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> The major problem I think is NAT

NAT is not a problem. All you have to do is configure port forwarding on your router correctly. Dynamic IP assignment is a bit more of a problem, but it can be overcome by using dynamic DNS services. All of this is fairly trivial.

> I don't mind serving them from my home

I do. And I think it goes for a lot of people. My connection is residential, so somewhere in the ToS it says that I cannot run public servers off of it. Besides, there is no guaranteed uptime, I would need to deal with things like backups, hardware replacements and whatever other maintenance myself. Whereas with a service like Instagram, I just take pictures on my phone and upload. There is no overhead, my stuff is always available and I don't have to worry about backups.

> All you have to do is configure port forwarding on your router correctly. Dynamic IP assignment is a bit more of a problem, but it can be overcome by using dynamic DNS services.

But most people don’t even know what a ‘port’ is, let alone do they know that their router may let them change some settings.

> there is no guaranteed uptime, I would need to deal with things like backups

Are these important criteria for a federated system?

> my stuff is always available

Until it’s not because the centralized provider went out of business/censored you/was acquired/killed the product for strategic reasons

EDIT: typo

I agree with the other two points. The first one is not just something that you can change in router configuration. I am talking about CG-NAT. It's implemented by ISP and is not something that you can bypass.

> But most people don’t even know what a ‘port’ is, let alone do they know that their router may let them change some settings.

upnp was made for them.

> Are these important criteria for a federated system?

As long as I am storing data on my node and/or use my node to access the system, yes, it is. Also, the comment I was replying to just said "The solution I think is instead of hosting it on cloud we host it at home" and suggested running a server on a Raspberry Pi. Nothing about federation.

> Until it’s not because the centralized provider went out of business/censored you/was acquired...

What do you think is more likely, that Instagram goes out of business or that a Raspberry Pi sitting under my bed dies and takes my photos with it?

Raspberry PI is just an example. I am pretty sure if people started looking into self hosting we can certainly come up with networks and devices that can compete with centralized services.

We can even come up with something that would ensure critical data is always available via redundant nodes. Look at BitTorrent, I am pretty sure nobody would have thought it would work flawlessly before it did.

You are correct, I was assuming federation in a decentralized system. If it’s an isolated node in your home, it looks a lot different, and I agree with your administration pain points.

> What do you think is more likely, that Instagram goes out of business or that a Raspberry Pi sitting under my bed dies and takes my photos with it?

Of course your RPI is more likely to die than Instagram going out of business. But with Instagram, the risk is more around them booting/censoring/sharing your stuff.

Does Google Picassa still exist?

No. Picasa doesn't exist. But all my photos are now in Google Photos, very much intact, even though I have had multiple device failures over the years and if I was hosting these photos myself chances are I would not have them by now.

When I say NAT I mean CG-NAT implemented by ISP. You can't bypass it

>When I say NAT I mean CG-NAT implemented by ISP.

Are there any reliable statistics on how widely deployed carrier grade NAT to residences is? A cursory google search[1] doesn't reveal the data. Also, the top search result of ServerFault Q&A[2] has some speculation but no definitive statistical answer.

As an anecdote of 1, I've never personally experienced CG-NAT in 20+ years of residential internet use. I'm in the USA and have had various ISP service from AT&T DSL, Comcast coax, and Verizon FiOS and the ip addresses assigned to the WAN port of the routers were always the public ip visible on the internet.

I'm guessing CG-NAT is more prevalent on mobile phones or smaller ISPs. (But most smartphone users wouldn't want to run battery-draining decentralized server software on their mobile devices so CG-NAT wouldn't really be the barrier in that scenario.)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+residents+isp+"ca...

[2] https://serverfault.com/questions/895270/how-widely-deployed...

This might be region specific in that case. Over the years I've also switched multiple ISPs, not single one of them was without CG-NAT. I'm in India. It might have to do with subscriber base and available IPs.

My UK ISP (Hyperoptic) _only_ offers CG-NAT for IPv4 unless you buy an IPv4 address (by buy, I mean rent) but they do also give you a nice big IPv6 range, so you could use that (I host my one and only home hosted service on IPv6).

That's exactly what FreedomBox is trying to do. https://freedombox.org/

They have a lot of work to do on user friendliness and design though.

I'd rather see something like YUNOHOST partner with a hardware provider.

A major obstacle to your proposal is the near-universal blocking of port 80 inbound on residential ISPs.

I haven't seen this happening with Indian ISPs so far but have read quite a few responses here on HN which mention the same issue that you did.

I think if we have enough momentum with self hosting sooner or later one provider will unblock ports and incoming connection and soon others will follow the same practice out of competition. Maybe I am being too optimistic here.

> The major problem I think is NAT which is preventing direct hosting of content from home. Solve that and you most probably have solved decentralization.

That's mostly solved via dynamic DNS. But there's still a bigger issue:

The ISP. It always comes down to the pipe. If the provider of the pipe doesn't want your traffic flowing over them, they can cancel your service, throttle you down, whatever.

Also - at least for most people's home service ISP - the TOS usually is explicit about "no servers" - that's the rub. Some will look the other way about a server, if it isn't popular, or is only used privately - but whether they do or don't, they hold that axe right above your neck, and can bring it down any time they want.

This even applies to business class pipes; ie, most home ISPs provide business service (some restrict it to non-residential addresses, but many or most understand SOHO and allow it - just pay the $$$) - but they can restrict what you do with that pipe (ie - no porn, etc).

In the case of bigger pipes - like say you colo your own server at a major datacenter - even the guys providing the "big pipes" in theory could cut you (or the datacenter!) off if they wanted to, depending on the content flowing over their pipes.

If we're ever going to do decentralized right - we need to fix that part. And that so far hasn't proved to be easy to do. The main problem has been that the pipes still are in a limbo of "are they a common carrier" - and how far does that extend. If they are a common carrier, then everyone should be able to flow over the pipes - but cable ISPs block that (and then you have the lovely ALEC based legislation in conservative areas that work to block public ISPs, city-owned broadband, or even other companies, like Google Fiber, from expanding against entrenched interests).

> The major problem I think is NAT which is preventing direct hosting of content from home.

There's UPnP to attempt to automatically configure routers, and failing that there's UDP hole punching to establish a connection beween two NATed peers with a few packets from a third host (STUN or similar). You can use the hosts where UPnP worked to coordinate the connection between NATed hosts.

It's not trivial to implement, but it doesn't look impossible, and for example WebRTC seems to do a decent job.

No, the major issue is DDoS attacks.

What's going to HAVE to happen is enough competition among providers that you can issue a request to your local provider to filter out traffic, which you will NOT be billed for in any way.

That will actually start pushing pressure upwards to do the same, eventually reaching the backbone and/or across it to other providers, and killing 'spam' traffic will actually work.

As a side bonus this might help ISPs identify infected customers and get some help to them.

The true cost IMHO is time, time to learn it, to deploy, configure, update, manage, etc. Even if the hosting was dirt cheap, I don't want to spend my time doing it.

Another major problem is the agreement you sign with your ISP that says you won't host a server on your home internet account.

Are you living in the US? I live in Singapore and my ISP encourages me to host my own stuff. With a static IP and 1GBit/500MBit there's enough bandwidth available.

Yes. You can get all that when you sign up for a business account here, but usually not on residential accounts.

In the U.S. unfortunately the vast majority of ISPs make hosting your own services a direct violation of their terms of service. And worse yet, the U.S. - at least in many, many of its regions - lacks competition to jump to any ISP who would allow "at home" services. It really sucks here in the U.S. - at least for this kind of stuff.