During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.

In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought.

Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.

But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online.

Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.

Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge.

> The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track.

You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago.

It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.

I don't think that's any different to any other period of time when communication was suddenly able to expand. Gutenberg's press didn't come with an automatic lie detector that meant the printed word could only contain true facts and nothing else. Instead, it was mainly used for pamphlets and other campaigning propaganda - some of which surely had some truth to it, but much of which was partially or fully fabricated.

I think you are romanticising the past's approach to the written word here. It has always been possible to completely rewrite history, if you're willing to put the work in, and totalitarian regimes have had no issues in convincing their populations to burn their own books if necessary.

This has never been possible in the past.

Is there something materially different here with the internet? Are we now entering an era of too much free speech? Is it now too easy for us to communicate with each other? And if so, what's the cutoff? What arbitrary barrier would we need to put in place to make the internet more like the printing press and safe to use again?

Yes. There are effectively no hard copies. It is possible to change the historical record of any non-printed material to suit your particular needs like never before.

You can think of this as a world beyond Orwell's or Bradbury's wildest nightmares.

I would argue that the opposite is true: it is now harder than ever to change the historical record, which is why we now talk about hypernormality and post-truth, where even if there is evidence for something, people will still lie and claim the opposite and be believed. We live with an abundance of evidence, and yet the Orwellian ability for people in charge to tell you one thing one day, and another thing the next, has never been stronger.

And I think you're again making the mistake of thinking of the printing press as a device for printing books or other materials designed to be long-lasting and valuable. In practice, the printing press brought about a revolution of flyers and pamphlets - ephemeral documents that were distributed one day and then abandoned the next. These things should change freely, and many never entered the historical record at all.

Is it? I feel it's the other way around. For example, just 10 years ago, there were no apps that forbid me from taking screenshots. Copying CDs and DVDs was comparably easy, even for normal folks. How do I copy a Netflix episode again?

Also, you said "On the other hand, it is now easier than ever to make copies of materials that we see." - now you seem to be talking about finding a copy. But those are two very different things.

Perhaps they'll use a warped interpretation of copyright law to do it, or maybe something even more draconian like censorship laws with a punishment for publishing banned information.

Could they do it, technically? Not unless they controlled the entire world's networks, including those of countries with competing aims. Would that stop them from trying? As we've seen with the endless attacks on end to end encryption, I'm sure they'd give it a shot.

I genuinely think our society is one of the most censorship-resistant societies in history. This comes with its own problems (how do you deal with media that genuinely is harmful, like calls to violence or plots to abuse children?) but I think this is the tradeoff that one has to make when dealing with censorship and liberty. The more you make it difficult for the authorities to shut down good speech, the more difficult it becomes to protect against harmful speech.

With online-only records any hard copies will be incidental. The source-of-truth for any record has always been online, and can be retroactively edited with much less fanfare. Incidentally, it will also be much easier to flood the world with the updated narrative.

Hell, we have Musk publicly advocating to edit old online material to suit the new, "more desirable" narrative.

The result is a kind of anti-literacy. Most people can read the words, comparatively few people are media-literate enough to filter truth from lies with any reliability. So the current media landscape is unusually poisonous. It's mostly vested interests lying to you and trying to manipulate you, through ads, troll farms, and mainstream media.

The fix would be AI filtering of content. Right now there's no chance whatsoever of that working accurately, but it's possible in principle to counteract the rise of AI disinformation with AI critiques of it.

Among all of the other revolutionary changes promised by AI, that possibility has flown under the radar. But it would be a political and economic showstopper if implemented, because everyone would suddenly be seeing authoritative, accurate news and analysis - like old-school fairness doctrine journalism, but better because it could presented at a level that matched the reader, while also allowing questions.

Ironically Grok was doing something like this for a while, until it... wasn't any more.

I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian.

If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.

The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see.

I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth.

So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.

I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives:

https://wiby.me/ https://clew.se/ https://kagi.com/

But that's not the majority experience and more importantly, it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.

Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".

Oh wait, they didn’t.

As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.)

We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.

Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).

To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.

Media is being deleted or locked in vaults.

Games are being shut down with no way to restore them.

The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge.

I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.

And no, it's not just the em-dashes.

I do this for a living, FWIW.

You are talking about preserving intellectual independence.

Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems, right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of digital textbooks.

IMO one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish (which is getting worse every year anyway).

That's an interesting take. I think matching these services isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit.

My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a private selection of media with a strong personal preference - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to reconsider my preferences.

Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.

You are not allowed to do that!

The reality is that with minimal effort and money you can cheaply buy some multi TB drives. Get a 100 euro computer, a 50ish internet connection, a torrent feed and a usenet sub. Netflix has very little stuff by comparison.

You can also set up a crawler with some archiving and crawl that part of the internet that is interesting to you specifically. Feed it the urls you've visited, crawl 1-3 links deep from there and you will be in awe how fantastic the search results are. If you type "banana" in the search box it will give you a surreal page full of interesting pages about bananas. (Interesting to you only)

As the collection grows and time expires you will also be increasingly shocked how many of those website are not around anymore.

I ran a dead link checker on 10k old bookmarks for a niche topic one time. I didn't pay much attention to the topic for 8 years or so. I was very excited thinking I would find all kinds of new developments. In stead it was depressing as f. Something like 50 links worked. Stuff like a link to a Google search result.

By this do you mean family photos and the like? I'd like to hear more about this. I'm building up a personal library like this too.

I get your broad point, but I would argue that for the vast majority of time most people did "rent ideas". Most people didn't have massive private libraries of books. Knowledge was locked in public or private institutions where if you were granted access by the owners of that institution, you would be allowed to go there and read the knowledge. If it was a public library you might even be able to take that knowledge home with you temporarily. But you wouldn't be able to keep anything you couldn't keep in your head, or transcribe yourself into your own documents. If the library closed, burned down, or you lost access to the institution, you also lost access to the knowledge contained within.

Which seems like then the argument should be for systems that allow you to take advantage of the ease and relative cheapness of copying and archiving digital forms of knowledge. To that end, "Print to PDF" being built into the operating system on mac OS might be one of my most favorite features. I have more than a handful of archived information from pages that don't exist anymore because of it.

It is only a matter of time before the grid goes down, the country restricts the internet, or the service you rely on goes away.

That's not something to be proud of that you upvoted it.

It's not a discussion, unless you think talking to an LLM is a discussion or equivalent to HN.

And obviously if this is permitted or rewarded with upvotes it's just going to become an endless spam site of people posting low effort cotton candy they didn't need any thought to produce. No signal all noise

There's at least one value to LLM content: it always outputs correct grammar and punctuation. Unlike this human sentence of yours, which took me two attempts to parse because it's missing a necessary clause separator.

But on the substance of your comment, I (generally) agree.

Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".

SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.

This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.

I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing

- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on

- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.

- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.

- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini

- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.

- The Mac App Store was introduced

- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks

And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"

Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.

I do think this is within realm of possibility if Steve Jobs is still alive. Or at least could be convinced.

Tim Coo only cares about services revenue. And iCloud it is.

https://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/07/steve-jobs-reaction-to-...

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.

Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.

It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.

At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.

I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.

I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.

But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.

I agree that "combining phone with one of the most popular / best in some ways mp3 player on the market" was a big part of it (with web browsing and video playing equally important), but Shazam wasn't a new thing that iPhones brought us.

(I also agree with danieldk that Shazam just wasn't a significant factor for most people on any devices, before or after iPhones.)

What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most smartphones at the time had clunky resistive touch screens or even little joysticks to move a mouse pointer. With the iPhone, you could scroll with your fingers and it was butter-smooth (at least for the day). The iPhone was a game-changer because you had a device in your pocket that you could browse the web with and it was at least as easy as on a desktop, if not easier.

Just for comparison, this is how you browsed the web at the time on probably the most iconic smartphone at the time (Blackberry):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NuQrjBIofo&t=6s

and on an iPhone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euNlVt60hwk

It was SO much better at browsing than my BlackBerry at the time. Though I vastly preferred all messaging on my BlackBerry.

I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

* online apps start doing something incredibly creepy (all of my non tech friends have a story like "how tf did they know me and my wife were talking about crustacean sex?").

* some service people use shuts down, stranding their data.

* some service like gmail locks them out for no reason at all, stranding their data and blocking them off from the world (has happened to enough people to make others worried).

* some service gets hacked and leaks a bunch of data.

* some service jacks up prices to unreasonable levels (i predict that we will get more of this as the VC hose runs dry and tech consolidation increases).

* they get tripped up by some dark patterns.

Furthermore, I think the extent to which people would like to have things like smart AI that can see all of their personal data or video cameras in their house but dont pull the trigger because theyre worried about privacy is understated.

And, the rich and famous are of course even more concerned about privacy and where they go others follow.

>just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

>This was my attitude to the iPhone in 2007 - it was just an alternative to stuff you could do on your laptop and other smartphones. It turns out that if you make it look sexy and make it ergonomic and give people a feeling of power and control they will shower you with money.

Ya but it turned out that smartphones ended up being super convenient once they got good/usable enough, and it unlocked really useful things that you couldn't do before, or just made things more convenient. If I have all my gmail data at home (or on a machine I control in a data center somewhere), does that make anything more convenient for me? Whereas being able to navigate around a new city with zero knowledge of it, translate food packaging when I'm grocery shopping in a foreign country, communicate with with any of people from wherever I am as long as I have my phone on me - those are real benefits.

I do kind of like how you're thinking about this because I'd love to live in a world where I could have ownership over all my emails, social media data, music, etc and have it all be just as convenient (or more convenient than) and work just as well as gmail, instagram, spotify etc do today. But we've definitely been moving in the opposite direction for the last 20+ years and there's good reasons for that:

1. It's easier to have someone else (like google, facebook etc) manage something for you then manage it yourself. And in many cases when there's network effects it's impossible for you to replace the experience you get from one of these services on your own.

2. Most of the time, people aren't gonna do hard things like making good software (and solving the hard problems, not just the fun problems) or building a social network without some way of making money from it (either you paying for a service or them monetizing your data via ads or selling it)

3. It's way easier for them to manage everything if the data is on machines that they control than on your machine, and it way easier for them to get people to pay for a service (and deny them access if they don't pay) if its on their machines too

All that said I'd love to see the iphone of self-hosting someday

I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.

They're already doing that on the hardware side. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/synology-confirms-ne...

Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.

- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

> Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

Dont SMTP servers already retry a few times before giving up? Plus it is not like you're using the phone to host content for the whole of the internet. It would be just for your close circle usually.

I am not saying phones make the perfect servers for all kind of applications but for certain kind of workflows... I think Phones are pretty good. Our network infrastructure (NAT, firewalls etc... limited data plans etc..) is the main headache for most of these use cases. But the network infrastructure is a problem even for our laptops, home computers etc..

At that point, you're better off going with some N100 mini-PC or such. But that's not a phone.

And I'll remind folks that we've been talking about the power of people owning their own servers in their homes for decades, and yet the vast vast vast vast majority of users aren't doing it.

Where it gets complicated is there's a (totally understandable) expectation these days that your data is synced across multiple devices, and you can collaborate with other users, who may also have multiple devices themselves. In practice, that necessitates some kind of always-on server that maintains state for everyone. A phone can technically do that, but you'd probably kill your battery in the process.

https://www.pikapods.com/

if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.

So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.

https://thebox.youatme.email/

Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.

The only substantive argument I can see is that the technology is immature:

> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app

Which, yeah, of course the tech is, there's only like a dozen people doing this. The exact hurdle named is hardly insurmountable: in the standards, OIDC overcomes this¹, or guest links. I don't want my family signing up for my weird app either.

One of the other big hurdles is that ISPs like to sell "Internet access", but only deliver half the deal. If you're not getting IPv6 connectivity in the year 2025, I'm sorry, that's a crippled product that your ISP was defunct and didn't properly inform you of when they sold it. (It's a lot easier to self-host on the v6 Internet. Some of my personal services are v6 only b/c of that, and that it works well enough in all but the most extreme or temporary locations.)

(¹but the half-baked OIDC implementations out there might require you to pre-register your app with them. That, rightly, might be a PITA.)

Self-hosting is like spending money putting a swimming pool in your backyard when you could walk to a public pool instead.

But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.

There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.

To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in my own town regularly enough to rotate my backups is too high. But if my family members and I could easily back up each other's systems from our various states? Or my group of dorky college friends who are now all over the world could easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.

What I really want, though, is literally just for there to be an Umbrel "Backups" app that lets me choose as a backup location one (or more) friend's Umbrel(s).

Redundancy is the main thing all these Docker-wrapper systems are missing for general use.

The problem is that people still believe that if they don't pay money, a service is free. But so many do not question why it is free. Hint: Not because Google just wants you to succeed and have a good life. And then, without any second thought, they literally upload their whole private digital life.

If you don't pay, usually, you're the product.

self-hosting has a lot of degrees. if you want your own TLD and peer with Tier1s, then it's astronomical, woo! But using dynDNS is also an option.

Especially if you compare to non-self-hosted services. You get a subdomain and that's it. (Or nothing, maybe some handle on Instagram.)

These days I have a Debian instance running at DigitalOcean that costs me $6/mo that acts as my primary DNS, with my home server as the secondary. I'm paying more, but I use that Debian instance for a few other things as well so I don't mind. The major benefit is I no longer worry about my IP changing at home, but it's not absolutely necessary.

The expensive part is aquiring the skills needed to pull that off.

It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.

Unfair IMO. The author _did_ the hard work. And recognized that most other people, not similarly motivated, would not.

Most people do not give a rat's ass about the security of their data. They know their social media apps are tracking where they go and who they meet, and they'll say it's creepy if you ask them, but they don't actually care enough to lift a finger to do anything about it.

a) Just because humanity as a whole did hard things, doesn't mean that most humans did or were willing to. It's perfectly possible that all the hard things we did were accomplished by a handful of remarkable individuals, doing things that the majority never would have been willing to.

b) just because people in one age have been willing to do things, doesn't mean they are willing to do so in all ages. So it's not like the past necessarily proves anything here.

You don't have to. The article mentions Tailscale--the whole point of which is to not have any Internet-facing app exposed. Everything is done peer to peer between clients that are behind firewalls. There's nothing listening on an Internet exposed socket for random connections to come in.

SaaS/cloud providers propagate this FUD 24/7 and then Okta, which should be pinnacle of security gets hacked and has issues with disclosure.

Relax. Most companies has security team incapable of operating beyond checklist.

I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.

I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.

> Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.

This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason why people prefer letting other people doing this work.

> I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP

I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking here about separate modem & router?

I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP, httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing many of the same things I did at home.

I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with work, I just want to go outside or read a book.

I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications; but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more to me at this point in my life.

My self-hosting infrastructure will probably outlive me.

I personally relate to the person you're replying to. I sleep better not worrying about HDD health or if my APs can reach their controller. Tried it - not for me.

Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.

I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.

Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who is.

That's your demand, not everyone's demand. And it seems are also indirectly assuming here that this is impossible without self-hosting, which also is not necessarily true.

The problem, is, we don't know. Self-hosting is like backups, it's working for a situation which might or might not happen; it's annoying, and it can save your ass, but most of the time you will never know if it ever will save your ass, until it actually happens. And until that point, it's just annoying. So we usually don't know if we really want to re-read a specific book and whether it has been become unavailable for us. We simply don't know that, until it happens.

> I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.

True, but that's why you should have backups. You don't need to manage a whole infrastructure for all your stuff, when you can also just make regularly backups. Of course, to be fair, most people don't even make backups, or know how to manage them well. But I would say those people can't (or should?) self-host their infrastructure anyway, they would probably blow their own data up in one way or another and lose them anyway.

> I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.

See, that's your stance, most people don't give an f** about this. They want things now, and don't care for some uncertain future.

> but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical.

Which most people are not. But it's not about the technical ability, self-hosting is mainly a problem of time, money and habit. Yes, many people can get it done if they invest into it, but they don't, many can't. And that won't ever change.

However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees for remote support. As they are your router they also get to see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP have access to my hardware.

Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.

"People exchange free speech for comfort, but most people never need the former anyway, so it's okay".

Or, because they do not know and do not care what is happening. Yes, they only care about comfort, who reads TOS anyway, right?! : /

But if the same was happening to their physical not digital properties then they might be furious.

I have some self hosted things, but because of the above I'm realizing that it is better to find someone to pay to take care of things for me. Someone large enough to get a sysadmin around 24x7, do trail upgrades, write the software/features... Unfortunately finding someone you can trust to do the above is important, and for many things there is no option.

I will likely always run jellyfix (or similar) for legal reasons. However for most things it would be better to pay someone I trust.

- You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned it.

- You can allow external access to your apps safely using cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google photos and there's even a really good app!

- Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic hygiene and monitoring it should be fine. And you aren't a profitable target anyway.

- Update require to restart the container with the latest release, your data isn't erased. Solutions such as Umbrel have a community of open source devs doing the updates for you.

Overall, it's not about removing all of our dependency to commercial services, but to do the switch slowly and regain autonomy. Having an alternative, however how imperfect it is (Jellyfin often freezes for me!) is worth it - otherwise the future is bleak.

Everyone go checkout immich.

That’s not to say there aren’t issues of ownership and control to be concerned about, but they are providing real value to many users, especially those who aren’t technically minded.

To the point about people not knowing how much they've given up, I think another way to phrase this is that people don't know how much has been taken away from them. This is why we need better consumer protections for internet services.

To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.

I can also very simply assign a domain to it and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.

Am I missing something?

What you’re doing with Hetzner is just a few less layers of abstraction compared to AWS or Azure. They can still theoretically take down the machine or steal your data, if they wanted to.

I don’t know what the correct definition of self hosted is, but there is a big ideological difference between what you’re doing and self-hosting actual, physical hardware in your home.

In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring.

It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.

I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.

I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.

What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.

As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.

That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).

Support has costs.

Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay with a 50-100% markup. "Plug and play, self hosted. Plug in a TB drive for more storage. Total solution!"

And it's still not enough. They need a domain, they need a tunnel, they need to hook up with Lets Encrypt. They need to leave the machine on, and they need a backup strategy. Much less now having to cope with all of the Fine People that inhabit the wild interwebs and will soon come knocking...and knocking...and knocking.

This all has to be explained to folks that don't know, have no aptitude for, and simply don't care, about the mechanics of this process. They just want it to work.

It's not just a couple of dockers shoved onto a small Linux box. It's free like a puppy.

Self hosting is arcane, fiddly stuff. Fine for those comfortable with it, but a nightmare to those who are not.

The thing I like the most is the area effect. I have those skills so 5-20 people get a self-hosted experience managed by me. But even so, many people will be left outside of any such area. This too, is fine.

My dad knows how to do basic woodworking, so if I need a simple piece of wooden furniture, I go to him. I have a friend who knows how to 3D print stuff (I know nothing about it) and another who's in medical school and gives me medical advice (including "go to the doctor" when the problem is not minor). But I don't have any friends which are good at car mechanics, so I go to the shop (and get charged) for all problems related to that.

Now, I do not live in the US, so maybe these sorts of relationships spanning wide fields are less common there, but the solution to rugged individualism doesn't seem to me to be "collectivism on a grand scale", be it corporations or the government. The solution seems to me to be "collectivism on a small scale", building friend-family groups that can solve the most common 80% of problems in most fields within themselves, and that reach into professionals from the larger collective for the other 20% of problems, or for the problems in fields they have no experience in.

Plex doesn’t automatically generate a valid certificate, for instance, even though Let’s Encrypt is a drop-in affair. Home Assistant’s own SSL support is an arcane nightmare out of the box, reminiscent of mid-2000s certificate processes. Proxies like HAProxy and NGINX can better support connection security and encryption termination, but now you have an additional layer to support and manage.

This is what I mean by “support has to improve [for self-hosting to be viable for the masses]”: if something isn’t as easy to setup in a secure manner as install, point to your content, and tie a DNS record to it, then that eliminates 99% of the potential customer base right then and there.

Lets connect! Send me an email – hn@drewlyton.com!

Complexity, sure. But for most people, the cost of Netflix, Spotify and whatever will quickly add up to a 500usd server. With 1-10 users you don't need much.

That is a very small part of operating. How about keeping it update and running? Data backed up?

Until setting up a private chatroom for your family is as easy as downloading an app on your phone, people are going to keep going back to Big Tech. UX for IT folk and UX for the layman are entirely different beasts, and the UX for IT is only recently improving thanks to things like Docker and the containerization of software making it more widespread and commoditized.

It already is - all my family and close friends are on our own Mattermost instance but it still has them have the same social apps everyone else has because two degrees out are not on our own Mattermost instance :)

This is absolutely ok! As the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. Hopefully federated networks take off then.

If you don't realize what this means (and I won't fault you for it) just imagine what would happen if the $300 hardware and storage were burned down in a house fire or stolen by a burglar.

I self host and have offsite backups on rsync.net and a sneakernet network of people where we exchange a few TBs of encrypted storage with one another to hedge this risk but even then there are scenarios where we could lose valuable data.

That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.

My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.

My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.

It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.

Last time I checked, there are about three hundred thousand different companies offering hosting, all over the world. That's a bunch more diverse than the government doing hosting, as per your suggestion. Or having towns contracting Microsoft for it, which would be the result with kolkhoz or sovkhoz cloud hosting.

Last time I checked, AWS was estimated to have ~5% of all web sites in the world hosted in its infrastructure, while AWS+GCP+Azure combined equate to ~66% of the global cloud compute market. That doesn't even get into the "providers" who are really just reselling major providers at a markup (like Vercel).

It doesn't matter if your town has hundreds of storefronts if one subsidized Walmart is putting them all out of business. Likewise, if every business in town is dependent on the Walmart, then it's really Walmart that controls things and not individual or collective business owners.

I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.

This same principle of focusing on the basics should apply to other services in the domain of selfhosters: secure data storage. Instead of building a complex, all-in-one platform, a community project could offer just a "digital locker" for files.

Users would connect to this storage via open protocols (like WebDAV), allowing it to work with many different apps. This gives users the freedom to choose their own tools for photos, documents, and media. This approach has three main benefits: * Lower Cost: It is cheaper to manage only file servers instead of a full software suite. * Simpler Maintenance: The limited scope makes the service easier to secure and sustain. * Predictability: The service is stable for users, and the workload is predictable for maintainers. It treats data storage as a public utility—providing the essential infrastructure and letting people build on top of it.

And if a community can’t get this basic and manageable thing up and running, a thing that has immediate and obvious utility, then maybe it’s unrealistic to expect more complex community or public utility-like services.

No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The war on drugs and the prohibition and many invasions also claim good intentions.

We already have a need to authenticate and communicate. In the same way we have passports and driving licenses, these kinds of basic utility services seem to be worth it.

I'm just advocating for the same thing, for the basic functionality, digitally, before we start dreaming of other kinds of solutions.

I'm really not happy with the solution that has emerged in Norway, where one private entity is basically the de facto identity provider for everything (BankID). Then there's a mishmash of all other providers with various levels of motives, usability, restrictions, technology, and cost.

The same way we found out national identity cards can be useful, to ensure we have proper basic communication and identification within our country when using that country's services and portals.

This is my logic: We already have to communicate and authenticate, no way around it. And our government is already mandating login and communication digitally. So, a service like I described would not affect the concern you seem to have, since we have already handed over the key, so to speak. But it would alleviate a lot of unnecessary and, frankly, security-reducing complexity.

I would assume you are extremely skeptical of anything governmental and centralized. Maybe you live in a country with more problems, so that your fear is more realistic. But here in Norway, we seem to have found a stable balance of powers and a stable relationship between the people and our government. So maybe your situation you live in makes the "tyranny" claim more palpable.

Sadly, this, to me, just reinforces my experience I have every time I run into libertarian values. There seems to be much more focus on angrily denouncing others' ideas and not contributing to any realistic or practical solution. And it's too bad you have to resort to absolutes, unnuanced ad hominem attack. I think a measured response would have been something like (my caricature of how I would have said it): "I see you want to improve inefficiencies, but I fear that you don't properly account for the dangers of abuse from the government." Instead, you come out swinging when all I suggest is that we just do what we are already doing, but better.

What we need first is incentive for smart, dedicated, part-time sys-admins to devote time and effort to community hosting.

Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.

In other words, you're on your own for the most part. So it really is just a variation on self hosting. By the way, we've already been there, seen that and done that --- it was called "co-location".

When you need something more with service and reliability, well --- you're right back to paying corporate overlords.

But thanks for the round trip thought experiment.

Really, it's easy to get sysadmin types interested in this; the problem is that most people aren't sysadmins and don't know any. If you really wanted a business model out of this, it'd probably be a managed service that lets non-tech-savvy users spin up their own versions of this without learning the details.

> Without this, it will work --- in the same way that open source works --- without any guarantees or commitments whatsoever.

There are plenty of successful economic models around open source, and plenty of open source software is used in high-reliability contexts. What comparison are you trying to make?

It's easy to trust a corporate overlord with your pictures or your email, because the immediate damage doable by somebody who has compromised those things is relatively low. Privacy is important I guess, but not when compared to things like whether your car or your insulin pump does what it needs to to keep you alive.

Eventually, the bad guys will be sophisticated enough, and the tech will be integrated enough, that it's no longer safe to trust economic incentives alone. You're going to want your sysadmin to share your interests (in a more specific way than you get from they-also-like-money).

I’d do it for free. I’ve long been frustrated that I have more reliable infrastructure in my homelab than most companies I’ve worked for, and that none of them have any interest in shifting out of the cloud.

I don’t see a market for it, though. Most people are generally happy with Google, Apple, etc. to host their stuff, and I get it - it’s quite reliable, integrates with the rest of their respective products nicely, and Just Works. Add to that the economies of scale, and it’s a non-starter unless you find a niche group of people.

Google One is $99/year for 2 TB of storage. For me to have confidence in uptime to offer public storage, I’d need at least 4U of colo rack space, and ideally 6U (2x 2U for HDD servers, 2x 1U for hosting applications in HA-ish). That would cost a few hundred USD/month, not to mention an initial outlay of tens of thousands of dollars for servers and drives (mostly the drives… high capacity enterprise-rated HDDs aren’t cheap). And that’s only for one site - ideally, of course, there are at least two, or at the very least, off-site backup like rsync.net.

And if you get hit by a car? Or worse --- maybe you get married and have kids<g>?

One big reason people *buy* service is sustainability/longevity/redundancy.

There are no absolute guarantees but I think most commercial endeavors nowadays would bet on AWS/Google/MS/Apple over "Hosting by Joe and Friends".

Personally, I'm betting on those who are highly incentivized and have the resources and structure needed to sustain reliable service.

I maintain 3 copies --- no hosting required. One copy is strapped to my wrist at all times so it is always just as safe as I am --- if not safer.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6784665

This is the "1" part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

Also, FWIW I am married and have kids. Hasn’t stopped me from homelabbing.

Co-location is still readily available. Which service and reliability improvements are you looking for that competent sys admins couldn't provide with multiple co-lo's? Not everyone made the cloud jump.

I moved to AWS and haven't had that problem since.

Not all corporate overloads are equal. Or rather, if you and your buddies get together and pay the $350+fees to legalzoom to start a corporation, you too, can be a corporate overload. There's still miles to go before you're Facebook, but congratulations, you're now... still the same person you were before you clicked that button on legalzoom's webpage and spent $500 or whatever.

Where is the problem of people turning into corporate overloads for you? Is it at 10 employees? 100? 1,000? 10,000? If we're too stupid to differentiate specific corporations because their legal structure means they're all exactly the same, then yeah, I guess there's no hope and we're all doomed.

BUT, you are going to be paying a monthly sub as long as you keep using the service. And soon as the service goes down (due to financial or other reasons) - game over man.

So there is still a lot to be said for downloadable software, even if it is no longer cool or fashionable. Pay once. Keep your data secure locally. Keep using it until you can't find a computer that runs it any more.

I develop 3 commercial downloadable software products. No plans to move them to web.

That said, the discussion seems stuck in a false binary between the control of self-hosting and the convenience of corporate services, but I think what the market wants is a third way that provides both control and convenience.

And to be honest, public libraries already do this, y'all. GO GET A LIBRARY CARD. You can stream from Kanopy at home.

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I wasn't aware of how most ingredients were made and what effect they had to my body. Once I learnt I started being way more careful with how I source food.

Same goes with technology: people don't understand that what they upload can be used against them or arbitrarily taken away from them, what they buy can be removed, that companies spy and abuse them. Once they do, many look into self-hosting or at least other alternatives from big tech. I've met many who want to self-host, but they lack the technical literacy to do so.

But purely outcome wise, many people want the benefits of hosting their own servers

Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option. A best, you can outsource your stuff piecewise: run your own software on a cloud VM, or bring your own furniture into a rented apartment, or give a valet the keys to the car you own for parking, etc. But there's always some relinquishing of control in exchange to some other aspect of efficiency / comfort.

It's also easy to mistake what most people want for what everyone wants, and miss an important market.

I think there's a full spectrum you're missing. You can own something with other people, and your level of control can be continuous, not discrete & binary. For example, my public library is funded by my local government, which I can influence with lobbying and voting. I can join the board of the library, and I can just go and talk to the librarians in charge to influence their decisions.

In an individualist consumerist mindset things are pretty stark : full self-hosting or full submission. If you reject that mindset there are many more options.

Let me remind you of the open source credo about free as in freedom not free beer. You are right that there may be exchanges or compromises at play, but it was a bit shocking to me when talking about what is essentially the digital commons that no one mentioned a library, which exists.

I'm also saying from a practical perspective if you want to stream movies without giving money to big tech, you can literally do that tonight with a library card. The infrastructure already exists.

Nominally, yes. In terms of that meaning anything, no. The benefit of ownership is not exclusivity, but control. If the library doesn't have a book (or other piece of media, of course), I have no power to influence them to get it despite that theoretical ownership. If the librarian decides a book is offensive and removes it from the collection, I have no power to influence them to keep it. I have to live with someone else's decisions about what the library does and does not contain, just like with a commercial service. So my nominal ownership really means nothing at all.

If I were to run my own version of Google Photos and the like, I'd probably go with the hybrid option:

Run all the software I'd run if I was self-hosting, but in the cloud, possibly with a backup in a second cloud. ie, put my photos in Backblaze B2, with second copies in S3 or something.

Personally, half the reason I use Google Photos is so that if my house burns down, I don't lose my pictures. A self-hosted server running under my desk doesn't carry that guarantee. Backups are off-site for a reason.

Though maybe self-hosted at home with a single cloud backup would be good enough.

I was skeptical about this scenario until one day Gmail lost 1 year worth of my emails. It's just gone. All other emails are there, but not this particular year. And there is no person who you can call to talk about that.

I can already easily run such things on my home computer. It's having remote (encrypted) backups and redundancy if my own system goes down that I'm looking for.

However, centralized networks of various kinds have grown too. From application-level networks (e.g. networks messengers from Signal to Discord; payment networks from Visa to AliPay) to transport- and network-layer networks (e.g. cloud-oriented client-server topologies; Tailscale), you see growth in the centralized world too. While I don’t have hard data, I’d casually assert that that growth is comparatively far larger than the P2P growth.

Also, if you’re referring to Moxie’s classic post about centralization vs. decentralization[0], I think you’re mischaracterizing it; it doesn’t claim that P2P is altogether inferior, wrong, or any such thing. I’d summarize his point as being that anchoring your application to a decentralized P2P protocol makes your application development less agile. In other words, there are engineering tradeoffs there, between centralization and decentralization. When he weighed the tradeoffs for making Signal, he came down on the side of a centralized architecture.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

If you can't actually download a copy of a digital content as a mere file, then you can't really host it and serve it.

You can't host your own Spotify-clone even if you are allowed to listen to songs. However, you can still download music on Bandcamp to feed your Spotify-clone.

You can't host your own your own digital Video Game Store usually because of various DRM, or because it's painful to "export" the content and painful to "import" it back.

Still on the video game side, You can't even backup your game save (at least on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series), it's not because of any copyright infringement or IPs misuse, it's only a way for them to get more online subscription with online game save backup.

There is still a positive side: when it will become impossible to legally own anything, I'm pretty sure some illegal system will enable you to have a massive library of whatever you want at the cost of few clicks and/or a couple of bucks. I'm saying "positive side" even though it's illegal because I mostly talk about the comfort of having your own local library.

The website [0] is pretty clear that the content of the game can go into a SD card, but the game save resides only in the internal memory.

You can find some ways to get them with some modding but nothing official.

[0] https://www.nintendo.com/ph/support/switch/data_management/i...

For games, there's GOG. Good luck finding bigger releases.

For music, there's Bandcamp and CDs and vinyl. Fortunately, most albums still release on either one of these.

Audiobookshelf can be used for most podcasts (some do not have a traditional RSS feed and are in some walled garden) and some audio books are available DRM free, but tons of books are Audible exclusives. I'm relatively sure that they also stop authors from publishing e.g. on Royal Road once they're on there.

The same is true for e-books - HumbleBundle and co are great, but good luck finding certain titles. I regret buying a new Kindle, but at least had the foresight to download all my books before they stopped allowing that. Physical books are an option, but that's not an equivalent to en e-book.

I stopped caring about TV shows and movies a long time ago (largely due to the atrocious streaming fragmentation, pricing, and the sheer audacity to include ads in paid plans), but I assume 95% of all shows are exclusive to some streaming giant, too.

I wonder if there are any startups in that space, there likely are. YC anyone? Whatare the obstacles?

Any other alternatives?

You could stream content from it over your home network (as long as you were connecting from another Apple device)

Is this lost technology or just a figment of my imagination? I've long since switched to linux and run the typical Jellyfin setup etc

I should create an account that posts nothing but the phrase "Stallman was right". I'd have work every day.

Anyway, I have a Pocketbook[1], recommended. Got the cheapest one, cost me something like 100 pounds. Doesn't need internet if you don't want it, and supports all the usual file formats.

[1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch

Corporate/investor greed is a limiting factor to the design. Network security and hardware/software vulnerabilities are the near impossible barriers to long-term viability. A solution basically needs to be unhackable to compete with cloud.

I have a platform vision that would definitely work, but I have no idea how to solve the greed or security issues. (No, Rust won't solve it! ;)

EDIT: Oh, and nation-state actors and corporate espionage. An independent, successful cloud competitor would be a prime target - they'd be relentless and burn it to the ground. Impossible problems.

Users don't know what's possible and without knowing what's possible they can't imagine it well enough to evaluate whether they will want it.

I have deployed simple UniFi setups for all my relatives, and they are very happy (though they couldn't have done it themselves). IMHO, they have the DNA to go further and offer a full self-hosted cloud, if they're willing to put in the effort to make it even easier and more integrated.

The whole sales pitch of cloud providers is that instaling and maintaining a server is just too hard for the average Joe.

Thing is the average Joe already has at least 2 dedicated servers in their home - their router and their IoT hub. Both are designed to be servers, and talk to third party endpoints over the internet.

While I'm not crazy about IoT, I think we are reaching the point where most people have something digital in their house that makes sense to be networked.

And thanks to IoT stuff, running and managing servers has become a certified Dad activity, like woodworking and home improvement.

I know multiple dads, who had no prior exposure to IT, who have set up rather complex Raspberry Pi based home automation systems, managing all the complexity of setting up and running a server at home.

I think the skills and interest are proliferating, and it's no longer going to be accepted wisdom to just rely on some nebuluous remote cloud provider, esp for simple stuff.