Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era.

2020s, people are going offline to have fun.

Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.

Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.

Before we had facebook and iphones the only people that were able to run a home lab were technically adept. In 1998 I used Avantgo and Vindigo to browse the news on the train and find restaurants when nobody else could. In 2005 I remember running my netgear mp101 upnp player and everybody was impressed how I could stream music. Then we made things like iphones and facebook which got everybody on the internet, and we made all the “hard” things like music, video, news, reservations, etc.. a “service” – democratizing it (what a nice word). But for technical people it was actually shittier than just running it on your own. Not right away -- there was small overlapping period from 2005 to 2014 or so, where the pace of advancement of technology was complementary to hosting it yourself, but after the corporate monopolies got fully involved everything just went to shit. I think it has come full circle again, where the “technically illiterate” will just consume the shitty services, and will be happy or oblivious to it – they are actually serfs giving their labor/money away and they don’t care. The rest of the technical folks are just going to do their own thing again because we’re sick of the crappy services. And it will be better than the general public can ever do, just like 1998 again.

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...

Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.

To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.

A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).

And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).

For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.

You never go full cloud.

""Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad."

Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology

Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs

If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead

If no, then why is "hosting" the term used

This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer

This sounds like a filter bubble plus wishful thinking. Most people can barely manage their phone settings, let alone run a homelab.

This is very much bubble thinking.

The traffic on every social media is increasing.

There is no mass creation of homelabs and no this will also not be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop”

Also “some companies” is amorphous. All of the cloud providers announced record revenue growth gated only by a lack of being able to get chips