this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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[–] MrTolkinghoen@lemmy.zip 1 points 13 hours ago

I like the article, but agree with so many of the comments here as well.

Ultimately I think one thing I'd love for would be a way to simply provide services (like Immich) for people but where the client is end to end encrypted, and neither the user nor the service has to worry about the how.

Example: how can I share an Immich with my family and friends, but where I don't have access to any of their data. I.e. what signal does, but immich or any other service. I want to share my server with friends/family, but I don't want access to any of their data. It isn't a lack of trust, it's that I don't want that as even something they have to worry about

That same concept then extends here to community hosting. If we can solve the problem for a few, it should be scalable to many.

[–] Omnipitaph@reddthat.com 18 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This guy didn't want to do the leg work of emailing his photos to his friends, and declares self-hosting isn't the solution to a social net? I totally see the point in community hosting, in fact I'm all for that.

But really? You don't have to make your servers public facing, you just white-list the people you want to see your stuff and make sure to organize your drives with public and private pages.

He went through all that and didn't take it far enough.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 5 days ago (4 children)

emailing his photos to his friends

that's sometimes difficult, e.g. when you have thousands of photos, and emails have a size limit of 20 MB per email. using matrix chat or sth is also not ideal since the other side will have to download images one-by-one. sending a zip file might work, but the matrix protocol might have a size limit for attachments.

an FTP server might work. also consider that you want to store the images somewhere, not just send them once. how do you do that with messaging services?

[–] Omnipitaph@reddthat.com 3 points 4 days ago

I feel like I covered my bases with the rest of my comment there. If you have thousands of photos that you want to share, host them on your server and whitelist the people you want to see them :/

IRL I've never sent nor received more than a handful of pics at a time, and always through email. It would have never occurred to me that people are out there sending the whole family collection to each other digitally. Grandma hordes those pics for a reason; as leverage for people to visit her!

[–] spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Synology shared folder, separate user accounts, accessible through tailscale is how I share media with my friends and family outside my network.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

It’s pretty simple to send a Nextcloud share link.

[–] JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev 1 points 5 days ago

Matrix file limits are server-dependent, usually enforced for the uploader only. If you run a server you can set it to several gigabytes lol

Alteernatively, use a tool designed for file transfer: https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570256bb3b2

[–] philpo@feddit.org 28 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?

Has anyone ever worked with them IT wise?

I do so in four different EU countries and know people who do in the US and Canada. And...well...there is a reason local governments often went towards the cloud services. Do people think Joe Admin in Bumfucknowhere can operate what basically becomes a MiniDC? And who controls that?

Sorry. Either go "host at home" and only fuck up things for oneself. Or do it properly with a proper DC. Colocate if you want. But that? I know it sounds appealing, especially for someone entering selfhosting (like the author did a few weeks ago). But there is a reason hosting is a business once it comes to other peoples data.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I can easily host vaultwarden, trillium, docker-mailserver, jellyfin, borgbackup and syncthing instances for my 5 neighbours. Everyone who's even slightly good with computers can do that for their neighbours. That's what I think when I hear "community". Not online fandoms.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah. And I am sure you won't do anything bad.

But we all know how many that will not be the case. There were countless cases of school IT staff being malicious, of healthcare IT staff being malicious. Do you think that won't be happening regularly on a small community scale? And that goes both ways: What happens when your neighbour suddenly accuses you of stealing passwords from you?

Don't get me wrong - I am also providing services to my friends and family. But I absolutely do refuse to do so for any vital or financially debilitating services (which I consider vaultwarden for example). And I am seeing large issues with promoting this model as a solution - which need to be addressed.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I trust my neighbour more than I trust Big Tech.
With Big Tech we know full well they'll completely legally, ethically and anonymously harvest us, profile us, manipulate us, encircle us and enslave us in their digital slaughter house. I'll take my chances with 10 million community organizers and the occasionnal small time crook instead of the certainty of a Big Tech Panopticon Mega Dystopia

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 6 days ago

Yeah,big US tech is cancer - but I am fortunate enough to not live in the US and there are enough mid size companies that fall under reasonable laws and governmental oversight (in the good way,not the bad way) that I can choose from. People always seem to think it's "selfhost or big tech" but there is a shitton of solutions between them.

Mailbox.org, Infomaniak(but I would be cautious on them due to the changing legal framework), posteo,Mullvad,Photoprism,Passbolt,Hetzner Storage Space,Ionos, Deepl, etc. are all a sane middle ground for most people and

I much rather have people do that than fall into the arms of their neighbourhood asshole (and let's face it,there are a lot of difficult characters in IT). Because first of all it's people's lives who are at stake - You can wait for the first creep who will use access to his neighbours photos (Immich,Photoprism,etc.) for some uncanny purposes. Who will use the WiFi&Device passwords saved to get access to someones CCTV system to spy on his neighbours. Etc. Etc. And, and this is as much of an issue,it will only take a few of these people to drive people away from all open source products, right back into BigTech.

Lastly: It's okay,that you see it that way. But people need to be informed that these are the risks. If you would take those risks (and don't think from an IT role but from your neighbours perspective here), go for it. I wouldn't, we can absolutely agree to disagree. And I don't think many would once someone tells them the truth: "Yeah, BigTech can absolutely access your files and possibly your passwords with enough efforts. If you let Joe over here host your files and passwords he can,but BigTech can't." I am not sure how people would decide.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think the issue is more that large tech firms can absolutely deal with external security in their applications. The amount of times gmail or Microsoft 365 has been hacked and leaked a bunch of client data is statistically zero when looking at their attack area.

Joe Dirt self hosting a mail server for his neighbors on a salvaged rack server is 1000x more likely to get hacked or lose a ton of his neighbors' data than a big tech firm.

That is kind of the trade off for community hosting. There are very very few backup and security-literate people in communities.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago

Big Tech is what we need security from !

Prison are very safe, for the guards.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Lol. So we trust local governments and communities now?

I trust my local community more than i trust Amazon, that's for sure.

Communities might be incompetent with IT (today), but maybe they just need a while to catch up. It could work in 10 years from now, and we gotta work towards that point.

Also, note that "local community" doesn't have to mean municipality; it can also be your local nerd working part-time at your local library.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 5 days ago

And this is somehow better?

There is a lot of room between "BigTech" and "Joe Average" doing it for his neighbours. Mailbox.org, etc. (see my other post here)

[–] ehxor@lemmy.ca 13 points 6 days ago

Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet's inception.

False. They came along after the fact and sullied the waters, then lobbied to make it illegal to tinker with the DRM locks, then got richer than God.

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 14 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I would say the future is in pooling resources.

Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there's a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

But I'm still thinking how can that even work. What I'm dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a "store" request and then just take it offline), or it won't work.

And global cryptographic identities.

Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

if there’s a way to contribute storage,

So IPFS and Hyphanet?

computing resources,

BOINC comes to mind.

search and relay nodes

Perhaps SearxNG?

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I've thought of all these, but what I'm describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you'd have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.

Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.

I highly doubt that. Each federated node is fairly expensive to host since it basically needs a complete copy of everything on its peers.

I think the future is distributed. You connect to others, and if the network is large enough, each piece of data only needs to exist on a faction of the nodes to be safe from disappearing. Just think about it, across your various devices (laptop, phone, tablet, desktop, etc) you likely have a couple TB available, and your can buy cloud storage for any extra space you need. And you don't need to always be online either, it'll sync when two peers are online at the same time, so it'll be eventually consistent.

The main barrier here is NAT IMO, you need to be reachable for it to work. That's getting resolved with IPv6, but it's rolling out really slowly.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

Techno feudalism mentioned. Queue a Varoufakis talk

[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Something that's always given me trouble is sharing my music.

If I hear a cool song and want to send it to a friend I have to go to YouTube.

And many of my friends send me Spotify tracks. The share feature of Navidrome has been incredible for this.

I can send them a link and have a listen party with them and then erase the link when were done.

It'd be nice to have this feature in more of the self hosted apps.

I've had the same problem with audiobooks until I found the soundleaf app - it connects to my self-hosted audiobookshelf server and makes sharing with freinds super easy without having to use mainstream services.

[–] JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

I wish more services adopted the service Tidal uses that sends 1 link that then points to YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, and Apple music.

[–] TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] xistera@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I've just been using Jellyfin for my music. Is there a big advantage to this over it?

[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Not really, I was trying our naivdrome as I'm phasing out Plex and liked it so much I kept it.

Its impressive how light navidrome is and it scans a lot faster since its only music and not my movies too.

That said I don't use Navidromes ui I use Synfonium as a client.

[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah that's what I'm doing. Its been great

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

The future (and the past) is piracy.

[–] CyberChicken@whatcom.social 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

And thus whatcom.social was spun up.

Thanks for the inspiration @th3raid0r@tucson.social !

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Thank fuck I neither desired nor ever used Kindle. I used either my library app to read e-books or getting my booty from the high seas!

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago
[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 141 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I agree with the premise that selfhosting is not something the layman can or want to do, but the assumption that self-hosters only host software that serve themselves is very, very dumb, and clearly comes from the mouth of someone who self-hosts out of hate for corporate services (same, though) and not for the love of selfhosting.

He complains that the software he uses can't handle multi-users, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. His solution is to make his government give him metered cloud services. What he actually wants is software that allows multi-users. What he wants, by extension, is federated services.

The bulk of users on the fediverse are on large, centrally/cloud hosted instances, but the vast majority of instances are self-hosted, and can talk to the centrally hosted instances, serving usually more than the 1 user who's hosting the instance in their attic.

The author conflates self-hosting with self-reliance, and I understand why, but it's wrong. If you're part of this community, you're probably not some off-gridder who wants nothing to do with society, self-isolating your way out of the problems we face. If you're reading this, you already know that we don't have to live on our own individual and isolated paradise islands to escape Big Tech. Federation is the future, but selfhosting is fundamental to that, and not everything can or should be federated. Selfhosting is also the future.

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[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything

[–] elDalvini@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 1 week ago (4 children)

He proposes the cloud be owned by communities, so in a way by everyone. That's not the same everything being owned by private companies.

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