- cross-posted to:
- selfhost@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- selfhost@lemmy.ml
The future is community-hosted
Related Hacker News thread:
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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’ve not looked into it properly yet, but - considering this is still free software - I don’t believe that level of granularity exists.
So, if I wanted to share my holiday photos from last week with 1 friend, and the photos from someone’s party to different friends… nope.
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
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.
The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
There’s so much to host that isn’t related to pirated media sharing though. I host like 5 services and only one could be related to that. I know you clarified that you’re talking about content, but there’s also so.much content that isn’t related to pirating either. Like most of the fediverse for example
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”).
yhe power or water bill pointed at your name and residence
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills. Renters are usually two levels away from the actual owner. Then there are all the people who live and work in cities but aren’t official renters.
In the USA, most power bills are the tenants’ responsibility. In the USA, virtually all internet connections are the tenants’ responsibility.
The locality hosting the services could also pass a law requiring the tenants to either bear responsibilities for, or be included in, all utility related billing.
A lot of arguments in this thread seem to be ignoring this as a solution to the legitimate problems they’re raising.
Many people live in cities without owning their house. So they never see those bills.
In my country it’s illegal for the landlord to include utilities in the price.
It’s the responsibility of the tenant to subscribe to those services in their name.
It’s done to prevent landlords from cutting utilities on a whim or to pressure late payments.
If every city has the same then why would you even want to?
It would have to be a national mandate that is available in every city or everyone would use the free service from one city but not vote to raise the taxes in their city to pay for their own.
If it’s a national mandate, then might as well make it a national service.
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?
Software suggestions?
If you do not have physical access, it is not yours. Trust absolutely no one.
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.
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?
Synology shared folder, separate user accounts, accessible through tailscale is how I share media with my friends and family outside my network.
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!
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
It’s pretty simple to send a Nextcloud share link.
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.
The future is P2P
The presence is P2W.
The future is federated.
I would say the future is in pooling resources.
Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.
Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.
All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.
But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.
And global cryptographic identities.
Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.
I’ve thought of all these, but what I’m describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you’d have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.
Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.
I highly doubt that. Each federated node is fairly expensive to host since it basically needs a complete copy of everything on its peers.
I think the future is distributed. You connect to others, and if the network is large enough, each piece of data only needs to exist on a faction of the nodes to be safe from disappearing. Just think about it, across your various devices (laptop, phone, tablet, desktop, etc) you likely have a couple TB available, and your can buy cloud storage for any extra space you need. And you don’t need to always be online either, it’ll sync when two peers are online at the same time, so it’ll be eventually consistent.
The main barrier here is NAT IMO, you need to be reachable for it to work. That’s getting resolved with IPv6, but it’s rolling out really slowly.
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.
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.
When you call the shots, you get the outcomes. It’s honestly not a bad way to live. Best of luck to ya!
Thanks, it is enough for me.
I like KOReader for my Kindle, but it’s available for Android too. Have you tried it?
Yes, KOReader and Librera FD are two applications I use currently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve had the same problem with audiobooks until I found the soundleaf app - it connects to my self-hosted audiobookshelf server and makes sharing with freinds super easy without having to use mainstream services.
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?
Not really, I was trying our naivdrome as I’m phasing out Plex and liked it so much I kept it.
Its impressive how light navidrome is and it scans a lot faster since its only music and not my movies too.
That said I don’t use Navidromes ui I use Synfonium as a client.
Yeah that’s what I’m doing. Its been great
