signing into cloud services and downloading apps is just so much easier to do!
This is actually true, but it doesn’t speak to why self hosting is “impossible” and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.
There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.
I’ll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting – especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)
There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers
In the late 2000s, Opera had a very interesting product called “Opera Unite”. It was essentially a self-hosting platform built into the web browser. You could use it to chat, host a website, share photos, share files (and let other people share files with you), and a few other things. It had a guest book called “the fridge” where people could leave you post it notes.
They’d give you a subdomain which would either connect to it directly (if your network allows UPnP or you forwarded the port), otherwise they’d proxy it via their servers.
Basically, it was a super simple solution to create a decentralized web. The goal was to let everyone own their own data in a way that anyone could understand, without having to know anything about server hosting. Instead of just browsing the web, you could contribute to it at the same time.
It worked surprisingly well, but never caught on with the general public, and they killed it off about three years later.
If you want self-hosting for everyone, then I suspect you’re gonna have something like a console – a self-contained box that requires virtually no configuration.
This is actually true, but it doesn’t speak to why self hosting is “impossible” and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.
There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.
I’ll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting – especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)
In the late 2000s, Opera had a very interesting product called “Opera Unite”. It was essentially a self-hosting platform built into the web browser. You could use it to chat, host a website, share photos, share files (and let other people share files with you), and a few other things. It had a guest book called “the fridge” where people could leave you post it notes.
They’d give you a subdomain which would either connect to it directly (if your network allows UPnP or you forwarded the port), otherwise they’d proxy it via their servers.
Basically, it was a super simple solution to create a decentralized web. The goal was to let everyone own their own data in a way that anyone could understand, without having to know anything about server hosting. Instead of just browsing the web, you could contribute to it at the same time.
It worked surprisingly well, but never caught on with the general public, and they killed it off about three years later.
If you want self-hosting for everyone, then I suspect you’re gonna have something like a console – a self-contained box that requires virtually no configuration.
So something like a Synology NAS, I guess.