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Comment by nebulon | Hacker News Reader

If you want to selfhost many of those apps, we have built a tool (Cloudron) to take away most of the deployment hassle for many of those apps mentioned in the link. Also to work around the provider lock-in with ipv4 addresses while hosting from your home or on-premise we have a built-in dynamic DNS feature https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns So in the end it doesn't matter if you change ISP or if you don't even have a static ipv4 as such.

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Cloudron is missing apps for most use cases I actually care about.

Can you add a google photos type app? Maybe Piwigo (it has a good mobile app) or OwnPhotos[1] (it has face/object recognition). Lychee doesn't have a mobile app or face/object recognition.

Can you add some communication apps like Matrix Synapse or Ejabberd? Mattermost is walled off from the outside world.

Can you add some social apps like Pleroma or Mastodon?

[1]: https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

I wasn't very much aware of ownphotos looks great and will add it to our backlog. Thanks!

Otherwise, Matrix+Riot is being worked on already. Mastodon is similarly mostly done https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1136/mastodon-microblogging

Our latest addition is now OnlyOffice, currently in testing mode.

Well, Cloudron provides apps for most use cases most people need. So the fact that you need some obscure apps doesn't invalidate Cloudron as a great solution. I've been using it for a long time and love what it has to offer. Plus the devs are great and keep working on making it better.

I think something like Sandstorm/Cloudron is the way forward with decentralization. I'm more than happy to pay someone else to manage all my services for me. But I see where my apps are hosted as the least interesting question. The important issue for me is lock-in. How easy would it be to switch if Cloudron does something I don't like, or if they outright ban me for some reason? If it's easy to switch, that keeps incentives aligned and fosters competition and progress. Does Cloudron do anything to mitigate lock-in?

Since the whole stack runs on your server there is no real way to ban anyone as such. Worst case is that you would loose access to updates, however all our app packages are MIT licensed (eg. https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/nextcloud-app ) as such you could just build the app image with docker locally and push to your server manually.

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