Mastodawn

Hazel Weakly Aug 3, 2025

I read this article today and quite liked it

https://www.drewlyton.com/story/the-future-is-not-self-hosted/

An analogy came to mind when reading it: if the cloud is feudalism, self hosted is sustenance farming.

Sustenance farming… Well, it sucks, it’s brutal, it’s awful. No wonder people want centralized infrastructure! Groceries aren’t a concept in sustenance farming, neither is something like “food sensitivities”—you just die or accept the feudalism because you have no other choice.

Some people happen to like sustenance farming and the idea of living fully off the grid! But they’re not normal. That’s fine, but it’s not workable for most people and carries an enormous amount of unstated privilege. For example: the person in the article casually buying a server and dropping a few thousand dollars on it, setting up several complicated systems in it, and “only” spending a few weeks of free time doing so? Privileged. Fun hobby if you like that, though!

The bad part, in my opinion, is that our only choices are currently techno fascism… Or the sustenance farming that killed almost everyone who attempted it. That’s not a great set of choices and it doesn’t have to be like that.

I liked the reference to community clouds in the ending of the article. It reminded me very much of Common Pool Resources that Elinor Ostrom talks about, or the emergent strategy of adrienne marie brown. I need to read more Ursula Franklin, but I suspect her writing is right at home here too.

I’d like to live in a world where communities uplift and support each other and are able to do so. I’m doing my best to help make that a reality, even if I’ve had to spend the last year or two putting my own mask on first :)

The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

In a world where corporations have detached buying from owning, one man attempts to do something radical: build his own cloud.

Drew Lyton

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Ian Aug 4, 2025

@hazelweakly While I agree, the issue I see is that self-hosting and home farming haven't been industrialized.

I've long thought that if self-hosting more like a home appliance more people would do it. Treat it like a game console where the experience is more streamlined than the DIY approach.

Similarly, if you could just get a greenhouse delivered and set up in your backyard or balcony the way a new dishwasher is, that'd probably make more people consider it. Take the appliance metaphor a bit further and have the greenhouse automate most watering tasks and alert you when you need to seed or harvest, and even the least green thumbed people would at least consider it.

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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@soviut @hazelweakly

I found the article’s definition of self hosting a bit extreme. By that definition, I’ve never done it: I’ve always rented a computer or VM in someone else’s datacenter.

I can see that, as we move to FTTP being common, hosting things at home might be feasible. The dedicated server I’m renting has a 300 Mb/s network connection, I get more downstream than that and the other local FTTP provider offers more than that symmetric. But whether you’d want to is another question. Someone else pointed out that your IP for residential IPs can be fairly easily mapped to your address, and handing your home address to random Internet people is not always a great idea.

The problem, as the article identifies, is that there’s a huge gap between buying an off the shelf service and buying or renting a machine that you configure everything on. There are some somewhat appliance-like projects, but they require a lot of configuring and my experience with the ones I’ve tried is that they are worse than doing it yourself: you get a container where someone has configured things in a non-standard way and so documentation doesn’t quite work.