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Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

It still is. But nobody is using that feature. People choose to centralize and visit the same 10 sites and to avoid self-hosting.

Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way, but it's sooo much easier for the average non-tech person to not self-host an email server versus using something like gmail. It's the same reason I do not own a lift for my car.. sure technically I can install a lift at my house for my car but then I have to maintain it's hydrolics and I'd only use the lift once or twice a year ... who has time for that? Especially if my thing is fixing piano's and not cars. Let the car people handle cars, let the piano people handle piano's... I think we are in the same situation with tech.

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> Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way

You are _technically_ correct, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier".

These days you are pretty much required to use those same 10 sites if you want to interact with anyone, do business, or find useful information.

Those 10 sites have effectively captured the Internet.

>, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier".

The gp is saying the millions choosing the "easier" action is what causes the network effects.

E.g. another example that applies to tech-savvy programmers: most developers have the knowledge (or can Google a tutorial) to host their own personal git server but most choose not to. The collective millions choosing not to bother with self-hosting leads to emergence of something like Github.

Signing up for a free account on Github is easier than:

- hosting a personal repo at home on a laptop or Raspberry Pi

- buying a $10/month shared VPS server to host it

So even before Github had network effects (say less than 1000 user accounts), it was still easier to create an account on an unproven Github platform than self-host. Those early adopters leads to future strong network effects.

But that also leads to unwanted side effect of Github deleting repositories from DMCA takedowns, etc (aka "censorship").

it really is much harder to self host than it used to.

90s: ask your ISP for a public IP, register your domain, start Apache and off you go

Nowadays: getting a public IP is iffy. All good domain names are taken. Emails from your self-hosted mail server go straight to spam/junk. Fiddling with TLS certificates is close to mandatory. The moment you start your server, you're bombarded by a flood of gratuitous requests, trying out every known vulnerability under the sun. etc. etc.

I wasn't part of the "ask your isp" era, but I would say you're painting nowadays a little more bleak then then it really is.

I can grab a cheap vps within minutes from DigitalOcean or OVH, with a public IP included. Both offer images with pre-configured software, and there are ample guides for setting up just about anything. Certbot/Let's Encrypt will literally setup add the generated TLS cert to your nginx config if you ask it to.

Self hosting is a monumental pain in the ass. Even if you have the technical capability it's still a pain in the ass.

I dunno, I think this could have gone a different direction. It never really worked to self host things, because of IP address scarcity. Maybe if IPv6 had actually rolled out in the 90s, everyone could have had an IP address. Maybe then it would have made sense for people to make software targeting self-hosting. DreamWeaver web pages that you don't have to figure out how to deploy to a server somewhere, mail clients that run truly locally, maybe other different stuff that we never thought of. The earlier versions of these would have still had security and usability problems, but maybe they would have been compelling enough that the effort to fix those issues would have made sense.

A contributing factor to this was the early and still fairly-extant asymmetry between upload and download bandwidth. This is going away slowly, especially with fiber (e.g. Verizon), but it was typical from the end of the dialup era right up until today to have upload be perhaps 1/10th of download bandwidth. This puts quite a crimp in self-hosting anything that becomes (or is hoped to become) particularly successful.

I had a friend who was there at the start of IP-over-cable, and they were particularly excited about the promise that they would be offering symmetric upload/download performance. By the time it became a consumer product, that too had this major asymmetry baked in.

Nowadays you cannot do selfhosting because of NAT and blocked ports on ISP networks.

Well, if you can afford a cheap VPS, you can use something like WireGuard or OpenVPN to work around NAT - just forward all of the requests to the VPS to your own box instead.

I did it a while ago and it seems to work fine to this day: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you... (disclaimer: forwarding ALL ports is usually overkill, unless you're lazy like me)

Alternatively, just ask your ISP for a static IP address, even though that could be more expensive.

Selfhosting can also just be: hosting your own email and website and not on AWS.

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