signing into cloud services and downloading apps is just so much easier to do!

This is actually true, but it doesn't speak to why self hosting is "impossible" and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.

There's no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.

I'll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting -- especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)

They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

This touches on something that I've been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

There's also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual "thing". I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

TLDR: Selfhosting is hard. Obsidian is easy. Federation is a thing.

Projects like Runtipi have potential for the masses, imo. Single click deployment of apps on your own server....if you can get Runtipi installed first, of course. But hey, a step closer I suppose.

I'm very new to selfhosting, only started in earnest in April of this year. So I definitely felt the hosts frustrations in deploying (or trying to deploy) solutions I wanted to take back from Google and Microsoft. I'm still learning and am almost to the point where I'm comfortable pulling the plug on Google photos entirely. But it's a lot of research for newbs.

@spaduf That's really nice, I actually use Obsidian myself for note taking and I can say that I will never go back to normal note taking software. The internet and software needs to change to be for the user, for if the software doesn't exist in the future. We never know if a service will go but we shouldn't loose everything.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #254 for this sub, first seen 31st Oct 2023, 08:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

My respect has increased for the verge

I use self-hosting for home assistant and jellyfin (behind two duckdns domains). I started to add more (Joplin server, Immich, tiny tiny RSS etc.) and found my workload increasing a lot, So I've paused that effort for now. For Joplin, I use syncthing with my Pi as a hub instead, which is much simpler.