I self-host a lot of stuff.
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As opposed to 'just pay the faceless corp instead of self-hosting.' This is notably not techno-libertarian at all, very inclusive, and the opposite of atomizing --
just look at Facebook and Twitter after all, they are the *Threads* that knit together our nations!!!If self-hosting shit is anything like a political statement, I'd say it's closer to anarchy than libertarianism.
@petko @neil @Colman Agreed. If you need something, like some black-box to share files with other people — you could just make something yourself with existing technical skills. Or organize with some other people with necessary skills and make a thing. This looks like some kind of anarchy and definitely not like "techno-libertarianism" lol.
The "how-to" knowledge is freely acessible and no one hides it with paywall — you can learn or get help from other people (for beer or money, etc) if you don't have a time/courage to learn.
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@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.
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@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. -
Thanks for sharing. This is useful info
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@neil
Sort of off-topic (and I agree that not everyone has the skillset/desire to self-host) but I followed your guide to upgrade my GlitchSoc instance and it was great. Thank you for posting it. -
@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...
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@neil
Sort of off-topic (and I agree that not everyone has the skillset/desire to self-host) but I followed your guide to upgrade my GlitchSoc instance and it was great. Thank you for posting it.@fname I am so pleased - thank you!
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@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. -
@fname I am so pleased - thank you!
@neil
I used the official guide the first time I did it and managed to mash my way through, but yours was much easier to follow.
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@neil
I used the official guide the first time I did it and managed to mash my way through, but yours was much easier to follow.@fname Excellent
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@neil When I was young there were organisations offering "shell servers" where you could run your software and host your website in a subdirectory of your home directory. That all was done for minimal amounts of money.
Maybe we need something like that again in the age of ad-phones. -
I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@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.
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@laurel not really, we are company limited, created by group of originally self-employed admins, we already transformed several times, and it is not easy and now I see, what is the difference compared to cooperative. Anyway, it behaved like cooperatively owned most of the time... and... this is never really easy
The most successful project was providing community based wireless ISP services when local telecom monopoly (privatized state telecom) was unwilling to provider broadband DSL services for reasonable prices. This era is long gone and now we compete against 5G mobile, XDSL infrastructure and also fiber and other fixed wireless services.
The idea behind datacenter is, that if you anyway lease backbone fibers for neighborhood fiber network, you get kind of free bandwidth for datacenter and if datacenter is small enough, it can be located in rental apartment building and the waste heat can be reused for heating water (basically: pay rent in hot water)
It more or less works - in the sense, that you can cover your fixed costs this way. But the question if, it can be considered "viable". Of course, we seek new customers, who would appreciate our approach: eg. VPS users, which would appreciate, that most of the waste heat for most of the year is recycled. Or Mastodon instance housing (I still hope, that sufficiently large Mastodon instance would start acting as CDN, but this is relevant for peering on national scale and national language instances).
Most customers are interested only in cutting costs or in technical parameters...
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk
I can agree on this, self-hosting is a different kind of rabbit hole.. requires near constant upkeep, and you spend most of that time looking at logs, analyzing, optimizing and improving what you already have..
You follow security checks and best practices to secure your self-hosted infra..
It's not for the faint of heart, can get daunting at times, but the result is satisfaction and knowing you took that first step forward from straying away from bigTech bros.. you feel free somehow..
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@neil so I don’t self host, but that doesn’t absolve me of choices in what/where tech I buy, and I’ll tell people why I’ve made those choices - somebody has to pay (including volunteer/hobby time) somewhere. Is it £3/month to FB (current UK ‘don’t consent’ price) or the same to this mastodon instance? DropBox/OneDrive/Google, or hetzner for Nextcloud (and actually this one worked out cheaper for us)… Gmail or Runbox… GitHub pages or mythic beasts… the value is worth it.
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@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”
'Self-host it' is an answer. Let me explain...
Writings on infosec, technology and life
shellsharks (shellsharks.com)
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.
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@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.
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@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.
@rasterweb Great!
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@neil It's the online version of "just fork it", totally belies the amount of work that implies and some folk don't have that dog in them.
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I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
@neil couldn't agree more. Self-hosting is a hobby, and not something that most people will want to do, or should have to.
