The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

This guy didn't want to do the leg work of emailing his photos to his friends, and declares self-hosting isn't the solution to a social net? I totally see the point in community hosting, in fact I'm all for that.

But really? You don't have to make your servers public facing, you just white-list the people you want to see your stuff and make sure to organize your drives with public and private pages.

He went through all that and didn't take it far enough.

emailing his photos to his friends
that's sometimes difficult, e.g. when you have thousands of photos, and emails have a size limit of 20 MB per email. using matrix chat or sth is also not ideal since the other side will have to download images one-by-one. sending a zip file might work, but the matrix protocol might have a size limit for attachments.
an FTP server might work. also consider that you want to store the images somewhere, not just send them once. how do you do that with messaging services?
- I feel like I covered my bases with the rest of my comment there. If you have thousands of photos that you want to share, host them on your server and whitelist the people you want to see them :/
  IRL I've never sent nor received more than a handful of pics at a time, and always through email. It would have never occurred to me that people are out there sending the whole family collection to each other digitally. Grandma hordes those pics for a reason; as leverage for people to visit her!
- It’s pretty simple to send a Nextcloud share link.
- Synology shared folder, separate user accounts, accessible through tailscale is how I share media with my friends and family outside my network.
- Matrix file limits are server-dependent, usually enforced for the uploader only. If you run a server you can set it to several gigabytes lol
  Alteernatively, use a tool designed for file transfer: https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570256bb3b2

Techno feudalism mentioned. Queue a Varoufakis talk

Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet's inception.

False. They came along after the fact and sullied the waters, then lobbied to make it illegal to tinker with the DRM locks, then got richer than God.

Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?

Has anyone ever worked with them IT wise?

I do so in four different EU countries and know people who do in the US and Canada. And...well...there is a reason local governments often went towards the cloud services. Do people think Joe Admin in Bumfucknowhere can operate what basically becomes a MiniDC? And who controls that?

Sorry. Either go "host at home" and only fuck up things for oneself. Or do it properly with a proper DC. Colocate if you want. But that? I know it sounds appealing, especially for someone entering selfhosting (like the author did a few weeks ago). But there is a reason hosting is a business once it comes to other peoples data.

Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?
I trust my local community more than i trust Amazon, that's for sure.
Communities might be incompetent with IT (today), but maybe they just need a while to catch up. It could work in 10 years from now, and we gotta work towards that point.
Also, note that "local community" doesn't have to mean municipality; it can also be your local nerd working part-time at your local library.
- And this is somehow better?
  There is a lot of room between "BigTech" and "Joe Average" doing it for his neighbours. Mailbox.org, etc. (see my other post here)

The future (and the past) is piracy.

I agree with the premise that selfhosting is not something the layman can or want to do, but the assumption that self-hosters only host software that serve themselves is very, very dumb, and clearly comes from the mouth of someone who self-hosts out of hate for corporate services (same, though) and not for the love of selfhosting.

He complains that the software he uses can't handle multi-users, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. His solution is to make his government give him metered cloud services. What he actually wants is software that allows multi-users. What he wants, by extension, is federated services.

The bulk of users on the fediverse are on large, centrally/cloud hosted instances, but the vast majority of instances are self-hosted, and can talk to the centrally hosted instances, serving usually more than the 1 user who's hosting the instance in their attic.

The author conflates self-hosting with self-reliance, and I understand why, but it's wrong. If you're part of this community, you're probably not some off-gridder who wants nothing to do with society, self-isolating your way out of the problems we face. If you're reading this, you already know that we don't have to live on our own individual and isolated paradise islands to escape Big Tech. Federation is the future, but selfhosting is fundamental to that, and not everything can or should be federated. Selfhosting is also the future.

That's an interesting point...
I'd like to share some (holiday) photos with my friends & family, so I can put those onto Pixelfed / Friendica / etc... I don't necesarily want to share all the photos...
And that's using the cloud.
Job Done. The self-hosting + federated cloud future is here!
Rejoice.
- The photo sharing complaint I don't understand, unless immich doesn't have the option to provide public or password protected share and upload links, which would be a real shortcoming for such app.
- I self host seafile server and use seafile app to sync taken photos on my iPhone to the server. Then you could (haven’t yet) setup a photo hosting service

Something that's always given me trouble is sharing my music.

If I hear a cool song and want to send it to a friend I have to go to YouTube.

And many of my friends send me Spotify tracks. The share feature of Navidrome has been incredible for this.

I can send them a link and have a listen party with them and then erase the link when were done.

It'd be nice to have this feature in more of the self hosted apps.

I wish more services adopted the service Tidal uses that sends 1 link that then points to YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, and Apple music.
It looks like you can self host Navidrome.
- I've just been using Jellyfin for my music. Is there a big advantage to this over it?
- Yeah that's what I'm doing. Its been great

And thus whatcom.social was spun up.

Thanks for the inspiration @th3raid0r@tucson.social !

The future is P2P

The presence is P2W.

The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything

He proposes the cloud be owned by communities, so in a way by everyone. That's not the same everything being owned by private companies.
- In fact, that model (conceptually, though not technically) is how most fediverse software already work
- So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?
  Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.
  Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn't usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you're going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences. We're talking massive fines and/or jail time.
  Edit: I should clarify that I'm not talking about services here, but content itself.

Thank fuck I neither desired nor ever used Kindle. I used either my library app to read e-books or getting my booty from the high seas!

I'd love to help community host stuff, but I'm terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.

Zero-knowledge hosting solutions should help with that, but I'm unsure how the tech and UX has been going for that on FOSS as of yet.

Every city should host main public web servicies for its citizens, each one as an instance of a complex system, that's how anarchy works.

Hi! This is what I'm trying to do with tucson.social. Wish the city would get back to me. I don't want to own/operate Tucson.social alone perpetually. Lol.
It would allow me to expand to a lot more community services outside of social media, chat, and Meetup platforms.
There's dozens of us! Dozens!
That quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons. The city residents pay for it but how do you verify "citizenship"?
- If you mean citizenship as being associated to the city whose hosting services you are using, yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence should be able to do that. Now, if you want that plus anonimity, the only practical option I can think of for a city-wide physical campaign is some sort of GPG Signature Meetup ("signature party").
- If every city has the same then why would you even want to?

Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.

Wouldn't a zero-knowledge hosting solution (you provide hosting, but you can't see what's into it past a stream of binary) help with that?

so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn't enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?

I didn't get the vibe that he didn't enjoy it. More that he figures that a typical person wouldn't enjoy it. And that I would agree with.
am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
Absolutely not.

The LinkedIn-styled writing here is hard for me to get through, but I think the general gist is that for profit platforms are easier to onboard which I agree with. This line stands out:

And what do we get in return? A worse experience than cloud-based services.

I have to disagree somewhat, it's a different experience that is absolutely more difficult in many ways, but for those of us who value privacy, control over our data, and don't like ads, the trade-off is worth it. Also it goes without saying that the usability of selfhosted apps has exploded in the past few years and it will likely become less and less of an issue.

Its funny to say a worse experience because I can confidently say that all the services ive replaced are equal or better than their corporate counterparts. And sometimes better by 10x
- I never wonder, is "X" is on jellyfin? Yes, good. No, give me 5.

No, you could never buy books on Amazon, only rent them. Calibre with DeDRM plugin was a poor way to liberate them, given that formatting in libre formats was often worse than the original.

I stopped doing that and ingnored the Kindle ecosystem in general. I tried a Kobe reader with .epub books from diverse sources but I mostly use tablets (LineageOS and GrapheneOS) to consume content these days. The reader apps are not that great there, sadly.

I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't waydroid something decent without googleing up. Certainly moon reader or something should run without the store?
- I'm limiting myself to only open source applications on the tablets. Strictly nothing from Play Store or Aurora.
I have bought a few otherwise hard to find books on Amazon. Actual paper books. At least used to be possible.
- Yes, when I buy books on Amazon it's the dead tree kind.

This is really cool. And I would say a good replacement for current cloud setups. Since it's unreasonable to expect everyone to self-host. Although I think this could only really be a cost saving measure since there are already services like protondrive that offer end 2 end encryption. And I would probably trust the reliability of proton drive over the community hosting my stuff.

E2E usually suffers from the same thing HTTP does: the MITM might not be able to read what you're saying, but they know who you're saying it to, and they may know in what context. This is a lot of information that can be used in profiling.

So you end up with systems like SimpleX, where everyone has a different UID for every contact, but that has its own problems, as anyone who's used systems like that are aware. We haven't really solved making that a good user experience for messaging; I don't see it translating to broader social media any time soon.

Nostr has some really good specs and tooling that neatly addresses these topics, including great cryptography support, signing, ad-hoc IDs, and an entirely voluntary simple naming lookup; it doesn't exactly solve zooko's triangle, but it provides a toolset sufficient to mix and match characteristics for whatever your threat model is. Sadly, Nostr is utterly dominated by the crypto crowd (and is associated with some controversial personalities), and even if you're not cryptocurrency-hostile, it's a really dull echo chamber with little other content that has prevented people who might otherwise build interesting platforms in it from doing so.

Mastodon was around for ages before (the in practice centralized) Bluesky; why did it take Bluesky to open a mass exodus from X?

This is a hard problem to solve. Throwing E2E at it doesn't make it easier; it's just tossing a buzzword in.

I agree that we need to find a way to make this communal rather than individualistic, but government backing isn't that. It would be nice if that happened and all, but with a thesis like that it feels like it's missing the mark calling state-hosting "community ". How do we make self-hosted services something that can serve at the level of the community? Like a load balancing reverse proxy that points to the servers those in the community can host and everyone invites their friends and neighbours.

End-to-end encryption means the service provider can't see your data even if they wanted to

Not necessarily. All it means is that intermediaries can't see the data in transit. You need to trust that the data is handled properly at either end, and most service providers also make the apps that you run at either end. Your library is more likely to buy whatever is cheapest than what respects your privacy the most (e.g. probably Google drive, not Tuta or Proton).

The incentives for even community-hosted services (e.g. if the library spun up its own cloud servers) to share/sell information is just too high. Maybe the library found someone uploading illegal content, and they wanted some monitoring in there to catch service abusers going forward. They'll probably put something into the client that a third party monitors, and now you have someone snooping on everything.

Instead of this, I think P2P storage is the better option for those who don't want to self-host. That way there's an incentive for the person providing storage to not know what it is (reduce liability), as well as the person submitting the data (reduce risk). Unfortunately, most current solutions here are a little shady, because they either rely on volunteers (no guarantees about data integrity) or anonymous payments (again, no guarantees about data integrity).

I'd like to see something in the middle:

apps that work off buckets of data, that the user configures
services that provide data guarantees that users can choose (e.g. AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Hetzner Storage boxes)
common protocol between apps for accessing this data

So if you want more storage, you buy said storage and know who is responsible for protecting it, and your app doesn't care where it comes from.

That's possible, but the bigger leap is getting people off the major platforms like Google's or Microsoft's cloud.

End-to-end encryption means the service provider can't see your data even if they wanted to
Not necessarily. All it means is that intermediaries can't see the data in transit. You need to trust that the data is handled properly at either end, and most service providers also make the apps that you run at either end.
This is incorrect. End-to-End is defined as from "User to User" and not "User to Service provider". That would be just transport encryption.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption
- Right, and that's what I mean too.
  For example, let's assume Google Drive is E2EE, the client apps on both sides have access to unencrypted data, and they can absolutely index it or whatever to sell to advertisers. The statement in the article was overly broad, because the service provider can see your data, assuming they also control the client apps.
Compute has become so ubiquitous it’s silly that we need to pick between server-client and p2p
Syncthing is a good example of being both, with options you can enable for your server version, but it’s way too basic compared to immich or nextcloud
- Eh, Syncthing is only stuff you control, which doesn't exactly fulfill what OP is talking about: extending the benefits of self-hosting to those who can't or don't want to self-host. It also doesn't expand storage, it just keeps your storage in sync between devices.
  P2P solves a lot of this. It provides expanded storage, can be easy to get into (add nodes as you go/pay others for nodes), etc. But there's the perennial issue w/ trusting others w/ your data.
  That's why I think a hybrid is better. Buy storage from trusted providers as needed and use apps that work w/ that. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to really be a thing, but I think it could be super cool. Places like libraries can provide libraries to underprivileged people, who can then add to it w/ something from the market.

«legally aquired» lol

Great article!