TLDR Self-hosting isn’t dying because people stopped caring. It’s dying because the complexity has gotten out of hand.

This post highlights how something that used to be a fun, lightweight hobby has turned into a full-time maintenance burden. Systems like Matrix are powerful, but they’ve become so intricate that even skilled engineers struggle to run them reliably. The result is a slow drift back toward centralized platforms, not out of preference, but because convenience keeps winning over autonomy. It’s a reminder of the growing gap between the ideal of a user-owned internet and the realities of modern software.

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omnimus 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I would say it became much easier in recent years. docker-compose became defacto server "app install", any linux supports it. That includes GUI options like Truenas/Unraid and very nice admins like Dockge exist.

The company behind matrix is aiming at huge scale servers but if you care about unfederated private instances you will find there are few much simpler "one binary" projects that can even use file based sqlite/rocksdb. Hosting those couldn't be simpler. You actually don't even need docker just systemd service and switch binary when updating.

	▲	Arathorn 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you want a simple docker-compose for Matrix, you can always use https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo. The reason Element ships ESS Community as kubernetes helm charts is simply so that the officially supported distro is as close as possible to the thing we have to support for the big govtech customers, where docker compose simply isn't going to cut it. Perversely, that means that ESS Community is pretty bulletproof (even if the scaling stuff is missing), but comes at the expense of having to run k8s.