Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Use open-source software! Do not rely on "someone else's computer". Build your own locally hosted cloud! If you can use open-source hardware when doing so: awesome. If not, make at least sure that everything needed to run the system is open.
This is the hard part to sell people. I feel like for self-hosting to become popular, there would need to be a "plug 'n' play" device that essentially has everything you need to set up a small server on your home network. If you could set up a home server as easily as you can set up a Google Home device, that would be amazing.
I run a bunch of stuff on Docker on my Synology NAS. It's not quite plug and play but at it's best it's quite within the realm of someone who's got some computer skills. At it's worst though it can suck up a lot of time. I enjoy that kind of stuff when it's not mission critical but I used paid cloud services at work for things that I run for free at home - precisely because I don't want to be the one dealing with downtime in an emergency situation.
“Quite within the realm of someone who's got some computer skills” means “inaccessible to most people”. I don’t mean to sound like an ass about it, but most people just don’t care enough about this stuff to invest even a bit of time in it (nevermind the upfront cost for a Synology or Qnap NAS).
Sure - but you've got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren't experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who's a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.
I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who's used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.
Certainly it's somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I'm sure in my house we're dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.
Setting it up is one thing, there is also the need to maintain it. If something breaks in the cloud, there are people dedicated to fixing it. That’s the hard part to convince people to.
Realistically, the best solution is hosted and managed versions of FOSS apps where the private data is encrypted. Most people just don’t want to manage a server, and this solution would provide funding to FOSS projects while also increasing data sovereignty for non-self hosters.
As much as we all might want it to, self hosting will never be mainstream.
Sure, a local backup is great but unsafe considering your homelab is still in the same geographic area as the things you're backing up. In the event of ecological disasters (local or other), storing all data locally is keeping your eggs in one basket. Idk much about cryptomater (or other such software) but encrypted automatic backups sounds perfect.