It was an idea that never went away. Many people have wanted to self host everything. Sadly companies have found it easier to centralise, and then as a bonus can monetise that data.
We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.
Even today, I doubt I could get anyone to just give me a smartphone.
So the next best thing is trying to operate in the constraints that apply, such as most people being unwilling to learn new things and going down the path of least resistance.
That some people don't want to spend time learning the thing that you happen to find interesting doesn't mean they're wasting their lives.
There was no choice but to use someone else’s computers for moving around large files. Plus CGNAT and whatnot making people have to use dynamic DNS. If a turnkey solution could have existed 20 years ago, maybe a market for it would have developed before the big companies locked it down.
Even if I’m wildly in favor of user control over data, I’d venture to say that there still is no choice but to use someone else’s computers, and not just for performance reasons. If applications have to gather every individual user’s data that gets shown to another user from somewhere outside their servers every time, won’t reliability and consistency and UX likely become nonexistent, in addition to the unusable performance?
Decentralized does not need to be slow like that. And very limited upload does get to be a problem if you want more than a couple people/servers to be able to access your media posts at the same time.
The person you replied to is assuming a reasonable distributed system.
But self-hosting machines are susceptible to the "I can only upload pictures and videos at 5-10mbps" problem. That requires more difficult peer-to-peer systems.
The first problem only requires getting small bits of data onto the same machine. The second problem requires getting large amounts of data onto many machines. Or reasonably symmetrical upload speeds.
I, and many like me, would pay for centralised service or any other service if it meant that we own our data and can tune the algorithms to our own preferences. I wont pay for doom scrolling, but would gladly pay for algorithm to serve me content that would better my human experience.
Governments have given corporation to much power, people need to rise up agains that, if it remains the same in AI age, we humans, and our collective mind would erode to the point of no return.
Unequivocally, users water plants that deliver in demand fruit while being most convenient and cheapest.
So, why can't I have that?
During my standard install of my favourite distro, I would only need to enter my name, subdomain and email password for everything to be magically installed, so I have a standard web site, some file sharing and email out of the box.
However, it would take me a fortnight to get this setup and I wouldn't have a clue how the email actually worked, if it worked. This wouldn't be my first rodeo either, so I wouldn't be starting entirely from scratch. I am also sure that there are some that have setup umpteen virtual linux machines that they could get everything done by tea-time.
Whether two hours or two weeks, it is still not that much work in the bigger scheme of things, which makes me wonder, why haven't I got some all-singing and all-dancing bash script that automates the whole process? But why has nobody else done it either, to make it fully open source and as easy to obtain as it can be?
Also, why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this? It could take the mainboard and power circuitry from any laptop, and, out the box, provide a decent web server, mail server and whatever else.
There is a suspicious absence of products in this space.
Step 0 is to secure that box, as routers are obvious targets, even before they have self-hosted data. There are some products based on RPi, NAS and router form factors.
> suspicious absence of products in this space
Earlier efforts:
Apache Wave (federated)
Chandler
Diaspora
FreedomBox
Microsoft Groove (p2p)
Urbit.org
Sandstorm.io
As for security, it is all a bit meh. If you have a box that only runs https: with no other ports open, you are half the way there. If you are just running static pages then you are done. If you run a NextCloud type of beast then you are opening things up, but my hunch is that it works just fine with nobody losing sleep on it.
Plex is obviously not true self hosting, but it’s a lot closer to it than a Netflix subscription, and the number of people who I do not consider very tech savvy who have not only been joining other people servers but trying to set up their own is staggering lately. And they’re not simply doing it because they want free movies or something. A lot of them have done it for the same reason I initially started: their kids.
I am concerned about the media that is put in front of my kids. I care about what shows they are watching. Kids are going to get their hands on screens there almost is no getting around it, so I would rather not trust YouTube et al with deciding what my kids do and don’t see. I can’t realistically be there to catch literally everything they watch, but if they’re using my server I know they only have access to a certain Library at all times so I can rest a lot easier. In a lot of ways I imagine this is how our parents felt when we were kids. On cable television growing up there were only so many “weird” or troubling things that could pop up, definitely nothing as extreme as we see today, and you could be reasonably aware of what most of those things were and know what channels to forbid/what times your kids should not have free access to the TV.
I found a lot of other parents feel the same way here. They’re just tired of feeling like the Internet is such an incredibly hostile place and want to find ways to take a little power back into their own hands.
I don’t know hopefully something useful popped up in that rant above. I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about this I really haven’t been able to bring together.
I started with CasaOS and Jellyfin. Quickly outgrew Casa and moved to learning Docker and setting up my own container stack, moving from media self-hosting to adding new containers of stuff like budgeting apps. I’m still working on building out my server but every container I add, the goal is basically to self-host a version of something I’m doing on a centralized service on the web and ultimately take my data and privacy back.
I will say some peoples’ elitist attitudes about stuff can be annoying and discouraging; it’s the same general spillover attitude from the Linux supremacy crowd. When I started with Casa I had someone basically tell me I was wasting my time and if I wasn’t running everything in VMs why bother. Which is entirely the opposite attitude to get “normies” and low technical literacy people on board, they need easy one-click install solutions like CasaOS. And if they decide to move onto something more complex, well I’m sure they can figure out how to reimage and rebuild their server in ProxMox or Docker as part of that.
Definitely agree about the elitist attitude problem. The amount of people who dunk on people for using Plex when I think it’s a fantastic jumping off point for true self hosting…it’s just so unnecessary and becomes a missed opportunity.
And I still don't get the "VM for everything" crowd. Why would you do that when you have containers?
It's much simpler and lighter. Any 200€ old corporate PC can run a dozen containers easily. What it can't do is run that same stuff in 12 VMs.