@neil “just host it yourself” is techno-libertarian nonsense. It’s like the Linux crowd’s “all you need to do is recompile the flux capacitor with the flibertygibbet flag and reverse polarity on the ant hill and if you can’t do that you don’t deserve to have a computer“ stuff.

It’s also notably atomising. Community level hosting is one thing — and has its own problems when confidentiality is an issue — but self hosting is just out of reach of most people.

@neil I think self-hosting is a bit like doing your own car servicing.

Sure, you can do it and if you know what you're doing you'll probably be happy and saving yourself some money - but unless you *actually* know what you're doing, many things can and will come back to bite you in the ass 😉

Hell, I *do* know what I'm doing and I'm very happy to pay someone else to do quite a lot of things I could, theoretically, do myself.

@neil

Tee hee!
Great info for those of us in Brexitland/Europa

It takes me a long time BUT:

- Moving to FLOSS
- Moving to sustainable and interoperable hardware
- Supporting next generation of hacktavists

@neil Great piece. I am a year into self-hosting and did it entirely for the learning experience.

I quickly realised that I wasn't confident enough in my security to use Nextcloud or Vaultwarden and am aware that I have probably made my home network vulnerable to a concerted attack.

So it has ended up very much a small scale hobby, not hosting anything confidential or essential to day-to-day functioning (where I pay for Proton, Signal, Bitwarden etc.).

@neil
I have built and operated my own hardware firewall, and it worked wonderfully, until my ISP changed my modem to a non-bridgeable one

I have built (numerous times) a software server on my laptop to host a local blog. I wrote tutorials to myself so I can replicate it on the next occasion—which always necessitated a refreshed tutorial

I want to have a hardware firewall between me and the internet. I want a non-google email. I kind of want my own Fediverse instance

I don't have the time, am low on money, and have few spoons

I will find that firewall, but it will likely be a secondhand commercial rig, and my networking knowledge/skills aren't there

I want to build a DMZ for IoT things, run my own cameras, keep my smart thermostats from calling home every fifteen minutes

But I can't find the energy to figure out how to freaking use the thermostats I have

I'm with you 100%—I could self-host... most things

But I can't, actually

@neil I have self-hosted stuff in the past, and occasionally think about doing so again for some stuff. But less and less of my computering is recreational and I choose to pay companies to worry about everything for me rather than spend my spare time doing more of what I do when I'm working.

Which is, of course, a kind of privilege in itself.

None of that is a criticism of course, just a reality that I've resigned myself to and remind myself of every time I think "oh, I could set that up myself".

@neil and you gotta hope the tools you’re using is actually secure

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/3aAWM0jLJv

@neil "It appears that “self-hosting” might mean different things to different people."

Definitely. We are able to do #selfhosting because we are local ISP for 25 years. We run our own datacenter from at least 8 years, and I was planning how to do the waste heat recycling for 10 years. We have access to second-hand hardware, because it would be hard to afford only the new hardware.

So #selfhosting is still collective activity of some kind, you need small business, or cooperative, or something, because you have expenses.

I suppose aggregating VPS-es for multiple instances on same physical hardware may have some advantages eg. with containers sharing the same ZFS filesystem (you can turn on eg. de-duplication of files)

So the #selfhosting usually anway about seeking some kind of cooperation. I would not be able to "selfhost" without cooperating with experienced admin...

@neil That is an excellent article.

I do think that you can self-host on someone else's computer, shrinking all the financial costs to a couple of small ones (hosting fee and domain name; just those are cheaper than having any kind of home internet connection).

I run a root server in the cloud, on an OpenStack instance. The entire machine is defined by me. I regard it as self-hosting.

@neil I think this summarizes why I'm suffering from more or less severe burnout symptoms on a daily basis.

When I'm done developing depressingly poor quality software projects designed to "generate" revenue for a greedy tech company for the day, I am expected to keep on top of the never-ending bot attacks against my self-managed services.

Every time I install a new kernel version or significant package updates, my anxiety peaks while I wait for machines and services - some of them being the backbone of my digital existence - to come back up.

I'd rather just pay for someone else to do it, but experience has shown that companies can't be trusted with anything anymore as increasing profits has become the driving force behind everything with quality and reliability being downgraded to a mere afterthought.

I hate that system and I hate being part of it but I have to pay my ever growing greed and inflation driven bills so what can I do?

@neil Neil is absolutely spot on and we need to talk about the politics of this. Telling people to "just self-host" to escape surveillance capitalism is the exact same tactic as telling people to "calculate your carbon footprint" to stop climate change.

It individualizes a systemic, corporate failure.
Privacy and digital safety shouldn't be luxury goods reserved for cis-white-male engineers with unmetered fiber connections, rack-mount servers along with free time and financial stability to pull it off. When our response to the collapse of digital rights is "run your own infrastructure," we are engaging in digital redlining. The solution to predatory data brokering isn't forcing single mothers working two jobs to learn Kubernetes; the solution is ruthlessly regulating the data brokers out of existence.

@neil Feel like at the end it's yet another ongoing commitment, and people might not have the time, energy, and/or spoons to tend to it - regardless of their technical competence  

(Though big respect to those who do!)

@neil very good reminder for these days... i'm seeing a huge influx of people ditching windows for linux lately (for obvious reasons)

But instead of just taking the time to learn linux a lof of people are diving straight into self-hosting... without learning the fundamentals of system administration (i say this as a very amateur sysadmin). They just run 'docker compose up -d' and boom, you're a self hoster...

But when things inevitably go wrong they turn around and blame the software or even the OS.

@neil Stepping out on a limb myself here. Here’s my response on why I think self-hosting *IS* an answer. But to understand this we need to, A. First understand the question being asked, and B. Not be overly literal or non-inclusive in terms of how we define “self-hosting”

https://shellsharks.com/notes/2026/02/24/self-host-it-is-an-answer

Key concept: We don’t have a great vocabulary for describing the middle ground between pure “I own the hardware” self-hosting to “I use big tech platform A”. Let’s agree there’s self-hosting spectrum.

@neil "Self-hosting requires a heck of a lot of privilege."

This can be true, but it's easier (and probably cheaper) than ever before.

And I'm doing it mostly to just say no to corporations getting my data.

@neil I think we shouldn't see self-hosting as the goal, but as an act of resistance in an hostile world.

And I agree that everyone who can afford to selfhost at home are the lucky ones.

@neil an exerpt from a blog post (https://brunty.me/post/de-googling-my-email-contacts-calendar/) I wrote recently :P

And I wrote this while _also_ being someone that self hosts a bunch of stuff on a homelab I run across multiple machines :D

#SelfHosting

@neil

address the problem at source, not push people towards self-hosting.

Okay I hear you but I think we also need answers that work at speeds and scales of individuals to small communities.

I am not gonna be able to overhaul our economic system (the source) in the same amount of time it would take to get several services up and running at home.

@neil Maybe it's not that deep, but here's a though: "self-hosting" is a concept rooted in capitalist thinking.

Let's get over the idea that corpo platforms are the only form of collective hosting and every man for himself is the one and only alternative.

Host stuff for your family, your friends, maybe even your neighbourhood. Don't "self"-host, community-host. Build systems together and help one another.