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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

You know what would be an interesting consumer product? A $100 black box you can plug into your home network that runs email, media, and social, applications with no hassle. Knock out dependencies on a dozen third party services in one fell swoop.

EDIT: to clarify, I believe consumer hardware has progressed enough to provide an elegant solution to a slew of simple cloud services which people pay monthly for, i.e. storage. The markup on simple software that is hosted in the cloud is just too high. Now convincing investors to touch a hardware start-up with a 10ft pole...

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I believe that is what sandstorm.io is trying to do: https://sandstorm.io/

Though I haven't used it, and I don't think they sell a "hassle-free" box yet.

Hardware is not the issue. You can do quite a lot of that on a Pi.

No, it's the maintenance. The security updates. And for email and social, the anti-spam/anti-abuse workload.

I agree. email is practically impossible to manage for a hobby-IT person. You need to manage accidental blacklistings, spam, make sure your ISP doesn't block port 25, etc.

Look at synology or one of the other NAS solutions. If you can deal with ARM (ie, not quite enough oomph for docker+vm use) you can get close to $100 price point, and hit all the requirements you mentioned.

However, I suggest forking out a few hundred more for an intel model if you can. My only remaining windows+office instance is now a vm on a 25w box that hosts a half dozen other things. The electricity this saves vs a desktop/home-built server has easily paid for the beefier CPU.

[edit: I estimate this setup is costing something like $20/month, including power + depreciation. Cloud backup is another $10/month, and I run a $1.30 / month cloud vm to host my website.]

Yeah I had a big hulking CoolerMaster Stacker Core i7 super home server before I ditched all my stuff and did the digital nomad thing for a while. Then when I got a home again I was used to just living off a laptop so all I had was a Apple Time Capsule for backups, and eventually moved to a place where it wouldn't route right (no manual MTU settings) so I got a separate router and decided to get the cheapest NAS I could find to replace the backup functionality. I ended up with an ARM Synology and now it does everything that home server did (vpn, git, rsync, backups, full dropbox archive, irc bouncer etc etc) and most of that was all set up with a few clicks in a web UI. And the security updates are someone else's job.

That's the plan of the FreedomBox (http://freedomboxfoundation.org/), but it seems to have stagnated.

If you don't mind the proprietary aspect, there are some NAS boxes that come with a simple(?) GUI for installing and running such services.

I think development is ongoing, but the website doesn't get much attention:

https://github.com/freedombox/

There were several attempts at this back in the dial up days. Here's one of them: https://www.cnet.com/news/gateway-shelves-net-surfing-device...

I've been thinking about it for years, I think it would be a killer product. Even just a $100 self hosted mail server in a black box would be great.

Mail would be hard to host at home since that's what many spammers did. Too many measures in place to discourage it. You would need at least a proxy service to make it work reliably.

Gonna get _so_ hacked. Eventually this is gonna happen but it's gonna be a mostly cloud service, perhaps with an integrated proprietary non-customizable auto-updating chromecast/appleTV like box for media locally. And Google or Apple will sell it to you. I mean, this is what they're already trying to do, but it's not all as integrated as it oughta be.

> You know what would be an interesting consumer product? A $100 black box you can plug into your home network that runs email, media, and social, applications with no hassle.

This basically exists, no? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0181JTPCU/

I think ben_jones is trying to imply that the black box would BE your email server, etc. He did say "Knock out dependencies on a dozen third party services in one fell swoop.", which seems to strongly imply not relying on an email provider, social network provider, etc.

I think he's talking about _services_ not the interface to them, ie: gmail.com, dropbox.com, facebook.com (which is weird, so maybe call it IRC/Usenet?).

Who (non-business) really pays for cloud storage and email anyway? For music you pay for the copyright licenses really. Why would you want to host your own version of facebook? Who would want to join 10+ personal social platforms...

That's where federated networks come in, for example GNU Social[0]. That way you host your stuff but can communicate with people on another network.

[0] https://gnu.io/

> runs email

How do you reliably convince any given home ISP to change your RDNS record?

> The markup on simple software that is hosted in the cloud is just too high

that's why there is a golf rush of competitors offering lower-cost alternatives?

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