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Comment by surferbayarea | Hacker News Reader

Self hosted email, chat, messaging, calls is the future. Individuals will own host and run their own services for these on public clouds. There is no reason for giant corporations to own these services.

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I admire your enthusiasm, but most users don’t want to think about or manage these things. Convenience and consistency of experience is the reason for giant corporations to own these services, and unless there is a compelling shift in consumer preferences, that seems unlikely to change.

A million upvotes. $50/year for FastMail to host my email is worth more to me than spending even one hour a year debugging mail server issues on my own hosted instance. Not even once!

It doesn't need to be that difficult. For example, you do not need a CS degree to own a TV, or a smart-fridge, it just works.

Can you open source your tv and smart fridge designs so we can get in on the action?

An intro to your parts suppliers and negotiating mates rates would also help.

There are a couple recent SwiftOnSecurity tweets about this I thought I'd share:

"Your email address is your identity. We are talking the rest of your life. I’ve done custom hosting for 10 years. My first email host got acquired by a conglomerate. That has not been pleasant or confidence-instilling."

"Need to remember, having your own domain means you need to stay financially capable at all times. You end up in hospital and bills lapse and domain scooped by a squatter? Get ready to start over in life like you’re 12. People do not appreciate what it means to have free email."

I would like to believe I'm savvy and diligent to self-host my own email. Odds are I probably am.

But the downside is colossal. One small fuckup on my part, and I lose access to my key to, basically, every institution I engage with. Irreversibly. Even if it never happens, the thought that it could would be a constantly pressing weight in my mind.

I hosted our e-mail server a few years ago and it was a massive pain, because I could never be certain if e-mails were being delivered.

99% of the time it was fine, but then we'd occasionally run into some odd spam vendor who had blacklisted our IP address (presumably from someone who had used it to spam a decade prior).

Maintaining our own spam filters was a bit of a pain.

For our business, I'm pretty happy shelling out $50 a month to have someone else (Google) take care of everything. I'm basically paying that for the security of knowing my e-mails are actually being delivered. Pretty sure most people feel the same.

I have been having the same issues. 99% of my emails go through but every now and then gmail marks one of mine as spam. I generally don't care as usually its other people emailing me because they want something and its their loss if they don't get the email.

My server sends and receives properly. Not my problem if others have misconfigured email servers

You're 100% sure that you're getting your complete email set from your provider? No misguided spam filter dead heading your emails here and there?

Cmon.

Well, I obviously have no control over what recipients do or do not mark as spam, so it's not an absolute guarantee.

But of all the options available, self-hosted was the least reliable.

Yes, because I want my grandmother to self host her email on a server. Sure I could do it for her, but what if I died first? It’s not as cut dry as you make it out to be.

EDIT: I get some grandmothers/fathers could be proficient in this, and power to them for being so. Mine are not, and I’m not going to waste their time teaching them when they’re mostly concerned with living out the remainder of the lives with family, etc.

You use the phrase “public cloud” like cloud is a mundane municipal, state or federal resource like NPR or the office that distributes license plates.

It is a sleight of hand that the big cloud corps have gotten people using the word “public” to describe them.

Future? Self hosting was common place in the 90’s.

And it's far less common nowadays per capita.

Common? For organizations yes (much more so than today), but most users only had dialup at home even in the late 90s

You could get dedicated dialup lines with static IP's. Also, real hard core users, of which I knew several, had dedicated ISDN and 56k lines for much of the 90's. There were also people who self hosted off their university residential network. This was very, very common.

I am a sysadmin and the last thing I want is to have to manage my own services in my free time.

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