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I run some of these but I don’t think it will take off in the mainstream unless we can get the process of setup and administration out of the 1970s.

It needs to be like installing apps on a phone with seamless auto update. Running Proxmox or Docker or even one of those self hosting oriented distributions is too complex for most people to bother with. As soon as you say “install this distribution on your server” you have lost most people.

It’s not just lack of technical skill. Even most people who are perfectly able just don’t have time to hassle with it.

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Yep. Shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than running an app on your phone. I'm working on this with my main side project. Curious to see if there's actually a market for it, providing software to make it seamless and selling tunneling bandwidth.

You've probably already seen it, but if not, checkout https://sandstorm.io/ It didn't do too well commercially, but might have been ahead of it's time

Sandstorm is awesome, but it's nowhere near as simple as installing an app on your phone to use it. Selfhosting something like NextCloud shouldn't be more complicated than selecting it from an app store and going through a quick OAuth flow to tunnel traffic from a domain name.

Completely agreed - setting up Sandstorm itself is a bit of a hassle. Once it's installed, additional apps on the platform are extremely easy though.

Thanks for pointing out nextcloud! Hadn't seen that one before.

What's your project btw?

The real killer for Sandstorm is that each app has to be modified to work with it, and they tend to get out of date. It just never gained critical mass as a platform.

But it had many advantages in terms of security and usability. I think if we can ever truly get selfhosting for the masses off the ground, something like Sandstorm will eventually thrive.

> What's your project btw?

It's not public yet. I'm working on the client software side and partnering with PrivateRouter.com to build out the network. We're shooting for a beta release in the next couple months.

I looked at it and it mandated login with a big cloud provider like Google, which almost completely defeats the purpose by giving them access.

It sounds like you looked at a very early prototype circa 2014? Sandstorm has supported login via email, LDAP, and SAML for a long time.

Thank you so much for sandstorm btw! It's a really incredible piece of software

Selling tunneling bandwidth won’t be a good model. People will just use things like ZeroTier and Tailscale and go P2P.

The market I'm targeting (which may or may not exist) is non-technical. They can be expected to conceptually understand things like data ownership, e2e encryption, privacy, etc, but setting up ZeroTier would be beyond them. Again, the phone app model. Go to the app store, select NextCloud, install. It's up and running and secure by default. No CLI, no port forwarding, no DNS management, no IP addresses. Just install and use it like any other app, except it's running on your hardware and (preferably) a domain you control.

> It needs to be like installing apps on a phone with seamless auto update.

The problem is, even if that might be ideal for the masses, it is in direct opposition to the values of many self-hosters today (like me).

Ask HN about Ubuntu's snap packages, and you'll know what I mean.

pikapods is the closest thing ive seen to that so far. the server is managed by someone else so you just have to sign up and choose what apps you want, unlike yunohost or cloudron where you need to setup up your own server first

https://www.pikapods.com

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