I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.
Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
General public is weird because everyone, yet no one, is the general public.
Fwiw I've started to see a shift in many non-tech circles I'm a part of. Especially when you take the time to explain the problems. Many do care, they just aren't made aware of the issues.
The general public will do whatever their friends do. If there was an iPhone charger sized box they could plug in anywhere and have their own personal cloud that can interconnect with other personal clouds, and a celebrity said it was cool to have one, the general public will do it without giving it a first thought.
In my experience just telling people to enable Google / Apple backup for photos is a chore at 5€ a month. And for general public this covers 90% of their needs.
There should be influencers or agitators (as named correctly) to tell general public what distro to install, what server to buy and how block tracking and ads
Precisely. My uncle has been using the builtin Samsung web browser for years on his phone, just because it said "Internet" in the name, and "Chrome" just wasn't a familiar name to him. Most people are like this.
True, most people get the full ad driven internet experience and it drives me nuts. Everytime I have to help other people with computer stuff I almost get an aneurysm when opening their browser...
At some point I started just installing ABP/uBO without even bothering to ask/tell them, if I had the opportunity. So far my reads seem to have been correct regarding whether this would conflict with each person's typical web use, as I've never heard back about any trouble.
Digital rights are indeed important, but only a small portion of the entire concept of human rights. I can imagine general public places much more emphasis on wealth (re-)distribution policies.
A lumberjack may also argue GP don't care about environment laws if they had timbernews.
How does being docker compose based make it inaccessible?
Self hosting implies having hardware and software knowledge to set it up. I agree, having a meta package that would set the system up as systemd would be an even lower barrier. But then again, there are podman commands that do this for you today anyway.
Self hosting could also imply buying a device that just does this with an additional management interface for updates. This could be build around a nuc/nas with above package. It still will require some knowledge to keep it maintained.
Then, you could offer maintaining them as a service again. Maybe there is value in that.
Update: apparently there is https://freedombox.org/ which is actually an appliance for this. Although it is more privacy focused and I don’t see a productivity or photo suite on it.
> How does being docker compose based make it inaccessible?
Because it requires people to also have knowledge about the ins and outs of docker and docker compose. If we are talking about web applications it is yet another layer that has been added over the years. It used to be that you could fairly easily host most things on a old fashioned lamp host (I am talking decades ago) and all you had to know was basic file transferring.
Of course, this was on shared webhosts in a time when VPSes were not really a thing yet or affordable. But, even on a VPS setting up a LAMP stack is relatively straightforward.
Once you add modern dockerized application to that mix you are now still looking at some sort of ingress to do the reverse proxy bit. So while it likely will not be Apache or nginx there will be some sort of layer there in addition to now having to setup docker properly (rootless and all that) and then also making sure your docker compose setup is in order.
It is not difficult *once you know how to* but it is another layer of knowledge and experience people need to acquire. That does make it less accessible for novices.
> you could fairly easily host most things on a old fashioned lamp host (I am talking decades ago) and all you had to know was basic file transferring
Setting up and maintaining a server is easier today than it was decades ago, A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing, reproducibility wasn't a goal, versioning was confidential, documentation was scarce and often outdated, out of the box security was lower, ties to the OS were higher. Managing virtual hosts was clunky, updating OS/PHP was risky. I would not go back for anything.
> having to setup docker properly (rootless and all that)
Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.
> A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing,
I'm sorry but this is just nonsense. LAMP is called that because it was a very standardized thing. Pop in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it. There were even ready made installers for Windows and Mac if you weren't on an Internet native operating system.
A lot more people got by using custom bash scripts, but cfengine exited in the 90s. It's still not honest to say things were more manual. Take a look at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today and look at the Compose or self hosted K8s stacks people set up today. That's orders of magnitude more manual work than just popping in a CD and selecting LAMP.
Yes, those are not the same thing. Yes, a self hosted stack today consists of so much more than running PHP in a web server. But for self hosters, the amount of work required has objectively gone through the roof. That's a problem if your goal is data sovereignty.
> op in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it.
At the time in question here tasksel wasn't a thing, I think merely a concept. It made its way in Debian installer around 20005 IIRC, right along "one-click installs" from hosting services mentioned in the other reply. The whole decade before that, indeed manual set up was needed.
> at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today [...] That's orders of magnitude more manual work
There is two kinds of self-hosters, those who aim at reproducibility and those who don't. The latter is more fun, the former gets quickly mandatory when you _rely_ on your homelab.
> Setting up and maintaining a server is easier today than it was decades ago, A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing, reproducibility wasn't a goal, versioning was confidential, documentation was scarce and often outdated, out of the box security was lower, ties to the OS were higher. Managing virtual hosts was clunky, updating OS/PHP was risky. I would not go back for anything.
You are speeding past my point by a mile or two. With a shared webhost you get a ready lamp stack. In the late 90s early 2000s you could fairly easily get a wide array of software running that way. All you had to do is create a database in the hosters control panel, upload the package and you'd be on your way. Later in the 2000s one click installers came along for popular packages making it even easier. In fact, they are still around these days making it extremely easy to install a wide array of lamp based applications to these days.
There are very few options these days to get started as easily these days with modern non lamp tech stacks. The only thing I am familiar with (other than the product presented to us in this post) is pikapods, [which only offers a limited selection of available applications](https://www.pikapods.com/apps). There are a few others, also catalog based, though they more seem to focus on deploying on other platforms for you. Other than that you start to quickly move to more complex hosting solutions aimed at business and scaling. Or platforms that are cloud platforms with all the added complexity to navigate and figure out before you can deploy docker containers. Not to mention ridiculous situation that a few of the ones I know about have pivoted to being "agentic compute providers" whatever that means and certainly will confuse a novice.
Which means that the "practical" advice given is often to "just" set up a VPS. And yes, many VPS providers will provide an image with docker enabled, but that is just the start.
> Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.
That, in fact, is another layer of complexity people will then have to figure out. Most information I am aware of these days does claim that it is better to run containers rootless or at the very least make sure the user in the container is non root. The fact that we are both convinced of the opposite tells you how confusing it must be for a novice.
The overall point I am trying to make isn't even about the exact details. It is that for hosting something these days there is much more required surrounding knowledge required before you can get started in most cases.
Docker doesn’t do that on my Fedora machine, nor on my arch machine. Did I set some setting somewhere that I forgot about? I’m also running rootless docker and podman so that might explain.
At the same time buying compute is more expensive than ever, and the gap between homemade projects and what's available online in term of speed, functionality and LLM capacity is bigger than ever.
Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues. Trying to do the same today will cost two arms and leg and require a lot more overall knowledge of what to compose to get the same result.
The dust will settle and we should go back to a nearer gap in I hope a few years, until the. it might be a glacier age for self-hosting.
> Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues.
You could argue it’s much easier on the software side, because self hosting Immich is much easier thanks for AI assistance with setting it up. If you can live without the built in facial recognition feature you don’t need particularly beefy hardware.
I find myself taking on far more ambitious self hosted projects thanks to Claude. Extending home assistant in various ways, deploying a “self hosted Spotify”, making sure everything is fully accessible via Tailscale out of the range of the wifi and so on. Of course the general population isn’t really aware or interested in most of this.
It's about 3~4 years I haven't used Immich so it might have evolved a lot since then, but looking at their current roadmap there is a ton of features I use everyday in Photos that won't be there.
And it's not to fault Immich, on the contrary, Photos is one of the rare Google property where the team is constantly pushing the envelope.
I could combine it with a bunch of external tools to make do, but it would be crazy clunky or would need full sync with Adobe Cloud for instance for the editing part, while doing all the scanning and categorizing locally.
On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends. It helps me as a research tool, but due to my own restrictions it won't be magic.
> On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends.
Totally understand this part. I didn’t mean to give Claude code full access to locally hosted environments but rather copy back and forth in your local shell with help from Claude (error messages, helping to plan out the installation etc.)
for self hosted and personal use, compute lasts a good while though. and in the time you would've been waiting to time the compute market, you get to benefit by being less a part of the AI data dragnet.
The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions.
Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. All the Gen X and Y people that I know of, including many that are very intelligent and accomplished in their field, literally have no idea how to operate a computer outside of watching youtube, checking emails, and opening Word documents. Ads? They hate it but have no idea how to disable them. iPhone running out of storage and iCloud says I can solve that for $2.99/mo? They would be like IDK what that is but sure I'll pay that $2.99 if that means I can record more videos of my kids.
I really hate this situation, and I try my best to help out the folks around me who I see are getting ripped off (either they don't know or they know but think that's what it is). But still, it's really hard to communicate or teach those people when the skill of operating a computer has become intuition and human nature to me. I really can't put these things into words on the fly that would help them understand :(
> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.
I'm not sure what you are seeing, but what I'm seeing is widespread teach illiteracy in Gen Z outside of their smartphone. Gen Z and younger mostly grew up with smartphones as their primary devices and with little contact with a laptop or desktop computer (and even then confined 99% to browser usage).
> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.
I can't quite confirm that. My younger siblings' classmates (still high school students, born >=2010, non tech average people) don't give a shit on these topics and behave identical to the Gen X and Y described.
Looking at my younger sister, I'd risk saying it's the same in all generations. I'll even say more: I think earlier generations had a general thought of "computer consists of separate parts; you can buy them separately and replace if needed / want better performance", even the less technical ones. But now everything is a black box (therefore e.g. why not overspend and always buy a black box from Apple if that's fashionable now).
But maybe that was kind of related to times and the place – where I live people needed to be a bit more savvy, so thought like "why you buy an iPhone if Xiaomi can do the same 4x cheaper; if you chose the right model you may even have a good camera too" was popular even in non-tech circles.
But yeah, now that hardware is a bit more of a commodity and such tradeoff might give you a bit more adware with a bit less convenience, maybe it's different. But the next generation's understanding of computer/phone as something else than a magical black box is gone.
Yeah it's not my point to say Apple is bad – their laptops are now without competition on build quality, battery life and performance; and iPhone is really solid, and was probably the only good UX back in the day. But it's also pricey (and building antipatterns for repairability and interconnections other vendors happily copied later), and back in the dat it was just natural to be "savvy" – and that meant understanding how much juice you'll get with configuring something with that RAM, HDD vs SDD and whatnot, or that getting phone with SD slot gives you more space for your photos, and it didn't matter it's slower than whatever flash phone manufacturers are using.
Apple popularised the idea of "just buying a computer", which took away some understanding in the common public. It happened somewhere during my generation, and it's just ubiquitous in the following one.
> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.
Yeah, you’ll need a lot of supporting evidence for this claim. From my personal and professional experience, this doesn’t track. And given how online the younger generations are, it tracks even less. I think there might be a bias towards tech bubbles in that statement.
Or, alternatively, I was a lot more willing to put in the time to self host before I had more money and less time. If it's truly important it's not in public. If it's public, I don't have time to keep up with security patches if I'm not being paid.
It adds more context about how much of a scam insurance is and how they come off as hypocrites for liking to use one form of ai for themselves (camera detection) while disliking another (customers trying to get more fair payouts)
How about regulate plastic so it doesn't end up in the river in the first place?
Worrying about cleanup without worrying about why we have to clean it up in the first place is a losing approach. It reads as just 'recycle better' without wondering why consumers have that burden in the first place.
There are many countries involved, who may be unable or unwilling to pass or enforce the kinds of necessary laws. And people who donate want to see outcomes like "removed X tons of garbage", not "continued to lobby government to pass law".
Also wild guess consumers in your country aren’t dumping their trash in the river because you have a function garbage system. It is mainly an issue with poor people in developing countries with no access (or cost prohibitive access) to garbage collection. Not sure if taxing the very poorest on earth is great.
Of course, but the users can’t be trusted to stay away from something designed to addict them.
Only real solution is regulation, although the how is still a big question mark.
I would ask, where is the line drawn between 'enjoyment and addiction.'
Is it the harm provided? Then what do we count as harm, and where is the line.
IE, There's no one stopping me from eating unhealthy, IE sugary foods, which are heavily addictive. I ride a motorbike, and I'd consider myself addicted to that, and it's got a high chance of harm, but we don't ban those. Ditto with gaming, social media, hobby XYZ.
I personally think the freedom to choose your vice is reasonable.
Maybe this freedom sounds reasonable at first. Pew Research says 36% of 13–17 year olds are on social media almost constantly [0]. This is not a problem that existed 20 years ago. The ease of access to highly addictive products is rotting the soul of society.
Instagram definitely doesn't have the option but youtube for instance does, there's a subscription tab that's collecting dust in most people's accounts.
We have that in the EU, they mandated it. It finally made instagram use-able for me again. Did instagram geo-gate that feature? Wouldn't surprise me, but still.
I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.
Problem really is that things like SSN or ID numbers should have never been treated as more as just one possible semi-public unique identifier. Never anything to be used in identifying a person for a contract.
I am glad there is some viable disruption in the auto space here, but I am also really disappointed.
A new 4wd kei style truck is ~10k, with a bigger bed. I know its apples to oranges, but damn do I hate the ridiculous regulatory capture around small vehicles and trucks we have in the US.
That's a fallacious argument because roads are the universal, basic transportation infrastructure. You cannot have no roads. Your point has some relevance regarding motorways, which are not free in every countries and may be considered part of the universal road network, too. So mentioning the cost of roads is trying to deflect via "whataboutism" without addressing the point.
One can have a roadnetwork as primary means of transport .. or a railnetwork. With roads mainly for the last mile.
Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.
Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.
Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.
Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.
Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.
Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.
(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)
Note that I did not claim that we shouldn't invest in train networks. I questioned the use of taxpayers' money to make train tickets extremely cheap or free when there is no affordability issue to begin with, both in itself and when compared to everything else that public money could be spent on, and the overall situation in many European countries.
Personally I think this is having our priorities very wrong.
(I also think that rail as a primary mean of transport over roads is totally unrealistic and impractical, but that another issue)
The whole idea of making train tickets extremly cheap is to make it "competitive" to cars. Trains are already cheaper to use than cars for a lot of people. But many people already own a car and have to pay the fixed costs per month anyway. Insurance, taxes, depreciation
If they plan a trip, the don't calculate the whole cost of ownershipt, they calculate the distance and how much fuel they need (a.k.a. flexible costs).
An extremely cheap ticket makes the car owners stop using their cars so much. This is not just a benefit for the abstact idea of "environment", but also a direct benefit for the population. Less cars means less noise pollution, less air pollution and more space on the roads. That way people, who actually need a car, van or truck to get around and do their work, benefit.
You can definitely have no publicly owned or maintained roads though. There are none in my area of town and $0 tax/public funding. It's private property all the way down. The only reason why public roads look like barely competed against monopolies is that you can't compete with "free" (at the point of use), which creates the illusion that the public element of roads are more crucial than they are. But if you just shit-can all the public transport private transport will emerge organically.
Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
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