The author talked about this a few months ago on Tim Ferriss' podcast[0]. One of my favorite episodes.

I'm passionate[1] about the concept but articles like this are a reminder to me that we need to make self hosting an order of magnitude simpler and accessible to more people. It shouldn't need to involve any CLI, DNS, TLS certs, port forwarding/NAT traversal, IP addresses, etc etc.

Self hosting shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. The flow should be 1) install the "self hosting app" on an old laptop or phone. 2) Go through a quick OAuth2 flow to connect your app to a tunnel that enables inbound traffic. 3) Use the self hosting app to install other apps like Jellyfin, Calendar, Nextcloud, etc. Everything should be sandboxed (containers work pretty well on Linux and Windows 10/11 via WSL2) and secure by default. Automatic backups (ideally an OAuth2 flow to your friends' self hosted installations) and auto app updates are table stakes.

There's no technical reason this can't all be done, but lots of technical challenges, and it's unclear whether anyone will pay for tunnels. I'm currently trying to figure out how to do reliable auto backups without filesystem snapshots.

[0]: https://youtu.be/0BaDQCjqUHU?si=0wDf-2RH-u9vdm3g&t=1380

[1]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

noman-land

Lets do this. There's literally no reason not to. It could even be a small standalone appliance that you plug in. It could be no bigger than Mac charging brick, and could even function as one.

We have to divorce society from these abusive corporate cloud relationships. It made sense 20 years ago. It is actively poisonous today.

We can easily make a turnkey opt-in peer to peer cloud using today's consumer grade open hardware and software, much of it default off the shelf.

nativeit

I’ve been using Caprover (https://github.com/caprover/caprover - think stripped-down Heroku on any given Docker box) for a few years, and it’s hardly consumer-focused, but has accomplished a good portion of what would ultimately be required for such a product. It’s always that last bit where the effort/risk/cost/[insert prohibitive factor here] becomes precipitously steeper and challenging. I think it’s a fairly natural thing, but also it’s got a lot to do with being not only more difficult, but also you’re then faced with tackling it under the full weight of every technical decision you’ve made up until that point, which can severely limit the plausible approaches.

I’d be keen to work on a project to marry a PaaS like Caprover with networking using ZeroTier or Tailscale, packaged in such a way that it could be easily deployed onto most reasonably equipped platforms, or delivered as a service.