The future is not self-hosted

It is definitely true that piracy is primarily a service problem, not an ethical one.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

No you never owned them, only a really permissive (for amazon) license that permitted access to them.

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.

Hardware: The Cloud

Applications, Data, Control: Self

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

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!

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).

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

> 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.

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 self-host the following:

     Video: Jellyfin
     Audio: Navidrome
     Audiobooks: Audiobookshelf
     Phone image sharing: Immich
     Home automation: Homeassistant
     Office suite: NextCloud
     Monitoring: LibreNMS
     Compute: Proxmox
     AI/LLM local: open-webui

> 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

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)

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.

(and many comments here didn't seem to read it)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

That's one reason we're building https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/