Hacker News Reader

Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

Self-hosting is still way too hard. Running your own Plex server on an old laptop shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone.

Folks shouldn't have to understand DNS, TLS, HTTP, IP addresses, ports, NAT, CGNAT, port forwarding, etc in order to run a server application on their own hardware.

I think we can build usable abstractions around most of it, while being secure by default.

[0]: please consider open source Jellyfin instead

View on HN

Docker and Tailscale are all you need. I have all my services in single docker-compose yaml.

Docker and Tailscale are still an order of magnitude more complicated than installing an app on your phone.

Having to use third party repos and trust the uploaders kind of misses the point of self-hosting imo

What's the value of Tailscale in a home network with self-hosted apps?

being able to have a consistent name for your server instead of using an ip address such as "192.168.1.23:4567", which would change often if you didn't set up a static ip.

once you bookmark "devicename:4567" or reference it in some other app, you won't have to change it again.

and of course having outside access to your devices when you are away is a nice plus as well

You could use DHCP for this. It can map your Servernames (their hostnames) to a local domain. eg. devicename.mackrevinack.homstead. But it can also map to just the hostname.

I don't know... most people are too dumb/lazy to install a program using an installer or apk file.

Notice how most of the software listed is free and open source - if the end user can't be arsed to learn a few things, why would the developers go out of their way to accommodate them?

They're just not the intended market.

Plex server has Windows version. If you use Windows, it's just like installing an app on Windows. The only thing is you need to setup port forwarding for remote access.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com