I wanted to take this as a quick opportunity to challenge the rhetorical usage of this random stat as so many people say this that it becomes aphorism. I think we should encourage more people to not be afraid of self-hosting. The belief that self-hosting shouldn’t be approached because it is hard is similar to the same lie we’re told about privacy.
There are a bunch of growing communities out there that are aiming to make homelabbing in a much more standardized way to lower the bar and challenge this notion (I have some listed on the front page of the link below). Me and a few friends are starting an curation aggregator community that compiles information scattered across the internet and taking in some of the best practices that we see online and create basic getting started guides that can then be slowly scaled depending on the needs.
I’m using Privacy Guides’ setup as an inspiration to set up the guidance here where we will have a “Software” section akin to the “Recommendation” section of PG that will talk about the pros and cons of various software (we will defer to privacy suggestions and link to PG). Then have a “Knowledge Base” section that covers basic terminology and build visuals to tutorials on Linux Administration among other things over time. We’re taking a very opinionated approach building around ubiquitous ARM or open RISC-V hardware with the intent to make scaling pluggable and interoperable. Similarly, doing as much configuration management through Open Tofu configs and Talos Operating System for bare metal Kubernetes support.
We’re really in very early works so not too much to show yet, but this is going to be a big passion project of mine and I hope I can overlap some of the concerns held here in the privacy communities in our approach to building this. My hope is to build an open standards community akin to openminilab and potentially start building out the framework for anyone to build their own local companies to build, maintain, and sell these in their communities. Even those who might not want to host their own servers, I imagine a reemergence of similar styles of local repair shops that can also now be the last-mile producers, sellers, and repairmen of standard homelab builds, or even provide local hosting services that they sell to their community.
I was putting a bunch of theory and writing together on this myself then bumped into some incredible work by an Anarchist researcher, Kevin Carson, who has been tracking this phenomena since the 2010s and a lot of it has grown into fruition so far: The Desktop Regulatory State | The Anarchist Library
Well, is it really a lie that its difficult for the vast majority of people and that it is not possible by the vast majority to ensure of self hosting?
Do you not have any sense of reasonableness with the sentiment my statements meant to convey?
I think even some tinker friendly and tech savvy folks will stop being “afraid” when it stops being difficult to ensure of the security and privacy at all times as best as possible. Sadly, this requires expertise because not all solutions are one and done - you do need to know to maintain things.
My statements I believe still remain true however. If I were wrong, self hosting would be ubiquitous today.
These two things or differences as I’m guessing you’d like to technically demonstrate are related and one is the result of the another.
Exactly my point - I said it differently and you’re saying it differently but the reason for why self hosting is nowhere near ideal is the same. There are many ways to say the same thing using different words.
Self hosting is complex because it is a technical and and a cost impediment for the vast majority and people want convenience, reliability, stability, and a no-nonsense approach to the tools and products they use.
Dude nobody cares if you’re right or wrong why you gotta naysay?
It would be one thing if I was just calling people out for not running their own servers or saying they ought to or they don’t care about privacy. Your comment about 99.9% could be true but that stat is likely not based on anything but your cynycism which adds nothing to the conversation. More people are doing homelabs today and even PewDiePie us telling his huge following to install linux. I’m working to capture the knowledge and prior attempts and lower the barrier, what actually does you being right contribute to this conversation?
We can sit here and say over and over again how hard privacy and homelabs can and scare everyone away, or we can provide solutions and start pulling communities and curate knowledge together vs give a shit who is right about the state of things.
That is fair and if hosting isn’t for you that is fine, but imagine if there were an open opinionated convention of hardware setup and configuration in the stack that collectively gets debugged and tested and improved upon, but also a bunch of templatized scripts (similar to homelab OS but that can actually do the scaling kubernetes options that could theoretically scale horizontally).
Having the open standard keeps it open for anyone in a locale to get super good at building these things (think local synology). Simultaneously, they can act as your repairman and even we could have remote software support if something gets jacked up.
We would have to consider clever ways to reduce harm like someone offers remote tech support and holds your system ransom.
There would have to be trust networks and redundancy built in but something a community could work through.
Umbrel actually looks closer to what I am looking for from a software perspective, though the license they use I would need to understand a bit more.
I would also like hardware to have a bit if an opinionated form factor that enables clustering.
Also, I’d want the licensing to enable more than. Just one business to get in on the fun. The idea is that you would open up the hardware and distribute the assembly line of parts into modules.