originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges.
then the industrialists went full-cloud on this idea. and the 'intelligence' got concentrated in a few gigantic industrial warehouses.
but it sure feels more orderly this way. why spread the load when you can focus it and centralize it?
This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports.
In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood.
The lack of that basic infrastructure and demand for always connected devices meant hosting at home was never an option for the broad populace, and so the market never had an opportunity to deliver those solutions.
Yes, it is for big city, but even small ones have something comparable, maybe slower like "3 years ago in big city".
Typical ISP firewall for these IPs are "Port 25 is closed". And it's all.
One problem - typically you can not get good PTR record, your back-resolve will be something like "ip12-45-67.pool34.isp.tld", which is pity for SMTP, but irrelevant for all other protocols.
Unfortunately, this country has started bloody war, and now I'm living in civilized 1-st world country with crappy DOCSIS connection and without static IP :(
I used to self-host while I lived in an apartment with a proper Ethernet connection. Now I have GPON with all the implications vis-a-vis a crappy provider-provided router and shitty service due to their monopoly position, so no real external access for me.
My stuff is now tunneled through a VPS; it works fine, but I’m still salty.
465 is TLS, and is not blocked.
ahem; https://git.drk.sc is hosted in my home office.
I am not sure I can get to the end safely if everything in my professional toolbox is something I rent.
Maybe you have an agreement with another friend and a set of scripts that do this.
Maybe you're using some kind of decentralized backup system where you have a big blob of encrypted, de-duplicated Other People's Backups in exchange for all your stuff being treated the same.
Or maybe you just don't provide all of this, maybe the entire network expects your server to be fragile and is running everything in a virtual machine to start with. You just have a box in the closet that runs a node in the mesh, with however much power and storage you want to throw at it, and this grants you x% of those numbers from ClosetMesh. It's pretty cheap and easy to have enough ClosetMesh storage to do something useful in a box about the size of the one your phone came in.
There is probably at least one SF novel's worth of backstory between where we are now and the world where everything runs on top of ClosetMesh. Do you want to be part of it? There's a bunch of projects trying to make this sort of thing work.
I just wanna have physical ownership of the photos I upload into the cloud
if my shit goes down, only me is to blame and only me has a problem
if my house get's blown over by a river, I have bigger problems than streaming music from my own personal server and backing up my own photos
in a more ideal world, I have some replication on 'friends' servers. but nobody runs their own shit.
Bittorrent-like tech has answers for you here.
... why does one exclude the other?
I used to host my own e-mail. I decided that I couldn't give it the time and effort it deserved, and moved myself and my users to a provider.
The best option is choice. Not forcing one or the other.