Why You Should Self-Host Everything
Why You Should Self-Host Everything
In today's digital age, it seems like everything is subscription-based. If you're not paying for a...
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If self-hosting is going to become commonplace, then it needs to be easier than setting up a network printer. People should be able to just buy a computer (maybe a laptop for integral screen and UPS) preloaded with something like Yunohost, but with a sleek GUI. It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
I feel attacked by this post. I self host Home Assistant, recursive proxy servers, RSS readers, photo managers, vscode, media servers, download managers, backup solutions, git, password databases, economy trackers… And if I need to print from my macbook I have to email the file to myself because in twenty years I haven’t ONCE been able to host my printer on the network in a way that works for more than three days before randomly breaking.
Hello brother. 🙏 May I talk to you for a minute about our lord and savior Brother Laser Jet Printer.
I said I’ve been trying for 20 years. Obviously it’s a Brother.
For real, how is it that Brother makes the only printer that everything from my phone to my servers can use without problems. Bonus points for not gouging on toner.
Xerox has been great for me. They dont just make giant copiers you need a forklift to deliver and a giant service contract. They still make small home office desk printers.
After wiring up to my network and giving it a static, it's just worked, for all devices for everyone. No need to download or install anything either.
I feel this post so hard. I'm always about 5 seconds from going Office Space on my printer.
Yeah! Fuck printers and scanners! Imagine one day going to your scanner, putting in it a receipt and then pressing the scan to PC button and actually getting it to work! Instead, you go to your computer and to the folder you named scans and there's nothing!
I have yeeted printers out of non-ground level apartment windows before, so i feel your pain. i bought a brother laser jet printer and hardwired it to a switch port and have not had connectivity issues for years. i can easily print from my phone, pc, laptop, whatever.
Lol I know what you mean. Maybe I am speaking more to the ideal of the home network printer than real life. My experience with them over the last twelve years or so hasn't been as terrible as yours, but it hasn't been perfect either.
Sounds like a market niche, you could start it up, call it something like "macrosoft". .. then start making scripts that do the work for the user, don't release the scripts because people pay for them. Let this go on for many years and you find yourself shoving "AI" down your users throats and screenshotting their desktop without explicit permission......
Hopefully that path is mostly precluded if an open source project like Yunohost is used as a basis.
It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
i disagree honestly.
Part of the point behind self hosting is to empower people with the knowledge and capability that they can do this shit, and fix any problems that result.
You aren't really getting people into right to repair, if they aren't at least espousing it, and trying to engage in it themselves. Sure you can always go to a third party to do something at the end of the day, but with how broad right to repair is, there is almost certainly something in your life that you can fix and repair.
Like it'd be good that people are doing that, but you also need to remember that this is literally a turn key product, that literally every cloud provider sells, and every company ever who will try to force proprietary buggy garbage on you, will pretend is good, and functional. Will try to sell you, because you don't know any better. I think it's just a cultural difference. Car guys that spend time working on their car simply wouldn't understand the average persons conceptual understanding of repairing vehicles, and vice versa. It's the same here.
What you are suggesting here, is a sold, turn key solution, except fully open source, no bugs, no issues, and wide reaching community support. I don't think that's reasonably possible.
I think ultimately, we need to make learning, and accessing learning materials easy (we already do a great job at it) and we just need to get people interested in this shit, some people won't. That's fine, they probably know someone that is though. And at the end of the day, that's probably good enough.
you also need to remember that this is literally a turn key product, that literally every cloud provider sells
I am unaware of server products that I can just buy, plug in, and get up and running in minutes with my own ActivityPub instances, media storage/streaming, XMPP messaging, and etc. If they really exist, please share links.
There's certainly value in doing this stuff the hard way, but the goal should be for self-hosting to be as easy as signing up with Google, Facebook, Spotify, etc. There aren't enough people with the time and curiosity to figure out the current state of self-hosting and make a dent in the three website problem.
im not saying they do exist, i'm saying that what you're talking about, is something that doesn't exist, for good reason. Because this is literally already a market place that has done it's job.
XMPP? Discord, it's literally discord. Storage and streaming? The cloud, netflix, etc. It's already a thing.
There aren’t enough people with the time and curiosity to figure out the current state of self-hosting and make a dent in the three website problem.
and yet, here we are, on lemmy. Funny how that works. You simply have to be willing to put in time and effort if you want to reap the benefits. You simply can't wish for everything to be handed to you on a silver platter.
Jellyfin and Yunohost are two projects that have simplified self-hosting and made it accessible for me. I just think more progress can be made in that direction.
and yet, here we are, on lemmy.
As far as I can tell, you are not self-hosting the Divisions by Zero Lemmy instance, so I'm not sure what your point is there. I am actually self-hosting my lemmy.crimedad.work instance with the help of Yunohost.
I just think more progress can be made in that direction.
I don't disagree, but a big problem with jellyfin specifically, is that it's just kind of a mess, don't get me wrong, great piece of software, super functional, and works really well. but it's also kind of fucking messy client side transcoding is still rather confusing, and some would be pretty nice UI and user elements simply don't exist right now.
I think i would prefer a more featured rather bare bones system that requires a higher level of configuration, than something with less features, that ships what is ostensibly the minimum viable product, while being plug and play. Having good features is often going to make software better, even if it's harder to use.
As far as I can tell, you are not self-hosting the Divisions by Zero Lemmy instance, so I’m not sure what your point is there. I am actually self-hosting my lemmy.crimedad.work instance with the help of Yunohost.
i am not, no, and that's kind of my point. Not everybody has to self host their own individual instance, one person can host an instance of something for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I simply do not think that you need that many people actively interested in this.
The entire world runs on software programming, yet the entire population is not programmers, it must follow that we will be fine without everybody liking this stuff.