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Comment by mervz | Hacker News Reader

So if an application uses a 3rd party provider for authentication (Google, Github, etc) is this no longer considered "self-hosted", despite it running on user's hardware?

I'm curious to know where you draw your imaginary line.

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SES is an email platform. So Plunk is a self-hosted email platform - which uses a cloud platform to actually send email. If it's not sending email by itself, it's not a self-hosted email platform.

Those apps using 3rd party auth providers almost universally have them as an optional plugin, allowing you to choose one of a dozen auth providers or your own self-hosted one. You're not tied to any specific 3rd party platform, and rarely tied to any 3rd party platform at all.

if we look at the philosophy behind self-hosting - to be able to host it ourselves, aka not rely on an external party for hosting, that means that if an external party is down or otherwise unavailable, then that line becomes fairly apparent. If 3rd party auth is required, then it's not really self-hosting then is it, because if that third party is down and the software can't be used, then that philosophy is violated. if it's optional, then that's fine though.

For something to be considered self-hosted, If the bombs drop and civilization is over and me, and my home lab are the only survivors, can I still use that software? I'd probably have other concerns in that case, like how am I going to survive nuclear winter, but that's where the imaginary line is.

That certainly rules out all chat, email, and peer to peer software.

Other than that, what's your power supply like?

I think you are mistaking interoperability with a network with dependency with a propietary service from a specific vendor. These are different things.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179737

Comms software can't be used if there is nothing to Comm with.

how so? ircd will keep running just fine on my server, as well as exim and dovecot for email. external Name resolution would be an issue, but I can run internal DNS for the other survivors that join my network.

edit: prmoustache understood your comment better than i did.

If an IRC deamon runs on the only server left in the world .. what's the point? Who's going to log in?

the question was if it is self hosting or not, and eg slack and discord are not. so regardless of how many humans are still alive to use it, on the only server still running, the survivors could use something self hosting whereas they could not use one that required a system that was down.

The answer given was:

> If the bombs drop and civilization is over and me, and my home lab are the only survivors, can I still use that software?

which rules out any software used to connect to non existant other servers or people.

Sure, the software "works" .. it just doesn't do anything .. ie. it can't be "used".

Yes it does.

That ircd servers in the example above can still be used with a bot as an automation tool (at that point as the only survivor the security would be the least of your concerns), as a way to invent imaginary friends to pretend your life is less miserable, whatever.

Or say you have a mastodon or pixelfed instance. Sure no other instance will ever connect and no other user will ever be able to see your posts...but you. Which could include some fond memories you want to keep.

It's a pointless intermediary when you have the bots directly there on your last remaining server though.

These semantic games are obfuscating the real issue here; tying the definition of "self hosting" to the "If the bombs drop and civilization is over and me, and my home lab are the only survivors" scenario is less useful than a two handed pit saw to a sole survivor.

I appreciate your assist to what I consider to be fragmede's "foot in keyboard" moment of poor definition, I suspect we're all better served with a better definition.

It depends if that 3rd party provider is mandatory or not or if you have the option of having local auth / your own keycloak server, whatever.

Once you have an external requirement and not option, it is no longer a self-hostable software.

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