. And the future for human persons, which is. The former will probably be HTTP/3 (quic over UDP) exclusively with CA TLS required while the future for humans remains on HTTP+HTTPS HTTP/1.1.
I won't be too many more years before the corporate future completely divorces itself from the actual web and goes full HTTP-IS-JUST-A-TRANSPORT-FOR-JS-APPS and becomes unable to even visit normal websites. For "security" reasons, of course.
My takeaway of the middle part is that the author had certain expectations about self hosting that weren't realistic and they jump to certain conclusions I would not have jumped to.
Yes it's true that we here are an extremely privileged bunch but over the decades I've seen tech become widely more accessible even before. People were paid a bunch of money just to write HTML in 1997 and in 2025 anyone can write a production ready website using the SOTA LLMs.
I am convinced the future is self-hosted (which is why I clicked on this link!) and as the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. From that lens, majority of the public not self-hosting is a cost-benefit, not a knowledge issue. Ergo, if tomorrow TikTok charged every person $500/mo, most people would figure out a way to run their own federated TikTok (but most likely just start using a similar but cheaper service).
Consider, there will be a future when Google will struggle to make money (gasp! how can that be?!) and many years before that day comes, all the "free" gmail accounts will be gone - because by then, email will cease to serve as a method for a company to mine novel information, I imagine there will be no "free" GMail although "free" email might still exist then just because the cost to provide 10GB email would be insignificant and worth good PR to someone (but at that point, not Google).
Name a more iconic duo
You do exactly that.
"Oh but security."
Any security you get from hiding behind a firewall is illusory at best. You still need to keep on top of updates and tech news. And I want to be able to access my stuff from wherever too.
Most of my friends don't have to, because they have me and at least 3 other friends who also self host.
There's a couple of things I won't let others in (like, my email domain. That's like my last name, so nope). But things like _sharing a video_? Yeah, I'll let them log in.
All because Big Corp does anti open software/anti privacy thing.
Give me a break.
These platitudes ring like propaganda. I do what I want with my computer and data. You don't get to choose to "connect with me".
> Beyond individualism
To authoritarianism.
It's fine if the author wants to do all this but the kind of "we should all do X, which goes against your privacy/data/control beliefs because it's for our greater good" sounds so Rich CEO that knows better, kind of talk.
That's one reason we're building https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/
Instead we should have ideas of AUTH, AUTH fraud (distributing content with wrong authorship), the right to generate revenue by distribution.
Restricting distribution of something that is essentially free to distribute feels wrong. If you tried to explain to aliens that you had solved "food" with a replicator but The Gov actually banned this and people had to starve ... you would likely be met with some questions.