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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

They probably don't care or think they have nothing to hide or probably never stumbled across numerous self hosted alternatives

https://selfhosting.quest/search?q=wiki

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Self-hosting also means you'll have to make sure it's up and secure at all times. I used to self-host a ton of things, but keeping a decent security posture has become so much effort it's just no longer feasible for me, and no longer fun, so I try to use SaaS with a good track record and a backup/export option for anything critical these days.

Self hosting has only got easier in the security regard thanks to solutions like tailscale

Tailscale is a centralized service that your whole network is exposed to. I'm using them but if you're self-hosting for security or privacy reasons, that's probably not what you'd want as they or someone who compromises them would essentially own your network and it doesn't get much more critical than that. You can monitor and harden your infrastructure against that, but that's no longer easy. If you trust Tailscale with all your traffic, including from/to your notes app, I guess you could just as well trust a SaaS notes solution with a good track record and support for exports/backups.

Tailscale is only partially centralized (the admin portion). The actual traffic flow is not.

But also, I use Headscale so I'm self-hosting my tailscale as well.

As a self-hoster, I would totally recommend to the average person to self-host services on your LAN, and just use tailscale to extend your LAN beyond your house (for example on your laptop and phone) so you can get to things when you're not at home. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I like self-hosting when I can, too, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to the "average person". Especially if they would come back to me for tech support.

The average person is not capable of self-hosting software and SaaS is much nicer looking / more fully features 99% of the time. I say this as someone who loves self-hosting and self hosts most of my own stuff.

A generic wiki is not an alternative to Notion. And believe me, I have looked.

Might not be for you but it is for me and countless others.

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