Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone.

Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call".

SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all brought together on a device that was aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic demand rocketed upwards. It turns out that regular people very much wanted a mini computer in their pocket.

This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.

I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game:

- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing

- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on

- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.

- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.

- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini

- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.

- The Mac App Store was introduced

- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks

And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"

Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.

> This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.

I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.

Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.

It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.

At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.

I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.

I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.

Yeah, at one point in writing this article I had a brief aside about more "off-the-shelf", accessible solutions to self-hosting like Synology. But I cut it because I honestly don't think they make the process that much easier. They help with hardware, but the software setup I think is still pretty difficult. Thanks for reading!

My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that also died as they stagnated). I thought people were a bit silly for spending so much on a phone then, and still do, because by the time I eventually got a "smartphone" with a touchscreen, there was enough competition in the market that still to this day I've never felt compelled by any phone product >$600

Pre-iphone I had my MythTV server recording and transcoding TV shows and then adding them to an RSS feed that my flip-phone would sync whenever plugged in. Unplug my phone in the morning and watch last night's Daily Show on the bus ride to work. Kind of crazy to think of what we could do even back then

This still exists... OsmAnd, offline map app for Android, has 10M+ downloads. Maps.me has 50M+ downloads. Sure, that's not 10B+ of Google Maps users, but still a lot of users.

I don't think the "advanced users" market has shrunk much, it's just the whole pie became so much bigger that the overall ratio decreased.

Ok it may be just as painful and non-mainstream to self host these days as the pre-iphone or pre-blackberry smartphones were, and i can imagine that it could get easier in the future, but still what's the point of selfhosting for regular people when the cloud exists? Having a calendar, email/chat apps, webbrowser, maps+gps and everything else in your pocket was a major convenience improvement, but i don't see a benefit like that from self hosting. I only see better privacy, more control and ownership over your data, and in some cases lower cost (but often higher), and those aren't nearly as powerful motivators for people.

I could imagine self hosting becoming more accessible but don't see how it could become mainstream when it's just an alternative to stuff that's already available in the cloud

I think there is an effort being made for this. Some folks have created https://selfprivacy.org/ and continuously developing it. I follow this project by heart

> It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

Phones are amazingly powerful. Why not "self host" apps on phones?

Synology is getting there with their one click install of lots of apps, and a "drop a dockerfile here" for anything else.

> I think self hosting is in a similar spot right now. The apps exist (many are extremely nice!), the software exists, but the seamless, aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic experience does not. It's a pain in the ass to set up self hosting.

if your apps are containerized, setting them up should be possible using some simple script.

So, you rented/bought new server: installed docker, and all following apps could be installed using some docker scripted commands.

Unlike with smartphones though, I don't really see that anyone has a strong enough incentive and deep enough pockets to bridge that gap.

I set up a service to make hosting those apps as seamless as possible while giving the user control of their data and also sharing revenue with authors to keep projects sustainable. Check it out here:

https://www.pikapods.com/

This did not happen with the iPhone. It happened with the BlackBerry.

A current delusion of mine is creating the iphone of self-hosting. Claude has me stuck in a manic state where I think I can do anything.

https://thebox.youatme.email/

Bonus points if you can spot the dick joke on that page. I'll send you a free prerelease unit if you can recognize all the layers to the joke.