Ask HN: What would make self-hosting easy enough for average consumers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would make self-hosting easy enough for average consumers?

5 pointsdani42999 comments

So I've been wondering that almost every household now has some amount of digital data that needs to be taken care of. Some having more data than others.

Considering the current situation of self hosting and NAS products, what do you think needs to change to make an average consumer even consider self hosting or a NAS product?

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In the recent days I've realized that people want more control over their digital data, this became more apparent to me when I saw Sony getting backlash on their recent announcements. People are considering to even pirate music again just because they want more control over their data. So I've been wondering that almost every household now has some amount of digital data that needs to be taken care of. Some having more data than others.

Considering the current situation of self hosting and NAS products, what do you think needs to change to make an average consumer even consider self hosting or a NAS product?

So there a couple of problems to solve in this space.

1. The price of hardware has to return to normal. Otherwise it might take 2 years to see a savings compared to just paying streaming subscriptions.

2. Private access from anywhere. This requires something like a vpn tunnel to a globally available address that otherwise drops all network traffic. There are private commercial solutions for this like TailScale. Otherwise you would need IPv6 access to a WireGuard virtual network interface, which is way more challenging to get correct than it sounds.

3. Finally the easy part is the software. I wrote my own solution for this but there other great options like Open Media Vault.

First you need an Operating System that can withstand direct Internet exposure for a decade without incident. Any administration required is going to kill it dead. There are no suitable OS options available at present.

Then you need to make the actual service dead simple to use from anywhere. Punching through NAT and firewalls are the main issues there.

An immutable linux base, like Flatcar, combined with dockerized apps for isolation and easy per-container updates could come pretty close if some engineering were put into UX.

You'd need to have unattended upgrades, or perhaps a companion app where you can send the user a push notification to say "hey bruh update your shit". Would also need engineers to support those updates.

Tailscale pretty much solved NAT traversal.

The containerizing is almost a capability based security system. Instead of adding that layer to block everything except a certain resource, why not change the defaults in the OS so that it defaults to NO access instead? Saves resources, provides much better security.

I feel nerd sniped.

Onion services. Just make it normal. Some may say that's overkill. It's really not today.

It happens to be the best way to self-host with privacy by default.

I don't buy that they are too slow. Its not. It's perfectly adequate.

Onion services never came in my mind tbh, but I think the core problem with onion services is the same with most NAS products and self hosting services out there. Most of the average consumers don't know what Onion services are, plus the technical knowledge barrier is still there, which is the main reason average consumers don't adopt self hosting. Which leaves us with the main question again, which technical barrier has to be removed to make the average consumer even consider self hosting in the first place?

Three commands and you can transform the old phone, computer into a usable service and access it worldwide and its costs nothing.

Perhaps it's just the knowledge that that is possible. People want digital sovereignty. They just don't know how easy it can be.

Most people have an old Mac, used phone in the drawer collecting dust already. The barrier is extremely low.

> which technical barrier has to be removed to make the average consumer even consider

that would be all technical barriers removed at once in an affordable, expandable and good looking personal server device i guess

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