I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services ... There got to be something between homelabs and cloud services bc the gap is too big.

Not quite there yet but Yunohost is a fantastic attempt to get closer to this ideal. Install the OS - and the basic self-hostic-use-case apps are all just there to click and install. From Immich to Kodi to Wordpress and what not.

https://yunohost.org/

> I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services

Exactly. Even something as seemingly mundane as hosting your own email is a major challenge.

With IPv6 (and/or NAT-forwarding) it was already possible to host stuff.

However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.

Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.

So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.