Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves these days in the age of privacy?

Because it's a pain in the ass and people don't care enough to. People don't want the fediverse, they want an app. They don't want to know about cloud and infra primitives, they want their photos in their phone and for them to be safe and shareable. They want their iMessages and WhatsApp to JustWork(TM).

> How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations?

You cannot. Make non profits to manage this infra. Wikipedia, Lets Encrypt, etc. Hacker News is a benevolent dictatorship funded by a VC fund and run by someone passionate about the work. Incorporate a 501c3, spin up a deposit account, and start sourcing donations and funding to pay for infra and people.

This is not a doomer comment. Enable the power admins and passionate folks to deliver a great experience to normies with as little effort as possible. Literally how Wikipedia functions: datacenter, paid admins, passionate volunteers curating bytes.

(Would be cool if Cloudflare supported one click deploy of Fediverse tools into their edge cloud; scale when you need, get your data out of R2 and databases on demand so you're not locked in; having to pay for infra is inevitable, that is to be solved for)

> Because it's a pain in the ass. People don't want the fediverse, they want an app.

It seems that I enjoy the pain with many other people on r/selfhosted. I will call that pleasure I feel, The Pleasure of Pain.

I think that was what the web was about since the beginning and lasted for a good couple of years before targeted ads and "data became the new oil".

Edit: I replied before the GP edited the comment.

I do not fault the r/selfhosted masochists, no kink shaming here, but recognize outliers vs the mean. Go talk to average folks for 15-60 minutes on the street about what social (video, communities, threads/twitter/x/whatever, etc) means to them, this will help calibrate perspective. This is just product and user research. Find out what people want and build it, don't build what you think they want. Product market fit is not just for startups.

Generally I'm for self hosting everything that I can, I just can't help myself pointing out that currently the most popular thread on r/selfhosted is "I'd rather kill myself than host SMTP again (self.selfhosted)" :D

> on r/selfhosted

If you're not participating in https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted from your selfhosted Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc... instance, I question your commitment.

I second this!

Most people would like the privacy, but not the responsibility and concomitant work.

Then a goal should make the responsibility as minimal as possible (buying a box, inserting a thumb drive and answering a few questions and you're off to the races).

You misunderstand. Responsibility cannot be avoided.

- power's out at your house. You should have bought a UPS.

- internet's out at your house. You should have a router with a backup connection.

- security exploit in the wild. You should have configured automatic updates.

- update repo changed URLs. You need to change the config.

- you enabled open signups, and now strangers are distributing MP3s from your images directory. You need to kill those accounts and change the config.

- you let your cousin have an account, and now he's in a flamewar with half of Australia (which he thinks is Austria, and also he believes is ruled by the Illuminati). You need to shut that down and talk to other admins about getting off of their blocklists...

Great list. A few more:

- Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege, or jump through hoops to evade their intentional breakage.

- Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs, posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using your host and now the police are knocking down your door in the middle of the night and dragging you in for questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors eye you suspiciously from then on.

self hosting is how much of that are you willing to put up with.

Everything is a possible point of failure. Of those there are those you can control and those you can not. Just adding in a DNS resolver ups the number of possible points of failure by 2. Mix in a proxy server with TLS rewriting. Add in a few more. Add in your docker source of containers is gone more failure. That on top of your usual 'computers are broken in weird ways' most of the time.

Outsourcing that to a 3rd party is tempting, very tempting. But you are also sacrificing other things to do so. So you have to balance those two opposing forces. Sometimes picking up the phone and saying to someone on the other end 'fix it' and they fix it is useful. Other times you digging thru hundreds of forums (or chatgpt these days) and figuring out what is wrong is interesting too and has its uses.

That most people just sign up for something and just want it to work. I totally get.

maybe not exactely what you're looking for (not open source and not non profit) but there is some solutions out there like this one: https://elest.io/

More like https://discourse.org/. You can run it yourself, but you can also just have them ding a credit card every month and not think about it again. Wordpress has Automattic, and I'd like to see the same for Peertube and Mastodon. With Mastodon, one can then go to folks and say, "Heh, here is a turnkey solution to migrate to for your 1:many and social interaction needs, fully managed." As long as these applications support an S3 compatible target for backups and restores, portability is a database and object backfill and DNS switch away. If you want strong durable storage, the Internet Archive has Vault, a product that can act as long term storage of last resort for digital preservation.

Lets Encrypt serves nearly 192M websites with 13 full time staff and an annual budget of approximately $3.35M, for example.

I am using https://masto.host/ for Mastodon and https://elest.io/ for Lemmy. They are fully managed.

I'm not worried about who owns my data, but I do want to have a stable identity. The first Mastodon server I signed up with mysteriously disappeared after a couple of weeks, so I decided I was better off paying a small monthly fee to put it on my own domain.

And even when you give them an app and basically spoonfeed them with the alternative, the small group that has come before will act like a bunch of elitist NIMBYs who will cry about their small "community losing character".

You write this as if the Eternal September problem doesn't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I know, but I am saying in the context of those that were already on Reddit and just wanted to move to an alternative place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com