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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

> each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine?

Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that.

So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most independence and freedom. The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

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Now you lost me. Expecting one server per person in a household is unrealistic. Even if software becomes perfect, what about the hardware aspect? Expecting a family of 5 to have 5 servers all available and reachable from anywhere sounds like a nightmare, and just a waste of electricity.

Your whole premise is that self hosting software can become a one-click deploy, if they can achieve that I'm sure different settings per user is possible. If who is legally responsible about what your brother does with the family serve is really such a big question, then let's just accept widely adoption of self hosting is not going to happen.

if the servers are all in the same house then the police is not going to ask who's server they can take, they are just going to take all of them. so if that is a concern, it would be lost. but GP is not talking about people living together, but not sharing with relatives who live elsewhere.

Yeah, this makes intuitive sense too. You share lots of that potential IRL liability with live-in family members anyway.

A server could be a $30 silent soap-sized box hanging on the router consuming 5 watts, you plug it in and it sets up services and domains ready to access. Why would this be a nightmare? It is already feasible on all levels. Assuming the house has fiber, reliability shouldn't be much of an issue.

A server could be a VM taps head

“Hello, Metropolitan Police here. We have a warrant to seize… docker container ab38asdf8765jk on your home server. Go ahead and export its attached volumes and the image. We’ll wait.”

Docker IDs are hexadecimal so that one is invalid. Sorry Met!

That sounds like a you problem, failure to comply will result in forfeiture and imprisonment…

I wouldn’t put it past them… capriciousness in UK policing is a feature not a bug.

I'm gonna be doubly pedantic - that wasn't the container id, that was the actual container name. As a name, it is valid.

I actually did think of that so that's definitely the best kind of correct!

Why do you think this hasn't already happened?

CGNAT (lack of ipv6), and lack of fiber, meaning lack of upload bandwidth.

A 30 dollars box will replace cloud storage, photo storage, video steaming, and all the other services people expect to have? I don't think you have though through what exactly you're trying to replace, we're not talking about tech people wanting to host their static blog here.

A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that.

Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.

Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates.

And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't even get to have a public IP for their router anymore, and having every non-tech person punch a hole in their firewall to access their photos... I'm sure that's going to go well.

And if you somehow manage to do that, how are you going to share your photos in your personal server with your friends? Because that's pretty high in people's needs.

There is always a way to make things more complicated and/or expensive. That is not the goal of the exercise, though.

What I listed is not optional, it's the bare minimum if you want to have a widely-adopted self-hosted solution for someone's digital life.

If you're going to recommend your non-tech family store all their photos in raspberry with a single hard drive with no backup, that's kind of evil.

a cheap virtual host with a reverse tunnel...

> The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others.

How is that the golden rule? I self host and somehow missed that. I think of it more as devolution, you can self host if you want to, or you can use a family hosted option, or a community. That way a balance can be struck between convenience and sovereignty such that as convenience naturally improves so does sovereignty. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good, is a soft gradient all the way down.

Edit: I googled the ‘golden rule of self-hosting’ and all I could find the the parents comment but that seemed to be enough for google AI summary to accept it, so stating it as fact appears to have done so in so far as Googles AI is concerned.

> The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

Some people think otherwise because they trust each other, and understand that specialization allows efficiency and economies of scale.

Even if it's stupid easy to run five servers at home, there's sure to be one person who likes maintaining them more than the other four.

It's stupid easy to load and unload the dishwasher, but my sister didn't like handling the dirty dishes and I didn't like running around and putting them away, so I loaded and she unloaded, and we were both slightly but meaningfully better off on a daily basis because of it. Of course we could each just load and unload our own dishes, but a slight reduction in independence and freedom (counting on each other to do our part) improves things for both of us.

People often--I'd even say usually--work together because they benefit from it, not just because they lack the technical chops to do otherwise.

it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it).

and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i see everything that is posted. if he needs different software he can still host that himself, that's besides the point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a platform for the family to use. a private facebook alternative.

i don't know about your family relationships, but for me family means to support and stand by each other.

> it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that

That's just an usability issue that needs to be solved. In 2002 nobody could believe that even elderly and children could use smartphones 20 years later.

And it turns out maybe children.shouldn't be using smartphones 20 years later.

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