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Comment by MoreQARespect | Hacker News Reader

Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone.

Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".

SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.

This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.

I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

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I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game:

- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing

- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on

- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.

- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.

- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini

- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.

- The Mac App Store was introduced

- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks

And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"

Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.

Basically a Mac Server would have fixed 99% of our needs. Apple could make a Local iCloud Server / iOS Time Capsule where I still have all the content, but would require a subscription just for the backup services. And Apple could charge 3x the Amazon Cold Storage pricing just for reselling it.

I do think this is within realm of possibility if Steve Jobs is still alive. Or at least could be convinced.

Tim Coo only cares about services revenue. And iCloud it is.

Started with Mobile me

https://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/07/steve-jobs-reaction-to-...

It’s coming.

They’ll release an Apple TV that also handles local AI tasks for anyone in the family.

Apple explicitly called it the Digital Hub strategy. But they never went all the way.

The ongoing Services revenue was too great.

SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

so much this. even late 2000s had an upstream problem.

impossible to serve anything with ISP blocking common ports to save their precious upstream bandwidth in a cable network, which is mostly downstream.

i couldn't believe when i moved to a place that had newer DSL tech (one block from the ATT brick building holding the city repeaters, so zero latency baby!) and while cable was giving everyone way over 100mbps connections i was only on 3mbps, but zero latency and 3mbps up too against who knows what that best-case-100mps-down cable really had for up... i could setup servers, had all open ports etc. it was mind blowing and at the same time it's so stupid that it highlights how bad it was then. we still had T1s at work in 2005 iirc.

> This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.

I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.

Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.

It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.

At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.

I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.

I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.

It doesn't have to be difficult to self-host. Like another commenter said, in a diffe world that could be the default. iCloud gives apps an API to sync. The backend doesn't have to be a data center, it could be a time capsule in your living room. You could connect using a private wireguard lan. The protocol could even be built out to support redundant time capsules in case one failed.

But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.

Yeah, at one point in writing this article I had a brief aside about more "off-the-shelf", accessible solutions to self-hosting like Synology. But I cut it because I honestly don't think they make the process that much easier. They help with hardware, but the software setup I think is still pretty difficult. Thanks for reading!

Pre-iphone I had my MythTV server recording and transcoding TV shows and then adding them to an RSS feed that my flip-phone would sync whenever plugged in. Unplug my phone in the morning and watch last night's Daily Show on the bus ride to work. Kind of crazy to think of what we could do even back then

My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that also died as they stagnated). I thought people were a bit silly for spending so much on a phone then, and still do, because by the time I eventually got a "smartphone" with a touchscreen, there was enough competition in the market that still to this day I've never felt compelled by any phone product >$600

I had the iPod Touch and iPhone relatively early (well, much earlier than the general population). I don't remember Shazam being important at all, I think I only discovered it a few years later.

What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most smartphones at the time had clunky resistive touch screens or even little joysticks to move a mouse pointer. With the iPhone, you could scroll with your fingers and it was butter-smooth (at least for the day). The iPhone was a game-changer because you had a device in your pocket that you could browse the web with and it was at least as easy as on a desktop, if not easier.

Just for comparison, this is how you browsed the web at the time on probably the most iconic smartphone at the time (Blackberry):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NuQrjBIofo&t=6s

and on an iPhone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euNlVt60hwk

I second this - for me, it was the browser - it was usable with normal websites.

It was SO much better at browsing than my BlackBerry at the time. Though I vastly preferred all messaging on my BlackBerry.

I think that's a fair point, but I definitely wasn't speaking from the perspective of even the first iPhone version, more from point where the general population had access to them, and my impression was that they enjoyed the novelties that seemed heavily marketed at the time, Shazam being a very relatable problem for almost everyone.

Not only were there Shazam apps on phones pre the first iPhone, but in the first place Shazam was a service you didn't even need a smartphone for! When I first started using it, they had a telephone number (in the UK, I'm not sure which other countries) to call up while music is playing, and 30 seconds or so later it would text you the song that it detected during the call.

I agree that "combining phone with one of the most popular / best in some ways mp3 player on the market" was a big part of it (with web browsing and video playing equally important), but Shazam wasn't a new thing that iPhones brought us.

(I also agree with danieldk that Shazam just wasn't a significant factor for most people on any devices, before or after iPhones.)

That's an interesting bit of history I didn't know about, but my point wasn't that Shazam was a new thing exclusively for the iPhone, but it was among the novelties that helped market it along with the other attributes we agree on. I think the most compelling reason was fashion, not so much technical, because really I didn't know anyone with the very first versions anyway.

This still exists... OsmAnd, offline map app for Android, has 10M+ downloads. Maps.me has 50M+ downloads. Sure, that's not 10B+ of Google Maps users, but still a lot of users.

I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.

Isn't Organic Maps the open source successor of Maps.me?

And CoMaps the successor of Organic

TIL about CoMaps

Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benefit like that from self hosting. I only see better privacy, more control and ownership over your data, and in some cases lower cost (but often higher), and those aren't nearly as powerful motivators for people.

I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

privacy and control are things which people dont tend to think about until:

* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").

* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.

* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).

* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.

* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).

* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.

Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.

And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.

>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

>>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

>This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

Ya but it turned out that smartphones ended up being super convenient once they got good/usable enough, and it unlocked really useful things that you couldn't do before, or just made things more convenient. If I have all my gmail data at home (or on a machine I control in a data center somewhere), does that make anything more convenient for me? Whereas being able to navigate around a new city with zero knowledge of it, translate food packaging when I'm grocery shopping in a foreign country, communicate with with any of people from wherever I am as long as I have my phone on me - those are real benefits.

I do kind of like how you're thinking about this because I'd love to live in a world where I could have ownership over all my emails, social media data, music, etc and have it all be just as convenient (or more convenient than) and work just as well as gmail, instagram, spotify etc do today. But we've definitely been moving in the opposite direction for the last 20+ years and there's good reasons for that:

1. It's easier to have someone else (like google, facebook etc) manage something for you then manage it yourself. And in many cases when there's network effects it's impossible for you to replace the experience you get from one of these services on your own.

2. Most of the time, people aren't gonna do hard things like making good software (and solving the hard problems, not just the fun problems) or building a social network without some way of making money from it (either you paying for a service or them monetizing your data via ads or selling it)

3. It's way easier for them to manage everything if the data is on machines that they control than on your machine, and it way easier for them to get people to pay for a service (and deny them access if they don't pay) if its on their machines too

All that said I'd love to see the iphone of self-hosting someday

I think there is an effort being made for this. Some folks have created https://selfprivacy.org/ and continuously developing it. I follow this project by heart

The very first thing they show on the website is a list of cloud providers.

I don’t think that’s a gotcha. Using a cloud provider in a way that provides easy migration options can be valid on the spectrum of self-hosting options. The ones they list specialize in renting virts by the hour/day/month, not lock-in services with no external equivalent.

> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

Mostly battery life I would think

For single-user single-device scenarios, that's totally doable. It's called a purely-local app.

Where it gets complicated is there's a (totally understandable) expectation these days that your data is synced across multiple devices, and you can collaborate with other users, who may also have multiple devices themselves. In practice, that necessitates some kind of always-on server that maintains state for everyone. A phone can technically do that, but you'd probably kill your battery in the process.

What happens to the site when that phone gets lost or stolen or falls on the floor and breaks?

Phone apps could backup data to another location the same way a laptop can.

but then why not host from that second location?

Battery life, offline access.

A whole host of reasons:

- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.

- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

Right, but you can leave a spare phone plugged in and connected to wifi just like a laptop.

The point is that while phones are able to do what you suggest, they're not fit for purpose. A phone shouldn't be used as a long-term server because it turns into a fire hazard as the battery degrades. And you can't just remove the battery because most phones won't even power on without a battery (even when plugged in).

At that point, you're better off going with some N100 mini-PC or such. But that's not a phone.

Yep, at that point we've circled back to the original years-long conversation about home servers, except now instead of a cheap mini-PC it's a phone. The distinction isn't meaningful.

And I'll remind folks that we've been talking about the power of people owning their own servers in their homes for decades, and yet the vast vast vast vast majority of users aren't doing it.

> Battery life Would it be any more battery life consuming than having an always on connection for push notifications? I used to have a local http/ftp file server running on my Nokia N9/N900 and even on my early Android phones back in the day. I used to still get an all day battery life.

> Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

Dont SMTP servers already retry a few times before giving up? Plus it is not like you're using the phone to host content for the whole of the internet. It would be just for your close circle usually.

I am not saying phones make the perfect servers for all kind of applications but for certain kind of workflows... I think Phones are pretty good. Our network infrastructure (NAT, firewalls etc... limited data plans etc..) is the main headache for most of these use cases. But the network infrastructure is a problem even for our laptops, home computers etc..

What kind of apps would you want to self host on phones?

Offline maps, music/video library, all/most photos. This is all working on my GNU/Linux phone.

All this works on Android also no? OSMAnd, VLC, tons of photo gallery apps exist..

Yes, the question was about self-hosting.

Synology is getting there with their one click install of lots of apps, and a "drop a dockerfile here" for anything else.

I suspect that's just a temporary sweet spot before they start locking things down to their "trusted" (i.e., paid-for) partners.

They're already doing that on the hardware side. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/synology-confirms-ne...

> I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.

So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.

Unlike with smartphones though, I don't really see that anyone has a strong enough incentive and deep enough pockets to bridge that gap.

I think, money is not really the problem here. Self-hosting is a shitshow on the same level and for the same reasons because of which package-management on python has been such a shitshow for so many years. There are too many conflicting usecases, and not enough effort for standardization.

They however can run their own app or desktop app that can to peer to peer communication. The whole point of self hosting is that we can have data and network sovereignty.

I set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here:

https://www.pikapods.com/

Looks cool! Thanks for commenting!

I use your site and it rules! Thanks for building it. Was scrolling to see if someone was gonna mention it. Such a great idea and great execution

This did not happen with the iPhone. It happened with the BlackBerry.

A current delusion of mine is creating the iphone of self-hosting. Claude has me stuck in a manic state where I think I can do anything.

https://thebox.youatme.email/

Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.

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